When Steve Ballmer announced he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board of directors, he cited a fall schedule that would “be hectic between teaching a new class and the start of the NBA season.”

Ballmer recently purchased the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion, so that's what he means by the NBA season. However, Ballmer was mum on where and what he would be teaching.

It turns out Ballmer will teach an MBA class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in the fall, and a class at USC’s Marshall School of Business in the spring.

Helen Chang, assistant director of communications at Stanford’s Business School, told us Ballmer will be working with faculty member Susan Athey for a strategic management course called “STRAMGT588: Leading organizations.”

“We pair practitioners with academics scholars in teaching the MBA program, so Steve Ballmer and Susan Athey will be an example of that practitioner-scholar pairing,” Chang told us.

According to Athey, she and Ballmer began discussing an outline for this course last spring, adding it was around April when the two "got it figured out." She says Ballmer was considering different universities he might want to spend time with this year, and his relationship with Stanford, as well as Athey (Ballmer hired her as an economics consultant in 2007 to assist Microsoft in the internet space), helped him reach his decision.

Athey offered us more details about the course:

"It's a course Steve and I are designing together," Athey told BI. "It's a new course, original content. We're looking at how you create value in organizations from a variety of different perspectives — different managerial functions and providing a theoretical conceptual framework and filling that in with real world examples and experiences. It's a course that looks at lots of different perspectives on a CEO's role on creating value in an organization."

With a class of 80 students already pre-enrolled, Athey says she is incredibly excited to work with Ballmer in the classroom this fall.

"Steve is completely intellectually engaged and he's really intense and he brings such a wealth of knowledge," Athey said. "The fact he was at Microsoft when it was a small company and he had many leadership roles from the early days, watching the company grow... I think it's going to be terrific to get this interaction between Steve and the students."

As for the spring semester, Ballmer will head to Los Angeles — closer to where his Clippers will be playing — and teach a course at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. We reached out to the Marshall School, which declined to offer more details about Ballmer’s class.

Ballmer, a Detroit native who joined Microsoft in 1980, led several divisions within Microsoft, including operations, operations systems development, sales, and support. In 2000, he was named CEO, replacing Bill Gates. He announced his resignation as CEO a year ago.

In his letter to CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday, Ballmer said “I bleed Microsoft” and “I promise to support and encourage boldness by management in my role as a shareholder in any way I can.”