Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about adoption trends you’re seeing in terms of colleges and universities working with you as well as alumni or those institutions adopting these kinds of courses.

Ann Marie Sastry: It’s been fast. I banned any design folks looking at existing online platforms for EdTech. My feeling was that they were woefully behind.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now that I understand a bit better of what your technology is capable of doing, can you go back and explain to me what is the usage model of your customers?

Let’s say a university buys your product. You started off by saying that universities don’t always have enough faculty to build an alumni education curriculum. How much of what you’re talking about is done by technology? What level of faculty involvement is there?

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down one more level for me and tell me how.

Ann Marie Sastry: So, we do this by selecting articles, ranking, and then training algorithms to select articles that are closely related either by hand selection or by other means. 

Sramana Mitra: What are the sources of content that you’re applying algorithms on?

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Amesite CEO Ann Marie Sastry (Part 1)

Artificial intelligence is applied to EdTech in creative ways. Ann Marie discusses her company’s work in this field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and Amesite.

Ann Marie Sastry: I’m the CEO and Founder of Amesite. We are an artificial-intelligence-driven designer and platform provider for online learning. We deliver courses, programs, and the whole curriculum for businesses, universities, and K12. Our mission is to improve the way the world works using better technology to create engaging and affordable learning experiences. 

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.

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.

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 3)

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 next level detail in each of them? I can imagine real estate is different in different countries. What are the region-specific nuances in the different segments that you describe?

Thought Leaders in Online Education: Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education (Part 2)

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 meaningful.