Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 5)

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. I’m going to make that comparison.

What is really fantastic about MOOCs is that it democratizes education. It made it available to millions of people worldwide. It exposed people to so many courses and programs here at MIT.

A lot of the content that was originally put online were degree courses. That was placed online. It was for the general audience. The completion rate was very low at the beginning. It’s still quite low right now.

What’s awesome about these MOOCs is, it puts us in a place where we could really share our content with the world in a faster way. That has always been a part of our DNA. We’ve wanted to share our knowledge with everyone going back to open courseware from almost 30 years ago.

What’s unique and different about professional education is, we’re painstakingly designing these courses in a way that impacts and creates collaboration and good learning. These courses can take anywhere from six to nine months. It’s very much in high quality.

Audiences today are very discriminating. They want blockbuster videos just like the blockbuster movies they watch. We’re working with not just MIT faculty but also industry experts. We’re trying to work with more and more MIT alumni and learning design experts.

The blended experience is very unique. We’re trying to have more opportunities to come together online and be part of an online community, but then be able to meet in person. Those people that have already gone through the online experience, they come together. They’re with the faculty. We’re really focused on this. We want to make an impact.

The other thing we are focused on is increasing the number of women within our courses and also serve underrepresented communities globally. I’ll give you the recent example of the Spanish courses. Those numbers are really significant.

When we started those programs in Spanish, these were emerging technologies types of topics. We had about 15% women taking those courses. It’s much lower than the number of women that go into STEM. We’ve really focused on trying to raise those numbers. Within a year, we were able to get around 34%.

In particular, we’ve reached 40% on our leadership and innovation courses. We’re proud of that because we were able to make learning these topics accessible to more people. It was especially heartening.

I was born in Cuba. I’ve always wanted to offer programs in Spanish online. For me to be able to realize that dream this past year has been fantastic. Recently, we were recognized by El Economista. That’s our focus. We want to help the world solve its problems.

We follow the mission of MIT. I wake up every morning very clear about what I have to do every day in terms of my work. It’s a self-supporting unit within MIT. We receive no funding from MIT. Any profit that we make goes back to MIT.

Besides meeting the needs of our alumni, we wanted a place for them to come back and continue their education. That has expanded into a global audience at this point.

Sramana Mitra: It has been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education
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