Essays & Ideas

Matthew Rascoff

Writing on education, technology, and opportunity.

Vice Provost for Digital Education, Stanford University

Lecturer in Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business

The Writing

Essays

Access & Opportunity

Building pathways — dual enrollment, social capital, digital equity — that widen who gets to learn from great universities.

Talks & Podcasts

On stage and in conversation

Keynotes and panels — from the United Nations to ASU+GSV — and longer conversations on the future of learning.

Talk

Who Discovers the Future? AI, Power, and the New Architecture of Science

ASU+GSV Summit

2026
Talk

Community is the Frontier of Digital Learning

National Technology Enhanced Learning Conference, Singapore Institute of Technology

2025
Talk

Living Textbooks

Stanford Data Science · with Nina Smidt, Siemens Foundation

2025
Talk

Scaling Social Capital

Keynote · University of Florida Intersections Conference, Orlando

2025
Talk

Educational AI with “humanity in the loop”

UNESCO International Day of Education, United Nations Headquarters, New York

2025
Podcast

Pathways to Higher Ed Reimagined

Teach and Learn podcast (D2L)

2025
Podcast

How Generative AI Will (and Won’t) Transform Postsecondary Education

EdUp podcast

2024
Podcast

The Bull Case for Elite Universities

Obviously the Future podcast

2024
Talk

Revolutionizing Student Success: AI’s Impact on Teaching, Learning, and Academic Engagement

Panel moderator · ASU+GSV Summit

2024
Talk

Empowering Students with AI

Unleashing Human Potential Powered by Technology, Hong Kong

2023
Podcast

EdTech Bright Spots for Collaborative Learning

WorkforceRx with Futuro Health

2023
Talk

The Brave New World of Higher Ed Digital Transformation

Panel moderator · ASU+GSV Summit

2023
Talk

Learning, the University, and Human Agreement

Tec de Monterrey Faculty Summit

2022
Talk

Digitization, Open Source, and Learning Technology

Stanford Academic Technology Community of Practice Showcase

2022
Podcast

The Future of Digital Education

School’s In podcast, Stanford Graduate School of Education

2021
Talk

The Learning Technology Commons

Future Trends Forum with Bryan Alexander

2016

Projects

Building in the open

Open-source experiments

MCP · Assessment

SLAM — Stanford Learning Assessment Model

A cloud-native formative-assessment layer for AI workflows: a cloud API, a remote MCP server, and a one-click installable bridge that surface evidence, strengths, gaps, and next steps in student work — without assigning grades.

Open educational resources

Living Textbooks

A Stanford initiative, funded by the Hewlett Foundation, to reimagine the textbook as an open, continuously updated resource. We publish open educational materials on modern, GitHub-based infrastructure so educators can freely adapt and improve them.

Interactive dashboard

How Stanford Courses Handle AI

A dashboard analyzing how 3,353 Stanford course syllabi addressed student use of AI across 2025–26, coded into five policy patterns.

Claude plugin

Higher Education Plugins for Claude

AI plugins for Claude Cowork built for faculty and academic administrators — spanning course design, grant writing, scholarly communication, institutional governance, student-facing work, and research compliance.

Open data · Claude skill

CDS Open Data

Machine-readable extraction of the Common Data Set reports from 44 U.S. universities, produced by a single reusable Claude skill rather than per-school code — making admissions and enrollment data easy to analyze.

Contact

Always glad to exchange ideas about education and its future.

About

Matthew Rascoff is an education innovation leader who has worked across sectors to democratize access to knowledge and opportunity.

He joined Stanford University in 2021 as the inaugural Vice Provost for Digital Education, advising Stanford’s president and provost on digital learning initiatives and establishing Stanford Digital Education (SDE). Under his direction, the SDE team pioneered a model of mission-driven digital learning that accelerates social mobility for students who have been historically underserved by higher education.

Matthew is also a lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a 2025 Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.

He has written about open educational resources, emergency remote learning during the pandemic, and digital pathways programs to improve access to higher education. He is currently researching and writing a series of case studies showcasing approaches to AI and education that are emerging from the global entrepreneurial ecosystem. These cases will be published by the Stanford Graduate School of Business and made available to educators in schools of management, public policy, and education.

Previously Matthew was associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University, where he founded and led Duke Learning Innovation. His team led the Covid-19 emergency remote teaching response at Duke and at Duke Kunshan Universities. Before Duke he was vice president and founder of the Office of Learning Technology and Innovation for the University of North Carolina system, where he built UNC Online, a statewide cross-registration network for online courses.

Earlier in his career Matthew launched in Berlin the first international office for JSTOR, the digital library of scholarly books, journals, and primary sources, and helped to expand this service to institutions across Europe. He led product teams at Wireless Generation (now Amplify), an edtech company, and built and launched their product development center in Durham, North Carolina. He helped create the strategy group at ITHAKA, an incubator of higher education technology ventures (now Ithaka S+R). Matthew’s experience also includes Google, where he worked on the Book Search project to digitize all the world’s published works.

After completing undergraduate studies at Columbia University, Matthew did graduate work at Bogazici University in Istanbul on a Fulbright Scholarship and later earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He has been a Marshall Memorial Fellow, a Bertelsmann Foundation Fellow, a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow, and a Stanford Fellow. He serves on the advisory boards of Anthropic and the California Learning Lab and the governing board of Meritus College.