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Microsoft Builds a “Partners in Learning” Value Chain

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

My previous blog provided a brief overview of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program and its objectives of helping primary and secondary schools dramatically enhance teacher skills and transform educational models around 21st century best practices that use technology as a tool for demonstrably and measurably improving pedagogy and learning outcomes. This blog provides an overview as to how Microsoft plans to dramatically scale this program, while simultaneously ensuring—and objectively measuring—the program’s success.

A Localized, Leveraged Model

Although Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program is developed and coordinated centrally, through a 10-person headquarters staff, the real work is done in the field. The company has assembled 85 field managers (typically former teachers and school administrators) to tailor and localize the program around the needs of schools in 112 individual countries.

These local managers work not with individual schools, but with mid-level education ministry officials and leading educational experts in each country. They run policy implementer workshops to help these policy makers and implementers:

  • Envision how to transform education;
  • Discover the technologies that are available and how to most effectively apply them;
  • Identify expected results; and
  • Formulate change management processes that will be most effective in helping schools transform their education models.

This is where the leveraged model kicks in. Although the mid-level officials and educational experts have neither the authority to change their country’s educational policies nor the reach to educate and train schools and teachers, the workshops are intended to provide them with the tools required to communicate the opportunities and value of using technology both:

  • Upward, to their country’s Education Ministers; and
  • Downward to school districts and individual schools.

Teachers who have been trained in these new skills then train other teachers. Schools that successfully go through the program (so-called Mentor Schools) then train the next generation of schools (so-called Pathfinder Schools) who then become the next generation of Mentor Schools. Although the program has already trained about 2 million teachers, its efforts at transforming schools are still relatively nascent. As of the end of 2009, it had only certified 12 Mentor schools and had pre-qualified another 30 to go through its Pathfinder School program.

Microsoft, however, plans to rapidly and dramatically scale this program. The tools used in the program are available to any school and more than 1,700 schools have already begun using them. While not all such schools will wish or qualify to go through the complete program, some certainly will. By the end of 2013, the company expects to have qualified a total of 45 Mentor and 300 Pathfinder schools (who, in turn, will engage with thousands of other schools around the world) and to have trained about 12 million teachers across 112 countries.

Pretty ambitious objectives. How can Microsoft grow this program so rapidly? More importantly, how can it ensure that that it delivers the type of objectively verifiable outcomes that Microsoft is so intent on demonstrating?

With a Little Help from its Friends

These goals are clearly too ambitious for a single company, even one with Microsoft’s resources. Sure, a leveraged model will certainly help, but the Partners in Learning team cannot do it all. Therefore, the group is partnering with other groups within Microsoft. For example, it leverages content created by Microsoft Learning and works with Microsoft’s Education Products Group to create specialized education market SKUs, such as Office for Educators.

The Partners in Learning team is also actively partnering with governments, NGOs, universities, donor organizations and other corporations. For example:

  • Intel, Cisco and the World Bank helped Microsoft develop its policy implementer workshop;
  • The University of Wittwaterstrand in South Africa is the first in what will be a chain of universities that deliver these workshops;
  • The University of Washington developed the foundation for change management model that Microsoft uses in migrating schools to 21st-century skills; and
  • Third-party consultants help individual schools implement such programs.

It Takes a Community

Defining new educational models, demonstrating their value to national education leaders, training teachers, and providing a leveraged framework for implementing these models in individual schools is a necessary first step. A successful program, however, must do more. It must also maintain interest in the program, facilitate the development of courseware and other content, and allow participating teachers and schools to share experiences and emerging best practices.

That is where Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Network fits in. Although the foundation of this global, collaborative, professional development network has been in place for more than five years, Microsoft launched a new, greatly enhanced version in November 2009.

This network, which Microsoft describes as something of a LinkedIn for teachers, allows teachers to register by filling out profiles, find other teachers with similar interests and complementary experiences, create communities, build shared workspaces, and share content and best practices. Although the current network is available only in English to 17 countries, it is being extended to support Spanish, French, Chinese and Arabic and is scheduled to launch in 23 additional countries over the next few months.

