YOGYAKARTA – Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), one of Indonesia’s largest and most prestigious universities, has adopted Microsoft’s Office 365 for Education to boost the productivity of its students, lecturers and academic staff.
Office 365 for Education will complement the campus’ existing technology and will be initially used by 6,000 UGM students. Eventually, however, it will be used by all 60,000 UGM students as well as its 6,000 UGM lecturers and academic staff.
With Office 365 for Education, the UGM academic community can enjoy direct benefits from the variety of cloud computing-based enterprise-level productivity and communication services from Microsoft. Office 365 for Education makes it easier and faster for students and lecturers to collaborate with each other — both for teaching and learning in everyday classroom scenarios, as well as for long-distance learning. Office 365 also allows better development of long-distance learning infrastructure.
Prof. Ir. Dwikorita Karnawati, M.Sc., Ph.D., Rector of UGM, said, “This strategic partnership between UGM and Microsoft will further accelerate UGM’s plan to realize our vision to be an excellent and innovative world-class university. With the support of Microsoft’s advanced technology, we believe the teaching and learning process of our lecturers and students can be further modernized, UGM can be more competitive globally and we can contribute more to the nation.”
Office 365 for Education services are designed to support e-learning system, with features such as Microsoft Office Online (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Calendar, Outlook, etc. – that can be accessed, edited, saved and shared online), Skype and Lync for virtual class and group meetings.
OneDrive from Office 365 also allows academicians to save their intellectual work in the cloud with unlimited storage capacity with superior security features. All of these features can be enjoyed and managed by one admin through the unified admin experience by Office 365.
“We have implemented Office 365 for Education as pilot project since December 2013,” said Widyawan, Ph.D., Head of Systems and Information Resources of UGM. “Through the collaboration with Microsoft Innovation Center in UGM we completed the integration of Office 365 with eLisa (UGM’s e-learning portal) in May 2015..”
“Through eLisa 365, students and lecturers can access and take advantage of all the features of Office 365 through their academic email account (Single Sign-On). These features include a better experience in creating an online community for lecturing, discussions and quizzes, uploading online lectures and announcements of academic results. The presence of such a variety of features is made possible because of the flexibility of Office 365 as an open platform with Application Programming Interface (API) enabling it to be integrated with non-Microsoft platforms such as eLisa,” added Widyawan.
“The strategic partnership with UGM is the result of one of Microsoft’s commitments to improve and transform Indonesian education”, said Kertapradana Subagus, Public Sector Director, Microsoft Indonesia. “With the support of Office 365 for Education services, we hope that the UGM academic community can be more productive and proficient in their respective fields, so as to produce graduates who are ready to compete in an increasingly mobile and dynamic world.”
Dr. Ridi Ferdiana, Microsoft Innovation Center Manager of UGM, said, “In addition to Office 365 for Education, Microsoft has in the past taken the initiative to advance and modernize UGM and Yogyakarta’s education system, through the Microsoft Innovation Center (MIC) in UGM, Yogyakarta. The MIC functions as a research facility to bridge the gap between the academic world and industry. It provides a variety of training programs as well as capacity building and technology support initiatives to encourage local software innovation and to foster the development of a local software economy in Yogyakarta.”
