Foothill College and Stanford create online class on computer coding for community colleges

Foothill College and Stanford are pioneering a novel approach to introduce community college students to computer programming with online instruction that remains human supported and connected even as it scales. This model is adapted from Code in Place, a free online course developed at Stanford, in which people around the world learn the Python computer language together.

Now completing its second year, the ongoing partnership between Foothill, a California community college in Los Altos Hills, and its neighbor up the freeway, Stanford, is yielding significant benefits for each party. It provides Foothill — at no cost — with a proven curriculum and learning technology that combines synchronous and asynchronous learning. In turn, it allows the Stanford Code in Place team to extend their project into the California Community College system and, for the first time, offer academic credits toward a degree.

“Before Foothill, when we offered Code in Place, our message to learners was that they weren’t going to get anything out of this course except for the joy of learning a new skill,” says Chris Piech, a Stanford assistant professor. “That actually pulls in a large number of people, but there are folks for whom credentials are essential: Foothill plays an incredibly important role for people in that respect.”

Piech’s work with Foothill follows a remarkable first chapter for Code in Place. Co-founded at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic by Piech and Mehran Sahami, Stanford's Tencent Chair of Stanford’s computer science department and the the James and Ellenor Chesebrough Professor in the university's School of Engineering, the goal was to make computer programming accessible to people from all walks of life, with no requirements beyond arithmetic and basic literacy. 

When launched in 2020, the course quickly caught fire, with some 10,000 learners signing up. Perhaps more surprisingly, 900 people volunteered to lead sections over Zoom that featured live, person-to-person instruction. Code in Place has been offered every spring since 2022, with similar numbers each time. “It may be the course with the most teachers in the world,” says Piech. [See previous stories about the course from 2021, 2023, and 2024.]

Code in Place’s success is due, in large part, to the sections that these volunteers lead, generally at a ratio of one instructor for every 10 or so learners. While an earlier generation of online courses, known as MOOCs (massive open online courses), also enrolled large numbers of learners, they didn’t match Code in Place’s outcomes. MOOC completion rates are typically below 10 percent; Code in Place reports 65 percent.

Beginning programmers get a warm welcome in CS49

The section leaders are, in Piech’s words, “the special sauce” that makes Code in Place stand out from MOOCs and other online courses. 

Eric Reed, chair of Foothill’s computer science department, agrees, saying that this novel approach to online teaching was key in Foothill’s decision to adapt Code in Place for credit at Foothill. “What Code in Place brought was this section leader model that really resonated with me,” he says. Foothill prides itself on being able to give its students the individual attention they need. “This approach made it possible to do that online for many more students,” Reed explains. “The idea that we could have former or current Foothill students, who had already gone through the foundational classes, come back and help their peers learn computer science was fantastic.” 

Reed and his colleagues decided to use Code in Place as the basis for an overhaul of Computer Science 49: Foundations of Computer Programming. It’s an introductory course intended for students who may have little background in computer science or may feel intimidated by classes that are part of Foothill’s professional track in programming.

Today, after completing enrollment for spring quarter 2025 at Foothill, the Code in Place version of CS49 has 80 students — roughly triple the number the course originally attracted. Many had registered at Foothill for their first time so they could take CS49 and earn credits instead of taking the traditional Code in Place. 

“CS49 has become a really warm welcome,” says Lane Johnson, the course instructor who has taught it for the first four quarters. “It’s a nice on-ramp into computing for anybody and everybody who might want to explore their interest in the field.”

Quoc Anh Pham, a 19-year-old from San Jose, was in the first cohort of Foothill students taking the class in spring 2024. He had never studied computer science: it “seemed intimidating, very complicated, very complex,” he says. But he saw the course and its credits as a necessary step to transferring to a four-year college. “I went into this class blind,” he recalls. “Now I look at computer programming, and I think, ‘This is fun!’” Pham aced the course and is now concentrating in psychology at the University of Southern California.

