MIT celebrates 65 years of professional education

Clara Piloto, Director, Global Programs, MIT Professional Education

Big data is a current focus for MIT’s outreach to technology-driven enterprises and nondegree students, according to Clara Piloto, Director, Global Programs, MIT Professional Education. In a recent telephone interview, she said MIT completed its initial two Online X programs, titled “Tackling the Challenges of Big Data,” in 2014. An additional session will run from Feb. 3 to March 17.

Online X programs represent only part of what MIT Professional Education offers, having just completed its 65th year of Short Programs. In 1949, then President James Rhyne Killian Jr. initiated those programs, held summers, to serve working professionals including returning veterans from World War II.

Piloto said one of the longest running Short Programs covers fermentation technology and is widely known as “Danny Wang’s Fermentation Technology Class” after Professor Daniel I. C. Wang, who began teaching it in the mid-1960s and continues to direct the class. Short Programs introduced last summer covered smart cities, engineering leadership, understanding and predicting technical innovation, and additive manufacturing.

MIT Professional Education also offers its Advanced Engineering Study Program, initiated by MIT President Julius Stratton in 1963 to serve post-graduate students. Under the program, fellows each year from around the globe are hosted by MIT Professional Education as “special students” and get to enjoy the benefits associated with being part of the MIT community. The program pioneered distance learning, contributing to the introduction last year of the Online X Program. Other initiatives include Custom Programs, developed for technical employees that take place on campus or company sites, and International Programs, which propel MIT’s lifelong learning initiatives worldwide.

Digital leaning has taken a huge jump over the last two or three years, Piloto said, with universities like Harvard and MIT offering free courses powered by edX. Fee-based Online X Programs provide enhanced interaction with faculty and other students plus the ability to earn a Certificate of Completion and continuing education units (CEUs)—all at a reasonable price of $545.

“MIT Professional Education chose the big-data topic for its initial Online X Program because of market demand for the topic and because of big-data initiatives happening on campus,” Piloto said. She noted that faculty members at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory were very excited about the topic, and 12 MIT faculty members agreed to be part of the course, including the two faculty co-directors, Daniela Rus and Sam Madden, both professors of electrical engineering and computer science, and Andrew Lo, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The course incorporates five modules covering 18 topic areas with 20 hours of video. Topics include data collection, data storage and processing, extracting structured data from unstructured data, systems issues (such as security and exploiting multicore processing), analytics, visualization, and applications ranging from medicine to finance.

Piloto said that students should have a computer-science background, but for the first session, the majority of students were big-data novices. Only 35% identified themselves as proficient in the topic, and only 3% claimed to be experts.

Piloto said, “It’s a challenging course that keeps you on your toes,” but it’s online so you can readily review the curriculum. Participants who successfully complete the course are eligible to receive a Certificate of Completion and two CEUs. Piloto said that for the first session in the spring of 2014, 83% of participants earned the Certificate of Completion while 63% earned the CEUs. That course drew approximately 3,500 professionals from 88 countries and more than 2,000 organizations worldwide, including companies such as Boeing, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco, IBM, and Thomson Reuters.

Looking ahead, MIT Professional Education is considering expanding the capabilities of its online offerings. Piloto cited one popular program in which students come to the MIT campus and build a laptop-based synthetic aperture radar system. She asked, “How could we put that online?” One possibility would be to send a kit to Africa, for example, to complement an online course. Additive manufacturing offers additional opportunities. The student in Africa could make use of a 3-D printer at a nearby facility to produce a prototype designed as part of an online course, she said.

As MIT’s current president, Rafael Reif, has stated, the MIT Professional Education programs make the university “…better connected to the front lines of technology-driven enterprise and better able to fulfill our mission of disseminating knowledge and effecting positive change.”¹

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