James Garner Ptaszynski, Ph.D. – Senior Director, World Wide Higher Education Strategy jimp@microsoft.com
Microsoft Priorities for Higher Education – Creating the University of the Future – Today (stop waiting for tommorrow’s technology)
Trends – Global Competition, The Economy, Elite & For Profit Institutions, Students & Consumerization of IT
Look at article – Leadership – Stephen Laster – Project Rescue! Helping a lost but determined CIO navigate the tough new world of higher education IT
Center of Higher Education CIO Studies, Inc http://checs.org – new study reveals a disconnect between the top five skill that tech leaders need
Framework for Discussions
- expected outcomes of higher education – critical thinking, written communication, oral communication, quantitative reasoning, qualitative reasoning plus domain expertise and socialization
- major workloads to achieve outcomes – teaching, research and administration
- major processes – discover, organize, collaborate, share
- Office 365 for Education – a unified platform using tools familiar to the end user
Demonstrations
OneNote – looked at the use of this tool at a business school for a course from syllabus, assignments, grading, notes, research, etc Sharing of this OneNote can be done on SkyDrive or SharePoint for collaboration. Very powerful search is part of the tool allowing for topic searches.
Language Translation – built into all Office products to facilitate global collaboration
Unified Communication – speech to text translation – allows for getting information from messages in a timely fashion
Microsoft Academic Search – in beta but designed specifically for academic research- http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
Broadcast capability for PowerPoint – built in capability to broadcast a lecture/slide show
SharePoint – think of it as a “Swiss Army knife” – I prefer to call it a platform. Some things that can be delivered are : Business Intelligence, Accreditation, Educational Analytics – retention in particular, Research – information centre for research, Learning Management system (mentioned D2L is leveraging SharePoint), and Mobile applications
Two New Microsoft Initiatives
- Academic Summits – brings together CIOs and Chief Academic Officers for one or two days to focus on teaching, research and administration
- Higher Education Consortium – social networking site built on SharePoint to encourage community and collaboration between academics, Microsoft and partners http://mshec.org – building 6 councils to focus on key areas