These virtual communities create sounding boards for new ideas, expose experiments and experiences, facilitate peer review, and facilitate rapid and broad deployment of successful practices. They also serve as a primary vehicle by which teachers can be exposed to and share courseware, curricula guidelines and content. While teachers will create the vast majority of this material, Microsoft will also provide supplemental sources. For example, as mentioned above, the Partners in Learning group is working with other Microsoft groups (including Microsoft Learning and Education Products Group) to develop and tailor offerings for educators and is also beginning to build a network of partners (such as the Smithsonian Institution) to create more.

Microsoft will also highlight particularly innovative programs and materials through its Innovative Teachers and Innovative Schools programs and competitions and allow teachers and administrators to directly share learnings in annual conferences.

Assessing and Exposing Best Practices

Although Microsoft is certainly interested in inspiring and promoting innovative programs, it is committed to ensuring that materials and learning approaches are also effective. It is, for example, working with the Stanford Research Institute to develop metrics to assess IT technologies’ effect on learning outcomes and with UNESCO to study outcomes in four very different countries (Russia, Senegal, Finland and Indonesia). The study, which is using an open, technology-independent methodology, will generate peer-reviewed assessments. It is intended to result in a set of standardized, vendor- and technology-independent metrics that schools, governments and NGOs can use as a baseline for measuring the effectiveness of different technology-enabled learning programs.

Microsoft is convinced that technology has the potential of transforming the educational process into a more student-driven, project-based model and of dramatically improving outcomes. However, it views technology as a means of achieving this goal, not as an end. It developed a program to enable and encourage teachers to experiment and develop innovative uses of this technology and to expose the most promising of these approaches to other teachers. But it’s looking for far more than innovation. It is also looking for effectiveness, by ensuring that this technology produces optimal, measurable and replicable outcomes.

Although Microsoft is genuinely focused on ensuring that education technology produces optimized results, one can be excused for suspecting something of a conflict of interest. The Partners in Learning program is, after all, run out of the company’s Public Sector Markets group—a group that is focused on, and rewarded for increasing sales into its target market. Microsoft, however, makes no secret of this affiliation or of its desire to dramatically increase the penetration of IT into schools.  In fact, it refers to Partners in Learning as a “social enterprise” rather than a “social responsibility” program. It believes it has a responsibility to help improve educational systems in all countries to facilitate the countries’ and the peoples’ economic development, to create a more robust market for technology and to develop a better equipped workforce.

In other words, what’s good for the world—or at least for the world’s education system—can also be good for Microsoft’s business. No conflict in that.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, K-12, Microsoft, Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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Microsoft “Partners in Learning” Program Objectives

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

My December 6, 2009 blog on the evolving focus of Microsoft Learning examined the group’s evolving mission and its growing partnerships with colleges and universities to teach not only budding IT professionals, but also students in other disciplines (especially business) the value that IT can provide in their work.

Microsoft’s work with schools, however, goes far beyond teaching college students to use Microsoft tools in their professions. The company’s Partners in Learning program, for example, works with primary and secondary schools, helping them enhance teacher skills and transform educational models around 21st century best practices that use technology as a tool for demonstrably and measurably improving pedagogy and learning outcomes.

Partners in Learning History

Launched in 2003 with a $250 million grant, Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program’s goals were to provide schools with access to technology and help them integrate this technology into their curricula.

While the initial program produced substantive results, many schools continue to use technology in separate IT labs or to automated traditional “sage on the stage” teaching methods, such as by using PowerPoint as an alternative to whiteboards. Relatively few used this technology to fundamentally transform pedagogy into an independent, self-guided, project-based learning model in which teachers would support student-initiated learning by serving as “guides on the side”. Despite the grants and the guidance, most teachers lacked technology skills and the understanding of how to most effectively use technology in teaching, classrooms remained too overcrowded for personal attention, and governments could not provide the resources required to address these limitations.

Microsoft, however, was not discouraged. It continually adapted and then dramatically extended the program by committing an additional $235 million in 2008. The current program is built around a leveragable, holistic, best practices-based approach to transforming educational models around 21st century methods and to measuring results with objective metrics.

