Stanford University has a long history of offering classes and graduate degrees by distance education. Classes have been broadcast to local industrial partners since 1969. Classes for professional graduate degrees in engineering have been offered entirely via streaming media on the Internet since 1998.

The Biomedical Informatics (BMI) degree program was founded in 1982 as the Medical Information Sciences program, a MS and PhD degree-granting program with a focus on clinical computing. In the last 20 years, the program has evolved to include both clinical informatics and bioinformatics/computational biology. The program was renamed BioMedical Informatics in 2000 to reflect the integrated program in biomedicine, computer science, probability & statistics, ethical & social impact and core informatics courses.

Despite the long history of distance education, the BMI program is still growing from on-line introductory short course to individual on-line classes to a Certificate program to a Masters program which is slated to start in 2003. Factors which have affected the growth of the program range from insufficient program resources to support the enlarged program to insufficient classroom infrastructure to support the larger number of classes required for a new degree program.

As the on-line BMI programs grows in depth and scope, challenges such as fulfilling the requirements for the degree with a limited number of on-line classes, maintaining the quality of the on-line program, and bringing supervision and collaboration of research projects online arise which push the limits of the current generation of on-line infrastructure and tools.