Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 4)

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 that internally to hundreds and thousands of people. What we’re noticing is, people have problems they want to solve. They’re inviting us to the table to help them solve some of their problems.

For example, we work with Santander Bank. They’re very interested in recruiting more people to work in banking. Banking has become a really volatile industry. It’s being threatened by a lot of new technologies, and there’s this need for talent and new professionals.

They want to speak to the fourth industrial revolution. We help them train students that are just finishing their undergraduate or graduate programs and young professionals. The topic area is digital transformation and how to lead digital transformation.

We have a funnel of different courses and programs for them regarding these emerging technologies as well as leadership, innovation, cultural awareness, and emotional intelligence. You can work within this growing area.

We’re trying to create this pipeline where we’re going to be bringing in around 2,500 young professionals. The top 300 professionals will then be invited to sign up for more intensive and more rigorous courses. Of those 300, we’re going to be looking at 30 people who will be invited to come and either do an internship or invited to apply for positions at Santander.

We are committed to this program. That’s the work we’re focusing on. We are focusing on that high-quality, high-touch learning experience for not just companies but also individuals.

What I’m noticing is, there’s a trend where the quality of online education is reduced in some areas. It’s such a volatile industry right now. A lot of people are being driven by money and a lot of different companies are being created. I think the quality is suffering.

There’s just a lot of choices right now and a lot of different entities are entering the market. It’s no longer just universities. The quality could be maintained a bit more. Private companies are entering. New companies are being created just for online education.

Right now, there’re a lot of choices for people. Choices are great. The audience is becoming much more sophisticated. When they’re able to compare different products from different entities, they can see what’s really good content. It’s a really competitive market for everybody.

Sramana Mitra: I was not at all aware that MIT is doing this. I was aware of MOOCs and edX.

Clara Piloto: When we started our online courses six years ago, I call what we did back then online education 1.0. We learned a lot. The platform we were using at that time was edX. This was right after the MOOCs launch.

We were the first organization on campus to start professional and executive education courses. We wanted to replicate the in-person experience. That was fantastic. Over time, we started working with other platforms and expanding our product lines. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education
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