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| Anthony Salcito, Microsoft Vice President of Worldwide Education. |
Microsoft has taken aim at amassing mindshare in the education market with free cloud-based software. Eligible* education institutions across Asia Pacific can provide an Office 365 ProPlus subscription at no extra cost to all students, faculty and staff.
According to the company, nearly 98% of students using productivity software currently use Office**. With Office 365 ProPlus Benefit, students and educators everywhere in Asia Pacific can have access to all the familiar and powerful Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. Students and teachers who sign up for Office 365 ProPlus will also get one 1TB of storage on OneDrive for Business and Office Online, as well as access full Office on up to five PCs or Macs and editing capabilities for Office apps for iPad.
According to Microsoft, Office 365 ProPlus Benefit will enable teachers and prepare students for tomorrow’s jobs and allow for deeper collaboration between teachers and students. Speaking at the Bett Asia Leadership Summit, the global meeting place for the education technology community, Anthony Salcito, Microsoft Vice President of Worldwide Education, said: “Students need 21st century skills to be prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We are confident that Office 365 ProPlus Benefit can help to equip students with the skills they need for the future. Millions of students, teachers and staff across Asia Pacific are already using Office 365."
In Asia Pacific, a recent customer for Office 365 is Cognita Schools Asia, an independent schools group operating in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam as well as in other parts of the world. Some of its schools include the Stamford American International School and Australian International School in Singapore.
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| Brian Rogove, Chief Executive, Cognita Asia. |
Cognita Asia has chosen Office 365 to be deployed across all its schools in Asia Pacific to enable its teachers and staff to collaborate and communicate more seamlessly in and across campuses to facilitate better learning outcomes for students through Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and Lync. The move enables Cognita Asia to better manage its communications infrastructure across different countries, while enjoying enterprise-grade availability.
Brian Rogove, Chief Executive, Cognita Asia, said: “Cognita Asia has a clear vision of providing the highest level of quality in teaching and learning excellence for our students in Asia Pacific. Our schools are constantly innovating to enable our teachers, staff and students to stay ahead in a world where technology has radically changed the way we communicate. That’s why we are excited to be now on Office 365 to enhance the way we teach, communicate and collaborate across our network of schools.”
Rogove added that collaboration between Cognita faculty in different parts of the world can facilitate professional development, with teachers sharing lesson plans and best practices, while students can communicate with each other easily. "You don't have to spend a lot of money to get that sort of collaboration," he said. "We already see benefits. We have one point where people can reference best practices in teaching methodologies, collaborate with Lync, and (leverage on) teaching that's transferable."
Cognita Asia will complete its Office 365 migration in 2015. It is expected to roll out Office 365 ProPlus Benefit to all its students in 2015.
Another education institution in the Asia Pacific new to Office 365 is Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), one of the top universities in Indonesia. Office 365 is a cornerstone of their strategy to modernise their teaching and learning platform, and will drive an e-learning system to enable students and lecturers to be more collaborative, as well as its long-distance learning programmes.
UGM has today deployed Office 365 to an initial batch of 6,000 students. It is expected to roll out Office 365 to all its 60,000 students as well as 6,000 lecturers and academic staff.
Salcito added: “Educators have universally recognised the important role of technology in shaping the next-generation of information workers. In Asia Pacific, we are seeing strong double-digit growth in Office 365 amongst education institutions annually. This shows the aggressive pace of innovation that educators in Asia Pacific are taking in order to transform the classroom of tomorrow. It also validates Microsoft’s vision and commitment in molding the workplace of tomorrow through technology.”
Salcito noted that other tools that are ideal for educators include Office Mix and OneNote Classroom Notebook Creator, described in this blog post. He also acknowledged that tech alone is not the answer to enhancing education, and that offering devices and expecting a school to 'figure it out' will not work. "This journey is not a technology conversation. It's a future of learning conversation. Technology will support the conversation but we have got to shift the dialogue," he said.
Another education institution in the Asia Pacific new to Office 365 is Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), one of the top universities in Indonesia. Office 365 is a cornerstone of their strategy to modernise their teaching and learning platform, and will drive an e-learning system to enable students and lecturers to be more collaborative, as well as its long-distance learning programmes.
UGM has today deployed Office 365 to an initial batch of 6,000 students. It is expected to roll out Office 365 to all its 60,000 students as well as 6,000 lecturers and academic staff.
Salcito added: “Educators have universally recognised the important role of technology in shaping the next-generation of information workers. In Asia Pacific, we are seeing strong double-digit growth in Office 365 amongst education institutions annually. This shows the aggressive pace of innovation that educators in Asia Pacific are taking in order to transform the classroom of tomorrow. It also validates Microsoft’s vision and commitment in molding the workplace of tomorrow through technology.”
Salcito noted that other tools that are ideal for educators include Office Mix and OneNote Classroom Notebook Creator, described in this blog post. He also acknowledged that tech alone is not the answer to enhancing education, and that offering devices and expecting a school to 'figure it out' will not work. "This journey is not a technology conversation. It's a future of learning conversation. Technology will support the conversation but we have got to shift the dialogue," he said.
Rogove spoke about the experience of Stamford American International School, which had been built from the ground up, enabling Cognita to provide a state of the art learning environment. Individualised learning plans for students, related data captures and analytics have led to "amazing outcomes", he said, such as children moving from scoring Ds to Cs.
Technology has also enabled a school in Bali on a cashew plantation, a spinoff from a CSR project at Cognita, Rogove disclosed. Today, students at the school are able to collaborate with Cognita's schools in the region at a very low cost through Skype, exposing them to other students and other pedagogical approaches that they would never have been able to experience without technology.
Students and teachers can find out more information on Office 365 ProPlus Benefit here.
Click here to read more about the UGM adoption.
*Education institutions must be accredited, and Microsoft says a "small investment" is required for the core elements of technology. The free E1 version supports unlimited numbers of users but provides fewer features than the paid E3 version. E1, for instance, offers access to Office online but not offline, whereas E3 also supports an installed copy of Office for, at the time of writing, US$2.50 a student and US$4.50 per faculty member in Singapore. Institutions can find out if they are eligible here: http://office.com/getoffice365
**Microsoft data
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