Pham attributes his success, in part, to CS49’s enlightening lectures; hands-on lessons; and the engaging, easy-to-use platform — a creatively designed online IDE (integrated development environment) tailored to meet the needs of new coding students. The small sections also made a big difference. Every week it involved working in Zoom breakout rooms with classmates on a programming exercise. “There was a real camaraderie,” Pham says of his section. “Even though it wasn't in person, it became a very tight-knit group.”

Pham notes that he sometimes struggled to understand an assignment outside of the section, but that didn’t lead him to panic. “I didn’t need to stress,” he says. “It's just like, ‘I’ll ask the section leader for help.’”

Pham felt comfortable talking to Sarah Khan, his section leader. It helped that she had recently endured the same challenges he was going through.

Khan, now a graduate student in computer science at Georgia Tech, vividly recalls her own struggles at Foothill when she began studying programming. She says she failed her first two computer science classes as she was overwhelmed by trying to balance school with a demanding job in the fashion industry. It was during the pandemic — before the new version of CS49 was launched.

But Khan, who received a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature in 2007 from UCLA, decided to try again. “I retook those classes, and I made sure to get the hands-on help that I needed,” she says. She went to her professors’ office hours, and she camped out in the campus study center to avail herself of the STEM Center faculty tutors. “My progress was really dependent on having access to help,” she says. “It was really having someone holding my hand through the most basic concepts in the beginning.”

When she learned in spring 2024 that the inaugural Code in Place CS49 course needed section leaders, she volunteered and has continued every quarter since then. “My students are asking the same types of questions that I had,” she says. “I'm a firm believer that you have to pay it forward.” 

Sections benefit both students and instructors

While sections are commonly used in the largest college courses on campuses nationwide, the sections in Code in Place and CS49 are different. 

For starters, the section leaders in Code in Place are volunteers who are near peers: learners who recently completed Code in Place or a similar course. “It wasn't too long ago that the section leaders were in the same shoes as their students,” Piech explains. “They understand their students in really wonderful ways that lead to effective teaching.” In turn, students find it easier to share their questions with teachers who are just one step removed from being in the same situation.

Stanford has used near-peer section leaders in computer science courses on campus for more than 40 years. Code in Place breaks new ground by showing how the near-peer model can be carried out digitally at an unprecedented scale. Hundreds of new section leaders have been successfully prepared via Zoom to teach the course’s material. Perhaps even more surprising is that so many people have jumped at the chance to be section leaders. As of this spring quarter, there are about 5,000. 

“We have to turn away volunteers,” says Piech. “Our bottleneck is there's more people who want to teach — in the ratio of 1 to 10 — than there are students.”

Foothill, like Code in Place, has had no trouble recruiting section leaders. Most of them have chosen to keep doing it for at least another quarter, with some having volunteered for four consecutive quarters.

This enthusiasm is consistent with what happened to Piech, who first studied coding as a Stanford undergraduate in 2007 after taking an introductory programming course to fill an elective. He did well, and the computer science department asked him, as well as several others, to come back the next quarter to be a section leader. “It was one of the greatest things that's ever happened to me,” he says. “I discovered the joy of teaching and the joy of sharing programming with others.”

It also gives section leaders a better grasp of the subject, Piech says, noting a study he and colleagues conducted in which they compared the understanding of course material between students who tutored peers and those who took a practice test. The students with the teaching experience did, on average, 30 points better on the final exam than did those in the other group.

“I'm kind of hoping that more and more people in the world get that experience,” Piech says.

Does AI signal the end of section leaders?

In a time when many are touting AI as the best hope for providing personalized instruction, Piech’s emphasis on the human connection might seem out of touch. But he is no stranger to AI and embraces its potential. 

An expert coder, he produced an algorithm used in the language-instruction app Duolingo that enables an automated system to track what a user has learned. In creating Code in Place, he worked with colleagues to build the IDE that gives feedback to learners on their work, from short notes identifying minor errors to longer comments addressing conceptual misunderstanding or poor stylistic annotations. “There are sprinklings of AI throughout,” he says. 

