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.

Session 6 Chris Pirie, GM, Microsoft Learning Marketing and Sales Mgmt

The Skills Imperative – bridging the skills gamp and increasing deployment – 3 pillars

1. Digital Literacy – reaching the masses through technology readiness
2. IT Academy Program – reaching future tech leaders through competency and career enablement
3. Commercial Gold Certified Training – driving deployment through career enhancement

Channels for Microsoft Learning

1. Extended Classroom
2. Online Learning
3. Certifications

Provided some stats on aging IT workforce, global IT employment growth about why this is important to Microsoft

The Microsoft Ecosystem in Canada http://www.microsoft.com/about/corporatecitizenship (IDC report)

IT Academy Overview – BCIT might want to consider joining http://www.microsoftitacademy.com

• essential level – digital content for Digital literacy, Operating System and Office applications
• advanced level – supports content for Office, Server and Developer products
• will be part of the Campus Agreement in 2010

Jeff Johnson – IT Academy Area Lead North America

Diploma/Degree + Certification = Career Advantage

I have followed the development of the the Center for the Advancement of the Enterprise Architecture Profession with great interest over the past year.  The group has built a strong following and gathered sufficient momentum to be a force for the advocacy of Enterprise Architecture as a profession. After laying out a mission, vision, goals and core values, the group published the Enterprise Architect’s Professional Oath.  Over 1000 people made the commitment to the Oath and signed up.

I became aware of this initiative via Mike Kavis (@madgreek65) and Bob McIlree (@rmcilree) and the buzz in the Twitterverse (@CAEAP).  Bob asked me to consider participating in the creation of the EA Professional Practice Guide.  Here is the goal of the document:

The Enterprise Architecture Professional Practice Guide is being created as the leading business practice document for enterprise architects to advance their own practices, as well as forming a crucial reference set of information for education bodies.

Furthermore, this guide will be utilized in the Registered Enterprise Architect exam preparation and will cover a range of ethical, legal, financial, management, marketing and administrative issues.  The essential knowledge needed for planning a thriving Enterprise Architecture practice under a vast set of scenarios will be created and maintained by industry leaders for the industry and the public.

Last week I got the formal invite and  I joined the CAEAP team working on the EA Professional Practice Guide as a Chapter Lead for Chapter 7: Standards for Accreditation in Education.  My first task is to understand the original intent of including Accreditation in Education for the PPG.   The intent of the chapter is to provide a clear description of the development, governance and implementation of an accreditation program for organizations that deliver education in Enterprise Architecture.  The first deliverable was to create a chapter abstract for peer review.  I just uploaded it to our team worksite.  Looking forward to the feedback and comments.

You can be sure that I will be blogging much more about CAEAP in the coming months.