The pandemic paramountly exposed the need for digitalisation of the education system in Pakistan.

Conventional education has set up an indispensable collaboration between Microsoft and principal educational organisations, such as Higher Education Commission (HEC), Punjab Group of Colleges (PGC), Govt. of Sindh (SELD & SEF), The City School, & Government of Punjab (QAED) to facilitate the ever-growing need of digitisation within the education sector to make remote learning possible.

“Microsoft was founded on the principle that people can do remarkable things when technology is within reach. And we know that the right technology can literally become the engine for creating, sharing, exploring, individualizing teaching, and much more”, says Mr. Jibran Jamshad, Country Education Lead, Microsoft.

Microsoft has been in strategic partnership with Higher Education Commission by providing technology solutions to more than 200+ Higher Education Institutes (HIEs) throughout Pakistan. This partnership governs technology utilisation and sets in place multiple capacity building programs, including the Imagine Cup competition.

So far, more than 500K+ students and 80K+ faculty have been benefited directly from this collaboration.

Microsoft Teams platforms have been embraced by many leading academic institutions as a hybrid learning tool with over 400k active users across the country.

Under HEC, Microsoft is collaborating with leading universities by assisting them to take their on-prem workloads to the cloud with Microsoft Azure and have 20+ institutions in the EDU space that are actively using the platform today.

Microsoft also facilitates HEIs to view and consume their curriculum and content with their Business School courses to teach students the importance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in today’s economy and the University of Management and Technology became Pakistan’s first AI Business school in the country.

Several institutions like DOW University of Health Sciences, Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences & Institute of Business Administration, Karachi also recently digitised their back-office with Dynamics ERP.

Microsoft is now working more closely with HEC to identify more universities to be a part of this initiative.

Microsoft services also helped Punjab Group of Colleges to educate masses during the Covid-19 Pandemic - PGC used the scalability of Microsoft Azure to double its normal workload to broadcast online lessons to more than half a million students, providing them with FREE access to Microsoft Teams. PGC now has a shared workspace for conversations, files, assignments, and meetings – so students can be more engaged and effective every day.

Government of Punjab also partnered with Microsoft to launch the Microsoft Certification program across the province.

In the first phase, 10,000 teachers of QAED will receive Microsoft certifications. Minister for Education, Punjab Minister Mr. Murad Raas also endorsed this initiative saying, “This Microsoft's partnership with the government of Punjab is another step towards the PM’s vision of digital Pakistan”.

40,000+ teachers are already onboard on Microsoft Office 365 making Microsoft teams an official communication and training platform for the implementation of a single National curriculum and teacher’s training across the Punjab province.

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