M'soft offers 'Student Advantage' scheme to enhance tech learning
TO HELP equip students with the technology skills required in today's workforce, Microsoft has created "Student Advantage", which brings Microsoft Office 365 Education to more students worldwide.
Beginning on Sunday, any institution worldwide that licenses Office 365 ProPlus or Office Professional Plus for staff and faculty can provide access to Office 365 ProPlus for students at no extra cost.
Microsoft invites Thai universities interested in deploying Office 365 for Education to join “The New Era of Education on the Cloud” seminar on December 16 at its local office.
The software giant claims that with Office 365 Education, students can communicate and collaborate more efficiently, access assignments in shared workspaces, synchronise class notes in OneNote and use familiar Office applications such as Word, PowerPoint and Excel anywhere and across virtually any device.
They can save their data on cloud storage – Sky Drive or Sky Drive Pro – by default. These services are free and students can be assured that their data will be protected. Microsoft says it does not scan e-mails or documents for advertising purposes.
Haresh Khoobchandani, managing director of Microsoft (Thailand), said yesterday that Microsoft supported Thailand in achieving its objective of becoming a regional education hub within Asean.
“Under our vision ‘We Make 70 Million Lives Better’, we help educators transform and modernise education to meet the needs of 21st-century students through technological innovation and cutting-edge products such as Office 365.
“By further increasing the availability of the world’s most popular productivity solution through the cloud, we can empower more youth and help to unleash more future innovators.”
More than 35,000 institutions worldwide are automatically eligible to deliver the Student Advantage benefit to their students. Nearly 98 per cent of students using productivity software currently use Office.
Office 365 ProPlus includes all the familiar and full Office applications – locally installed on up to five personal computers, including Macs, and up to five smart devices, and available offline.
When a school combines Student Advantage with Microsoft’s other cloud services – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online, all available free through Office 365 Education – students have access to the same set of productivity tools and services used by Fortune 500 companies all over the world.
