Impacts from Stanford Digital Education projects

Dual enrollment courses for high school students

Overview

SDE worked with the National Education Opportunity Network to offer Stanford courses nationwide to students in Title I high schools. Students earned both Stanford and high school credits. SDE courses provided a high-touch learning experience to students, with a remote Stanford teaching fellow for every participating high school. To develop these courses, SDE collaborated with high school teachers, leveraging their classroom expertise to shape Stanford course content for a high school student audience. The goals were to introduce students in Title I high schools to Stanford coursework and the Stanford community, to give them college credit, to build confidence in college readiness, and to increase interest in applying to Stanford or other universities that may have seemed out of reach. 

Launch date: September 2021. Partners: National Education Opportunity Network (previously known as the National Education Equity Lab); school districts in Albuquerque, Dade County, El Paso (TX), Houston, Jackson (MS), Los Angeles, New York City, and Topeka (KS), among others; Stanford faculty from departments of African and African American Studies, Bioengineering, and Computer Science, Stanford Online High School, and Stanford Structured Liberal Education; and 16 other colleges and universities including Brown, Cornell, Howard, Notre Dame, and University of California. 

Impact

Over a five-year period, 2,612 high school students enrolled in Stanford courses at 103 schools in 22 states, plus Washington, D.C. For more information about the program, please visit "Stanford courses for under-resourced high schools." Stanford Digital Education published in fall 2025 a playbook offering guidance to educators at Stanford and other universities on how to create and deliver dual enrollment courses for Title I high schools in collaboration with the National Education Opportunity Network.

Developing lessons about AI for high schools

Overview

SDE helped to conduct and publish research on best approaches to teaching about AI in high school classrooms. As part of this work, SDE interviewed high school educators, held workshops with them, and coached and observed teachers and students in classrooms, both in-person and virtually. The effort involved designing for a Stanford website a number of original Stanford lessons about AI, which teachers can download for free. 

SDE also enabled high schools to use Google’s AI Essential online certification course, at no cost, and examined how best to incorporate that course, in full or in part, in high school classrooms. Along with supporting the use of the Google curriculum, SDE developed complementary learning materials.

Launch date: Fall 2022. 

Partners: Stanford Computer Science, Code in Place, Foothill College Department of Computer Science.  Stanford Graduate School of Education, Stanford HAI (Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute); McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford, Google, and several high schools including Uncommon Schools Northstar Academy Washington Park High School in Newark, N.J., Niagara Falls High School in Niagara Falls, N.Y., and Birmingham Community Charter High School in L.A.

Code in Place at community colleges

Overview

SDE collaborated with the Stanford University Computer Science Department and Foothill College, a community college in Los Altos Hills, Calif., to offer a version of Stanford’s acclaimed Code in Place (CiP) program directly to Foothill students, for credit. The college first provided the online course in spring 2024 and was continuing to offer it as of fall 2025, when SDE closed. 

SDE supported Code in Place (CiP) faculty — Chris Piech, assistant professor of computer science, and colleagues — as they worked with Foothill instructors to integrate CiP programming into an introductory CS course at Foothill, CS 49: Foundations for Computer Programming. CiP is a free non-credit online introduction to computer programming that enrolls some 10,000 students worldwide every spring. The Foothill-Stanford team leveraged the CiP platform to weave activities, lectures, and discussions into the community college’s existing CS 49 curriculum, providing a robust and engaging learning environment for students. 

Five Foothill computer science students served as section leaders when the course launched and the number grew to eight by 2025. These section leaders met with students weekly to deliver concepts, lead discussions, and answer questions. The section leaders were trained by CiP staff on pedagogical and platform best practices, and had gorup review sessions every week with Foothill, SDE, and CiP team leaders. met with the team weekly to check in on student progress. 

Foothill instructor Lane Johnson acted as primary instructor of record and oversaw the section leaders and students week to week. Code in Place staff member Miranda Li played a critical role in carrying out curriculum integration, platform troubleshooting, and section leader training. SDE Vice Provost Matthew Rascoff brought the team together, and Mike Acedo, SDE’s assistant director of project innovation and technology, provided project management support and acted as liaison between all parties.

Bringing Google professional certificates to community colleges

Overview

SDE pioneered a project that facilitated community colleges using a Google data analytics in their courses, enabling students to earn an industry-recognized professional certificate from the company. After establishing a three-way partnership among SDE, Google, and the Bay Area Community College Consortium, SDE drew on Stanford educational expertise to hold an intensive summer workshop for community college faculty. The program helped the educators to identify how best to integrate the data analytics certificates into their existing courses and community college curriculums. As SDE worked with participating community college faculty, SDE project manager Mike Acedo recorded the different strategies that emerged as the basis for a playbook of certificate implementation best practices that could be scaled to additional community colleges. Since then, we have continued to support the faculty as they experimented with integrating the content into computer science education at their schools. SDE tracked these efforts and synthesized the findings into a playbook of best practices: Empowering Community Colleges: A Playbook for Integrating Google’s Data Analytics Certificate into Curriculum (published in spring 2024). 

