Sramana Mitra: Summarize, as a last point, how you position vis-a-vis edX. When you go out to the world, how do you position MIT Professional Education versus edX? Clara Piloto: I’m going to focus on the MOOCs that edX is doing. They’re doing a lot of really cool things. They’re also expanding into professional education.
Clara Piloto: Corporate education is also growing quite a bit. We’re focusing on high-end quality experience for our corporate clients. That includes very customized programs in which we can provide different a la carte menu of experiences they’d like to bring in-house. It might be something that’s off-the-shelf content that’s slightly self-paced. We can share
Sramana Mitra: Who’s paying? Is it all companies paying? Clara Piloto: It’s a combination. A lot of individuals are self-funding but there are a lot of companies that have tuition assistance. I believe the larger number is self-funding. Sramana Mitra: If you segment the different areas where you offer professional education in, what is the
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about structure? Is there anything specific in your structure that is particularly interesting? Clara Piloto: I’ll start with in-person. We’re driven by learning-by-doing. Apart from theoretical classes, we also offer practical hands-on experience. It has to be applicable the next day in companies in your organization for it to be
Clara discusses MIT’s professional education initiative that is run in an online-offline hybrid format. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as your work at MIT that is relevant to online education.