Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 12 Education Products Strategy

Session 12 Jon Perera, GM Strategy, Education

Higher Education studies about students and institutions. Looking at broad trends and their impacts on education delivery. Microsoft is making a commitment from a number of fronts – education software, programs and policy & advocacy.

Interaction with over 300,000 schools across 115+ countries and 900 dedicated full time MS employees working in this area.  MS invests $485M USD in Partners in Learning.

Higher Education Approach

• engaging student, empowering educators
• enabling infrastructure agility
• fostering research & community

Software Roadmap

• divided between servers and services (software and services)
• tiers : applications, developer tools, programming model, application services, relational database, operating system, systems management
• academic toolkit (coming Jan 2010) – commitment to deliver MS Office with Higher Ed capabilities
  • interactive classroom (integrated PowerPoint and OneNote) – this is an add-in for PowerPoint and OneNote, cool interactivity between faculty and students
  • Semblio for digital content (packager for content) <- very interesting for our faculty includes assessment tools and powerful simulations – requires a client install for the Semblio player, web player by fall 2010 (this is a Silverlight platform)
  • mathematics (embedded into Word)
• Futures – SharePoint 2010 : Course Management – course lifecycle, content mgmt, collaboration, business intelligence. There is lots of momentum and interest in leveraging SharePoint as a development platform for learning management
• Microsoft Multipoint Server 2010 and Microsoft Multimouse SDK 1.5 – shared resource computing as off the shelf components
• working on Moodle integration based on standards

Looking Ahead – themes …

• “real time” adaptive learning
• Seamless cloud
• learning communities

If Microsoft can commit to this vision like they do with their Research and Development, we are going to see interesting capabilities coming for higher education.

Related posts:

1. Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 6 Microsoft Learning
2. Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 11 Security MS Strategy Overview
3. Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 5 Microsoft’s Virtualization Strategy and Futures
4. Canadian Colleges Update – Microsoft Dec 2009 Keynote Day 1
5. Canadian Colleges Update – Dec 2009 Session 3 Office System Futures