SINGAPORE– Starting from today, eligible education institutions across Asia Pacific can provide an Office 365 ProPlus subscription at no extra costs for all students, faculty and staff. With Office 365 ProPlus Benefit, students and educators everywhere in Asia Pacific can have access to all the familiar and powerful Office applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.
Students and teachers who sign up for Office 365 ProPlus will also get one 1TB of storage on OneDrive for Business and Office Online, as well as access full Office on up to five PCs or Macs and can unlock the editing capabilities of Office apps for iPad. All these productivity tools have been built on Microsoft’s rigorous standards for security and privacy of its users.
Microsoft has made the Office 365 ProPlus Benefit available at no extra costs to enable teachers and prepare students for tomorrow’s jobs. In this mobile-first and cloud-first age, students entering the workforce are expected to cope with a hyper-connected and technology-driven business world that require skill-sets in presentation, collaboration and knowledge integration. Built to run a more mobile workplace, Office 365 is optimized to work anytime, anywhere regardless of devices or platform. Extending this service to educators is important as it will allow for deeper collaboration between teachers and students as they will be using the same technology and features.
Speaking at the Bett Asia Leadership Summit, the global meeting place for the education technology community, Anthony Salcito, Microsoft Vice President of Worldwide Education, said: “Students need 21st century skills to be prepared for the jobs of tomorrow. We are confident that Office 365 ProPlus Benefit can help to equip students with the skills they need for the future. Millions of students, teachers and staff across Asia Pacific are already using Office 365. With the availability of Office 365 ProPlus Benefit today, we are putting the best-in-class suite of productivity tools in the hands of educators and students to unleash their creativity in the classroom and beyond.”
Office 365 takes centre stage today with schools in Asia Pacific
Microsoft Office has been an almost universal tool for educators in communicating and collaborating with their students, as well as a trusted productivity platform for both teachers and students in getting school work done. Nearly 98% of students using productivity software currently use Office.
In Asia Pacific, many students, teachers and staff have come to love and trust Office 365. The latest sign-up for Office 365 is Cognita Schools Asia, a leading international independent schools group operating in Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Some of its schools include the Stamford American International School and Australian International School in Singapore.
Cognita Asia has chosen Office 365 to be deployed across all its schools in Asia Pacific to enable its teachers and staff to collaborate and communicate more seamlessly in and across campuses to facilitate better learning outcomes for students through Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and Lync. This also enables Cognita Asia to better manage its communications infrastructure across different countries, while enjoying enterprise-grade availability.
Brian Rogove, Chief Executive, Cognita Asia, said: “Cognita Asia has a clear vision of providing the highest level of quality in teaching and learning excellence for our students in Asia Pacific. Our schools are constantly innovating to enable our teachers, staff and students to stay ahead in a world where technology has radically changed the way we communicate. That’s why we are excited to be now on Office 365 to enhance the way we teach, communicate and collaborate across our network of schools.”
Cognita Asia will complete its Office 365 migration in 2015. It is expected to roll out Office 365 ProPlus Benefit to all its students in 2015.
Another education institution in the Asia Pacific signing up Office 365 recently is Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), one of the top and largest universities in Indonesia. Office 365 is a cornerstone of their strategy to modernize its teaching and learning platform, where it will drive its e-learning system to enable students and lecturers to be more collaborative, as well as its long-distance learning programs.
UGM has today deployed Office 365 to an initial batch of 6,000 students. It is expected to roll out Office 365 to all its 60,000 students as well as 6,000 lecturers and academic staff.
Salcito added: “Educators have universally recognized the important role of technology in shaping the next-generation of information workers. In Asia Pacific, we are seeing strong double-digit growth in Office 365 amongst education institutions annually. This shows the aggressive pace of innovation that educators in Asia Pacific are taking in order to transform the classroom of tomorrow. It also validates Microsoft’s vision and commitment in molding the workplace of tomorrow through technology.”
