Mitchell, John C.

John Mitchell has been Vice Provost at Stanford University since 2012, first as Vice Provost for Online Learning and now in a broader role of Teaching and Learning.  

Over the past two years, his team has worked with approximately 200 instructors on 400 projects, including on-campus teaching innovation, online courses for public and selected audiences, and improvement of repeated course offerings. 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.