Launch date: Summer 2023. Partners: Google and the Bay Area Community College Consortium with collaboration on the professional development workshop from Stanford Women in Data Science, Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning, and Stanford Graduate School of Education, among others. 

Stanford pandemic education report

Overview

SDE’s pandemic education report, “Lessons from Teaching and Learning at Stanford During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” reflects a year-long effort to synthesize and clarify the failures and successes of emergency remote education at Stanford in 2020 and 2021. The report serves as the foundation on which the Stanford community can design its future digital education strategy.   

Launch date: October 2021 (published October 2022). Partners: SDE co-authors Cynthia Berhtram and Lisa Anderson interviewed 59 Stanford stakeholders, from deans and professors to students to support staff. 

Impact

The report provides a publicly available historical record of Stanford's response and documented innovations in online education that SDE and other units at Stanford have pursued. It also contributed to the national conversation about the effect of the pandemic on higher education and was covered in various news outlets and podcasts as well as being a subject of discussion at several education conferences. 

Academic Innovation for the Public Good
conversation series

Overview

Academic Innovation for the Public Good was a series of conversations held in real-time on Zoom before a live audience joining the webinar. Free and open to all, the sessions generally featured authors of recently published scholarly books on higher education and explored how to make higher education more equitable, accessible, and meaningful. The featured guests were interviewed by experts in the guests’ fields. The series aimed to create a community of educators and students committed to strengthening higher education.

Launch date: January 2022. Partners: Trinity College (co-organizer for 2022-24); more than 20 partnering and co-sponsoring colleges and universities (for 2022-24), including Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Duke, North Dakota State University, and University of Michigan. 

Impact

As of 2025, SDE had hosted 24 events, featuring 22 books, with attendance averaging roughly 130 participants. All the events were recorded and are available online. 

Support for Stanford student initiatives: Spokes

Overview/objectives

SDE supported forums and selected projects that elicited Stanford students’ creativity and initiative, particularly those with an education component. Most notable of these efforts was SDE’s sponsorship of Stanford Spokes, a student group that bikes cross-country over the summer, presenting hands-on workshops for youth along the way.

Launch date: Stanford Spokes was formed in 2018, and SDE began supporting their planning and fundraising in spring 2023. Partners: Stanford Spokes. 

Impact

For three summers, from 2023 through 2025, SDE provided fundraising assistance, logistical planning, and teaching instructions to the Spokes, who biked cross country and held learning festivals for children and teenagers along the way. Lessons ranged from “Building Bottle Rockets” to “How the Internet Works.”

Working Learners Initiative for Stanford employees: Coursera for Stanford

Overview

Working learners are employed adults who do not have four-year college degrees. In January 2022, Stanford’s Office of Community Engagement formed a community of practice to discover how distributed efforts could be connected to meet the challenges of working learners at Stanford. Stanford Digital Education was part of the core leadership team for the Working Learners Initiative. The goal was to accelerate opportunity and mobility for Stanford employees. As part of this effort, Stanford Digital Education, working closely with University Human Resources Learning and Development, launched Coursera for Stanford, a new learning program to support the educational and professional growth of Stanford staff. 

Launch date: January 2022. Partners: Stanford University Human Resources and Coursera, an online learning platform that offers courses. 

Lifelong Learning on the Stanford website

Overview

The Lifelong Learning website project highlighted lifelong learning opportunities at Stanford and made it easier to find and sign up for them. The site also helped to build community, shared understanding, and a common frame of reference among the Stanford entities that provide lifelong learning. 

Launch date: December 2022. Partners: University Communications and Office of Community Engagement.

Impact

Over a two-year period, the portal served 40K users from 192 countries. Visitors gained access to it through the main Stanford Academics webpage, where it appears alongside undergraduate and graduate education.

Stanford Administrative Fellowship program

Overview

SDE reached out to the College of San Mateo and other offices at Stanford to pilot an internship program for administrative associates, called the Stanford Administrative Fellowship (StAF). Interns shadowed Stanford administrative staff to learn on-the-job skills while receiving course credit and mentoring from the College of San Mateo. 

Launch date: September 2023. Partners: College of San Mateo, Stanford Pathways Network, the Stanford Administrative Champions, and Stanford Office of Community Engagement.