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.

The Office of the Vice Provost for Online Learning was as established in August 2012, after Mitchell served as John L. Hennessy's — Stanford University's 10th President — special assistant for educational technology and chaired a faculty committee that established initial priorities for Stanford and developed intellectual property guidelines for publicly released online courses.

[10][11][12][13] In addition to supporting delivery of digital course content, the VPTL engineering team is working to expand the features of Lagunita, Stanford's instance of the open-source release of the edX platform.

In collaboration with Stanford centers of scholarship such as the Lytics Lab Archived 2017-01-31 at the Wayback Machine,[17] which is jointly supervised by Mitchell, and Mitchell Stevens and Candace Thille of the Graduate School of Education, VPTL is playing a key role in evaluating educational outcomes and improving online learning based on data-driven research and iterative design.[promotion?]

Mitchell has been at the forefront of Web and network security research and education for more than a decade and has helped train thousands of students in programming languages and hundreds of expert-level professionals in the area of cyber-security.[promotion?]