John Mitchell became the inaugural Vice Provost for Online Learning in 2012, as well as the first Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning in 2015.
His team has worked with more than 500 Stanford faculty members and instructors on 1,000 online projects for campus or public audiences, transitioned faculty and students to a new university-wide course evaluation system and a new learning management system, and initiated the Year of Learning to envision the future of teaching and learning at Stanford and beyond. As co-director of the Lytics Lab, he is working to improve educational outcomes through data-driven research and iterative design.
Mitchell is the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering, professor of computer science, and (by courtesy) professor of electrical engineering and of education. His past research has focused on computer security, developing analysis methods and improving network protocol security, authorization and access control, web security, and privacy. He is a member of the steering committee for Stanford University’s Cyber Initiative.
Mitchell’s first research project in online learning started in 2009, when he and six undergraduate students built Stanford CourseWare, an innovative platform that expanded to support interactive video and discussion. CourseWare served as the foundation for initial flipped classroom experiments at Stanford and helped inspire the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) from Stanford. He received his BS from Stanford and his MS and PhD from MIT.