Microsoft is certainly making progress. As of the end of 2009, the program had produced:

  • More than 7.1 million trained teachers and school officials;
  • 12 “mentor schools”, which have successfully changed teaching and learning methods in accordance with Microsoft’s Innovative Schools Program methodology, and are now authorized to help other (Pathfinder) schools transform their own programs;
  • A pipeline of 30 “pathfinder schools”, which have already been qualified to go through the Microsoft program. These schools, although they may not yet employ advanced technology, have strong curricula, teachers and results, and leaders with a desire to go through the type of transformation required by the Innovative Schools Program. They have also completed a preparatory program including semi-annual in-person professional development sessions and monthly “virtual universities”. (Once they “graduate”, these schools qualify to become the next cohort of mentor schools.

This, however, is just the beginning. By the end of 2013, the company plans to have trained 10 million teachers across 112 countries, to have qualified 45 Mentor and 300 Pathfinder schools and to have thousands of schools in the Innovative Schools’ breadth program, though which any school can gain access to Partners in Learning tools even if they don’t complete in the full program.

How does Microsoft plan to achieve such ambitious goals? My next blog, Building a “Partners in Learning” Value Chain, will provide an overview of some of the key elements of Microsoft’s plan for driving this phenomenal growth while simultaneously ensuring—and objectively measuring—the program’s success.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, K-12, Microsoft, Skills Requirements, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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Microsoft Learning: Adapting to Changing IT Skills Training Realities

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

Microsoft created Microsoft Learning with a mission: to ensure that the lack of available skills is never a barrier to using Microsoft software.

Although the group has always dedicated the vast majority of its education and training attentions and resources to teaching current and aspiring IT professionals to develop, implement and manage Microsoft software, its mission has been evolving. This has been particularly true over the last decade as a result of changes including:

  • The need to expand beyond training IT professionals to develop, implement and manage IT environments and applications, to training business people to use specific Microsoft tools and to teaching students the value of IT tools in all disciplines and endeavors;
  • The dramatic post-IT-bubble decline in interest in IT professions in developing countries, combined with a simultaneous explosion in interest within emerging countries;
  • Schools rapidly growing recession-era interest in teaching (and certifying students in) skills that will directly improve employability by complementing conceptual education with the training of practical skills; and
  • The recession-era trend for students, employees and the unemployed to take greater control of their own careers by proactively developing their skills and preparing for defined career paths.

The company has—and will continue to—adapt its traditional skills training models to accommodate and capitalize on each of these changes. 

From IT Professionals to Students and Business People

Microsoft Learning’s primary objective has always been, and will continue to be the training and certification (2.4 million technology certifications to date) of IT professionals on Microsoft technologies. Although Microsoft has long-since offloaded the sale and delivery of this training to its worldwide network of 1,500 Certified Partners for Learning Solutions, it continues to develop the courseware and manage the certification process.

While many new certifications go to professionals that currently have other certifications, 60% of the 300,000 new professional certifications issued each year are to new entrants. And since college and university students (as well as career changers) now account for a rapidly growing percentage of total trainees, the company is authorizing more academic institutions to deliver training directly to their students.

Although Microsoft will continue to devote the vast majority of its training efforts to current and aspiring IT professionals, the company also wants to ensure that all types of people, across all industries and job functions, understand how to use its personal productivity applications in their daily work. Therefore, the company has developed a wide range of courses to help business users and students more effectively use Microsoft tools in their day-to-day work and has so far certified 2.5 million professionals to support its business products (in addition to the 2.4 million for its technology products). The company, in fact, estimates that it and its partners train 10 times more business users than IT professionals each year.

But since the training of IT professionals is much more complex and detailed, and since IT work is becoming increasingly difficult at a time when productivity applications are becoming easier to use, Microsoft Learning will continue to focus the vast majority of its efforts on IT training.

From Developed to Developing Countries

Like all IT vendors, Microsoft initially focused its training efforts overwhelmingly on those developed countries that accounted for the vast majority of total IT spend. Now, however, emerging countries are dramatically increasing their IT investments. Their demand for IT training, however, is growing even more rapidly than is their demand for hardware and software.

