Although the impact of Covid-19 on undergraduate- and graduate-level education has been examined in some depth, its effect on professionals seeking to bolster their knowledge and skills has probably not been looked at as closely.
Over the past year, professionals around the world were forced to pivot to remote work or, in many cases, they lost jobs due to the adverse economic effects of the pandemic. In response, many took advantage of this unusual time to build, enhance, or upskill their capabilities, particularly in the context of a demand for adaptive and more innovative solutions for organizations to survive and thrive during the pandemic and beyond. This unique set of circumstances, along with restrictions on travel at the global, national, and local levels, created an unprecedented demand for online or virtual educational programs that could deliver measurable results.
“At MIT Professional Education, we took a proactive approach to meet the continuing global hunger for new, cutting-edge knowledge, at a time of a complete cutoff of traditional, in-person learning. We stepped up our online blended learning programs addressing high-demand technical and human skills topics for professionals around the world,” says Bhaskar Pant, executive director of MIT Professional Education. “Further, in keeping with our core objective of increasing diversity and expanding accessibility to MIT knowledge for learners globally, we not only leveraged the power of facilitated online learning, but added programs in multiple languages to meet the needs of those whose native tongue was not English. As a result, in spite of the pandemic, we added thousands more to our learning community, breaking previous records — allowing us to further MIT’s mission of disseminating knowledge, and working with others to bring this knowledge to bear on the world’s great challenges.”
Source: “Building a more diverse, global, lifelong learning community during the pandemic”, MIT Professional Education
