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
AI & the Future of Learning
Keeping humanity in the loop as artificial intelligence reshapes how we teach, learn, and discover.
Educational AI with “humanity in the loop”
New Lines · From a keynote at UN headquarters for the UNESCO International Day of Education
How to Make AI Work for Higher Education
New Lines · Republished in The WorkShift
Empowering Educators via Language Technology
Stanford University conference proceedings · Co-author
Access & Opportunity
Building pathways — dual enrollment, social capital, digital equity — that widen who gets to learn from great universities.
Scaling Social Capital
New Lines
3 Questions on “Digital Education for Access and Equity”
Inside Higher Ed
Dual Enrollment for Higher Education Equity
In Recentering Learning, Johns Hopkins University Press · Co-author · book chapter
Supporting the Whole Student: Opportunities for Equity and Inclusion from the COVID-19 Experience
In Creating More Inclusive and Equitable Teaching and Learning, IAP · Co-author · book chapter
An Engine for Opportunity
New Lines
Rethinking Student Services to Support Adult Learners
The Evolllution · Co-author
Educational Equity and “the Spirit of Berlin”
German Marshall Fund
Open Source & Educational Abundance
Living textbooks, shared infrastructure, and the open collaboration that can make knowledge abundant.
The Public Purpose of the University
What private institutions owe the public, and how to balance democracy and meritocracy.
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech at Stanford that we must not forget
New Lines
The Oxford Oaks and the Stanford Sequoia
New Lines
Private Universities have Public Obligations
New Lines
Balancing Democracy and Meritocracy
New Lines
Colleges Must Recruit Scholars
The Wall Street Journal · With Daniel Pianko
Learning Innovation
Lifelong learning, academic innovation, and lessons drawn from a decade of leading change.
Learning without Borders
New Lines
Perpetual Learning as Alumni Engagement: Renewing the Social Contract
In The Great Skills Gap, Stanford University Press · With James DeVaney · book chapter
Higher Ed Needs a Long-Term Plan for Virtual Learning
Harvard Business Review · With DeVaney, Shimshon & Maggioncalda
Lessons for Learning After the Crisis
Inside Higher Ed · Co-author
Academic Innovation: The Obligation to Evolve
Education Next · Co-author
Stackability is a Learning Strategy
Inside Higher Ed · Co-author
Inside a Grassroots Academic Innovation Community
Inside Higher Ed · Co-author
Educational Improvement at the Meso Scale
Inside Higher Ed · Co-author
Unbundling Higher-Ed Tech: “The Place We Will Go” in 2017
EdSurge
Reimagining College as a Lifelong Learning Experience
The Chronicle of Higher Education · With Eric Johnson
Scholarly Publishing
Foundational research on scholarly communication and digital publishing from the Ithaka years.
University Publishing in a Digital Age
Journal of Electronic Publishing, 10:3 · Co-author
Scholarly Communications in the History Discipline
Ithaka S+R · Co-author
Scholarly Communications in the Economics Discipline
Ithaka S+R · Co-author
The Evolving Environment for Scholarly Electronic Monographs
Ithaka S+R · Co-author
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.
Who Discovers the Future? AI, Power, and the New Architecture of Science
ASU+GSV Summit
Community is the Frontier of Digital Learning
National Technology Enhanced Learning Conference, Singapore Institute of Technology
Living Textbooks
Stanford Data Science · with Nina Smidt, Siemens Foundation
Scaling Social Capital
Keynote · University of Florida Intersections Conference, Orlando
Educational AI with “humanity in the loop”
UNESCO International Day of Education, United Nations Headquarters, New York
Pathways to Higher Ed Reimagined
Teach and Learn podcast (D2L)
How Generative AI Will (and Won’t) Transform Postsecondary Education
EdUp podcast
The Bull Case for Elite Universities
Obviously the Future podcast
Revolutionizing Student Success: AI’s Impact on Teaching, Learning, and Academic Engagement
Panel moderator · ASU+GSV Summit
Empowering Students with AI
Unleashing Human Potential Powered by Technology, Hong Kong
EdTech Bright Spots for Collaborative Learning
WorkforceRx with Futuro Health
The Brave New World of Higher Ed Digital Transformation
Panel moderator · ASU+GSV Summit
Learning, the University, and Human Agreement
Tec de Monterrey Faculty Summit
Digitization, Open Source, and Learning Technology
Stanford Academic Technology Community of Practice Showcase
The Future of Digital Education
School’s In podcast, Stanford Graduate School of Education
The Learning Technology Commons
Future Trends Forum with Bryan Alexander
Projects
Building in the open
Open-source experiments
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.
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.
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.
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.
Press
Selected coverage
A few places the work has been written about.
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.