Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) emerged a few years ago to great fanfare, raising hope for widely available low-cost education for all. Many universities have developed free online courses, resulting in millions of course registrations and substantially increasing access to learning.  Like other academic groups, the Stanford Lytics Lab has developed research threads around understanding online learners, evaluating digital instruction, and building learning tools, also making data available for academic research by others.  What have we learned overall? Will digital technology make effective learning possible on an unprecedented scale? Or are there still important challenges around factors such as learning outcomes, assessment, credentials, and economics?  What role can and should universities play in developing our digital future? And why? John Mitchell is Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering, Professor of Computer Science, and (by courtesy) Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Education at Stanford University. His past research has focused on computer security, developing analysis methods and improving network protocol security, authorization and access control, web security, and privacy. Professor 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. CourseWare served as the foundation for initial flipped classroom experiments at Stanford and helped inspire the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) from Stanford.