The digital journey from classroom to boardroom

Dubai - Adoption of cloud platforms critical to education's future

From a technology point of view, the last five years have witnessed a major increase in the implementation of technology for classrooms. Five years ago, there was a major challenge as to if we really need the technology in the classroom or not. I think now it is very clear and it's a fact that technology needs to be adopted to enhance learning.
One of the things we see happening very successfully is the adoption of cloud platforms. For example, today we have over one million students and teachers across the Gulf region using Office 365 and we have around four million in the implementation phase. I believe we have reached the stage where technology is being adopted now in the classroom and we have moved from the stage where we were still doubting whether technology is useful or not; into an era where we can see how we can actually use it to help the students and teachers in teaching and learning.
One of the challenges that we come across in the education sector is enabling or implementing more technology, which means a large amount of funding and extra costs for the school, and additional infrastructure and implementation that is not really the business for schools or educational institutes. We realised this long time back and that is why we started investing in cloud computing. By using the cloud schools can save a lot. For example, Office 365 offers a 5GB mailbox, plus 1TB of OneNote for every student. All these tools are offered free of charge for all schools, for students and teachers across all educational institutes, and they can just leverage it just using the cloud. Thus, it removes a lot of burden from these local institutes.
The best digital tools are the tools that can be adopted easily by the students and the teachers. If you look at the tools being using today, PowerPoint is the leading tool that most of the teachers have been using throughout the years. They use it to create content, to embed multiple types of content into it, and that's why we released add-ons to PowerPoint like Officemix, for example, another free-of-charge tool. This makes PowerPoint a complete learning creation tool. So now teachers can create a full learning resource through the use of PowerPoint, adding questions, grades, etc.
From a student's point of view, I think they have been leading the adoption of technology. In fact, they even show us the way into using technology. For example, if we take Minecraft, it's something students adopted long time back and have shown us the way into how they are using it as a learning experience. We usually focus more on the professional development and working with the teachers more than the students in most of our programs. That's why we have very specific programmes where we work with teachers to make them champions of how to utilise technology.
With more implementation of technology, it means we have more and more data; data about our students and teachers and data about schools, and the future of this comes into learning analytics. With learning analytics, we would be able to have more analytics around how each student is doing, which students' needs help, which schools need to be built in which areas etc. So, I think the future will be into the analytical part where there will be more education decision making systems that help us take the right decisions for where we need to do the trainings, where more schools, classrooms are needed and so on.
The writer is education director at Microsoft Gulf. Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.