The reasons are two-fold:

  1. The explosive success of India’s IT outsourcing services has prompted dozens of other emerging countries to train large numbers of their own citizens in efforts to replicate India’s success. Certifications are instrumental in allowing offshore service providers to demonstrate their skills and to level the playing field with developed country competitors; and
  2. The tech crash of 2000, combined with the growth in offshoring, dramatically reduced the interest of IT careers in developed countries (and especially in the U.S.), thereby reducing the need for specialized IT training in these countries. Many developed countries, in fact, are already experiencing shortages in key disciplines. 

This double whammy shifted the locus of the IT training market. India, for example, now accounts for 25% of all new Microsoft certifications and other emerging countries, such as China, Mexico, are growing rapidly. Microsoft has recruited new training partners to address these developing country opportunities (including the giant NITT, which trains more than 500,000 people per year across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America) and has formed relationships with hundreds of additional universities.

Schools as Development and Delivery Partners

Microsoft has introduced a number of innovative IT programs (which I will discuss further in future blogs). The Microsoft IT Academy, which it launched in 2007, serves as an umbrella under which the company’s academic IT training offerings (curricula, courseware, software, online learning, certifications, etc.) are aligned. The program, which is primarily targeted at engineering, computer science and related disciplines, has expanded rapidly, encompassing close to 9,000 schools with plans to grow this number five-fold over the next five years.

This program, which adds hands-on, practical experience to the academic education of many curricula, is intended to enhance student employability by adding focus and certifications at special student pricing to the student’s resume and help them deliver immediate value to employers. Microsoft also offers a number of additional services and tools (ranging from career planning tools to resume, cover letter and interviewing guides) plus a newly launched career portal that go even further in helping graduates improve their  employment prospects.  

The company’s academic programs, however, go far beyond the teaching of aspiring IT professionals. The Partners in Learning program is intended to help educators develop and test new methods for using IT tools to enhance education and for highlighting and sharing best practices among schools. It also has a number of programs targeted at college, elementary, middle and high schools students. For example, it provides pre-packaged, online courses to help college students learn to use Excel in business analysis and PowerPoint in presentations. It also offers a number of pre-defined lesson plans to facilitate the learning of specific topics across fields including geography, history, mathematics, science and language. But while Microsoft directly develops the curricula for its IT courses, it relies primarily on schools and other experts to develop non-technical program materials.

Individual-Led Training and Career Development

With the recession prompting a number of companies to cut back on their funding of employee training, growing numbers of employees, students, unemployed workers and independent contractors are taking more active roles in developing their own skills. Microsoft’s new career campaign intends to help these individuals, such as by:

  • Emphasizing the demand for IT skills and certifications, such as by citing independent studies on the current and future demand for IT specialists;
  • Providing justification for individuals to pay for such courses themselves by demonstrating ways in which certifications can help individuals achieve their own career goals (in addition to emphasizing their value to companies);
  • Proactively assisting in career planning by laying out potential career paths and explaining the types of skills, training and certifications that will be required for each step along the way (rather than by focusing on the value of specific courses); and by
  • Distributing up to 1 million free vouchers for select Microsoft eLearning courses and certification exams. 

Into the Future

The future will see more these types of programs. Although the demand for skills training will continue to grow, the type of training, the purchasers of the training and the types of organizations that deliver the training will continue to evolve.

Some of these changes, such as the growing demand from emerging countries and the growing roles of schools in developing and delivering all type of IT training, are long-term trends. Others, such as the decline in corporate spending and the growing role of individuals in planning their own careers and paying for their own courses, were created—or at least exacerbated—by the recession. Such exigencies have prompted Microsoft Learning to take a much more pragmatic approach to positioning and promoting its courses. Its new mantras are for immediate employability and self-directed career development.

While some of these changes may be new, all are likely to shape Microsoft’s education and training programs for years to come. Although the company will continue to focus its primary efforts on the training of IT professionals, it will work increasingly closely with partners—especially all types of educational institutions—to integrate IT more seamlessly into all academic disciplines, curricula and coursework. It will also continue to increasingly position its training materials as providing at least as much value to the individual, as to the employer.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Corporate Social Responsibility, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, K-12, Microsoft, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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