Unlearning to educate, a transformative conversation
Sitting down to talk and to exchange ideas, provides a good reflection on the constructive and collaborative world that is emerging. With two very different backgrounds, Clara Piloto, Director of Global Programs at MIT Professional Education, and Pablo Rivas, CEO and founder of the ed-tech Global Alumni, get together in their common need to aspire to reach educational excellence combining their complementary and avant-garde ideas on education.
The talk they had is a compendium of all the imminent challenges that educational institutions and students have to face in order to steer the direction of continuing education towards the professional demands of the next years.
Every educational target, however, starts from an idea that despite not being new, is even more necessary than ever: Excellence. ”I know that it is one of the common values we share,“ says Clara Piloto, ”that it is part of your philosophy, but also of ours.” Global Alumni, whose mission is to bring Spanish speakers closer to the graduate programs of the best universities in the world, in Spanish and online format, was born and developed under the motto: “Excellence or Nothing”. MIT Professional Education in turn, is globally recognized for its commitment to quality and to its practical and changing role in the world of Education.
Pablo Rivas sums up this meeting point: “Global Alumni is a company that is trying to transform first-class education on a daily basis. MIT is a very prestigious university that has been doing things well for hundreds of years and is a benchmark for us to constantly look at.”
However, the innovative, the disruptive element in this alliance between Global Alumni and MITPE, we find it in the actual combination of the prestige of the programs and the state-of-the-art methodology supported by the latest technology. This is what allows the most important programs of MITPE to be raised up a level to become more transcendent, beyond the boundaries of geography and language, and get to the exact location where students and professionals are working.
“What inspires me most about this project,” says Clara Piloto, “is that through Global Alumni we are able to break barriers down: connect with people in their mother tongue, in Spanish, and incorporate into the curriculum the environment we have developed at MIT. In this sense, you help us with the support of the mentors and your team.” “MIT is a pioneer university in breaking language barriers,” adds Pablo Rivas, “and now that Spanish speakers can have the best education in our own language is a great opportunity.”
Leadership and innovation begin here and now
It is worth mentioning that these programs are eminently pragmatic. If MIT Professional Education and Global Alumni are combining their talents to reach the core of training demand and adapt to every student availability irrespective of where they are in the world, it is because they are aware that this is where change can best be actively exercised. MIT Professional Education’s new Leadership and Innovation program – online and in Spanish – is a good example.
“Innovation is part of our day-to-day,” explains Global Alumni’s CEO, “We need more and better leadership. The Leadership and Innovation program gives you the tools to change things in your organization. They will change from Day 1 to the end of the year.” “In fact,” adds Clara Piloto, “already from the very first day they start seeing the content, they find value and start putting everything they have learned into practice. I realized that those who took the program in English, when they finished, they had been promoted or their projects had been very successful. In other words, practices such as these drove innovation in their companies.”
“This program is special,” she adds, highlighting the great work done by David Niño, Senior Lecturer of the program, “there are many leadership courses, but very few innovation courses. This program combines both.”
In a nutshell, Pablo Rivas opinion is that there are four factors that make Leadership and Innovation a genuine and unmatched training proposal: “MIT, Professor Niño, the online structure in your own language, and the very topic of how the course is configured so that you can apply it immediately.”
Clara Piloto concludes the talk by focusing on the purpose of working together to benefit educational innovation: “our goal is to change the world for the better, you will think it is a far-fetched goal, but we are convinced that everything we do, from research to leadership and innovation programs, will bring about that change.”