Those features, however, are not the key to the course’s success. “Despite all the work that I'd personally done in artificial intelligence, I would bet all my chips on human teachers in this near-peer model.” 

Piech’s conviction arises from his research on learning. Among his studies is a rigorous trial comparing learning outcomes from AI tools and near-peer interactions. The human tutors “blow the AI out of the water,” he says. “They're motivating. They're inspiring. They speak language to students in ways that AI doesn't.”

Reed, the Foothill computer science chair, is on the same page. He admires Code in Place’s IDE and its friendly computer graphics, but that’s not what convinced him to use it to overhaul Foothill’s CS49. “The section leader model is what distinguishes this program, and the technology is there to support that pedagogy — they work together,” he says.

CS49 aims to serve all 116 California community colleges

CS49 is by no means a clone of Code in Place. They differ in three major ways:

• CS49 needs to assess students’ work so they can be given grades and awarded credits.
• Foothill uses the Canvas learning management system to engage with students in all its courses while Code in Place provides its own platform.
• CS49 goes deeper than Code in Place: a quarter at Foothill is 12 weeks as compared with six weeks of lessons for Code in Place.

For the last two years, Lane Johnson, the CS49 instructor, has met regularly with Miranda Li, a Stanford graduate student who oversees the Code in Place side of CS49, and Michael Acedo, assistant director of project innovation and technology at Stanford Digital Education, a unit in the Office of the Provost that works to expand access to Stanford for low-income high schools, community colleges, and other new audiences. 

Matthew Rascoff, Stanford vice provost for digital education, brokered the partnership between Foothill and Code in Place, and Stanford Digital Education has supported it with ongoing project management.

Together Johnson, Li, and Acedo, along with support from colleagues at Foothill and Stanford, are working through the assessment system, the platform integration, and the content build-out. 

At first glance, these might seem like minor adjustments. But they are an important test of Code in Place’s underlying philosophy: It aims to be open source.

“We are not only adopting but evolving Code in Place for Foothill,” says Lane Johnson, noting that the team has leveraged the Code in Place platform to weave activities, lectures, and discussions into the pre-existing CS49 curriculum. Li and Piech have also contributed material for CS49 that is not used in Code in Place. 

CS49 students can now sign on to the Code in Place platform through Foothill’s Canvas system without creating an additional account, thanks to Li. She also has created an interface that not only facilitates instructor grading but allows instructors like Johnson to provide both overall and inline comments on coding assignments on the Code in Place platform.

Li completes her graduate studies in June, and Acedo and Johnson say she is leaving a system that will work smoothly not only for Foothill but for other campuses in the 116-school California Community College system, the nation’s largest. For the first time this spring, the course was available to community college students statewide through the California Virtual Campus, a systemwide course-sharing platform. That platform has the potential to help CS49 scale statewide to thousands of students. 

Reed, the computer science chair at Foothill, believes that there is an untapped demand for this course. The four quarters it has been offered so far demonstrate that the model works. Initial surveys suggest that Foothill students enjoy the course and are learning the material. It also appears that it has started to reach a new set of students who are reluctant or unable to take other computer science courses. 

The popularity of Code in Place supports that hope. Over the last five years, it has enrolled 50,000 learners and 5,000 section leaders. While Piech expects to continue to offer it annually, he talks about CS49 as the next frontier.

“Partnerships with the community college system and other systems are our future,” Piech says. Instructors such as Johnson and Reed at Foothill, he explains, are doing the heavy lifting in teaching, working with students whose educational opportunities often have been limited. These students routinely hold full-time jobs while taking courses, and they frequently come from families struggling to make ends meet. 

“That's where we think the real impact is going to lie,” he says. “We’re going to spend a lot more time supporting other people’s classrooms.”

Jonathan Rabinovitz is communications director for Stanford Digital Education. 

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