At first glance it looks like any other executive education class: middle-aged students bend over laptops and iPads and a bow-tied lecturer clicks through a PowerPoint presentation. Every so often a student raises a hand with a question; and on occasion, the room explodes with laughter when the professor cracks a joke.
But this is not an average class. For one thing, the 40 students in the room are from 17 countries. For another, the majority are not native English speakers and some have very little knowledge of spoken English.
Welcome to MIT Sloan School of Management’s Global Executive Academy – or GEA – one of the first executive education courses designed to provide non-English speaking managers with a US business education.
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The GEA, which was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, provides its students with simultaneous translation in Arabic, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Most executive education courses in the US, Euro………….