SINGAPORE — Since the onset of the pandemic, education ministries across Asia have pushed for mass migrations online, with the help of Microsoft Teams, Office 365, and Microsoft Azure. Beyond ensuring lesson continuity, schools have been facilitating real-time interactivity between teachers and students in class while enabling students to discover, create, and share.
Finding and deploying the right tools quickly was instrumental in managing the seismic shift in the education landscape caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the Philippines, the executive committee of the Department of Education (DepEd) moved quickly to train educators upon the nation’s lockdown in March. Department Secretary Leonor Briones used Microsoft Teams to hold a meeting with 17 regional offices, addressing critical issues faced by teachers and students. The industry was kept connected via weekly “Ask the Expert” sessions for officers, as well as “TeamsTalk,” a bi-weekly online meet-up for teachers to catch up and solicit advice from one another.
In Vietnam, the Ministry of Education and Training deployed Microsoft Teams in a record time of 27 hours for more than 200 schools in Hai Phong city. In over 2 months, Teams was successfully adopted for more than 3.3 million teachers and students from primary and secondary schools, high schools and institutes of higher learning across the country.
Similarly, the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education adopted Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Education to create a conducive and interactive environment online. This was launched in early May for more than 160,000 students and 20,000 teachers across 253 Tokyo Metropolitan high schools, special needs schools and other schools administered by the Board of Education.
Educational institutions were also pressed to re-create the physical classroom experience. In Taiwan, the Ministry of Education (MoE) enabled 2.5 million students and 200,000 teachers from grade schools to universities to learn remotely using free Office 365 and Microsoft Teams accounts tied to their National IDs.
The integration of applications on Office 365 and Microsoft Teams also included Minecraft: Education Edition and Flipgrid, which were made available at no extra cost to students in Thailand. There, the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) teamed up with partners LannaCom and Microsoft to provide access to Office 365 A1 and Microsoft Teams for over 150 universities across the country, covering more than 60,000 educators and 2 million students.
To cope with the volume of learning taking place online, the Educational Broadcasting System (EBS) in South Korea deployed Microsoft’s cloud Azure to expand its system’s service capacity by 500 times within two weeks, granting access to 3 million middle and high school students across the country.
Meanwhile, in Malaysia, the Ministry of Education (MoE) and Digital Classroom Admin (DCA), with the help of Microsoft, rose to the challenge by conducting daily webinars to introduce teachers to Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Training sessions were recorded on Teams and uploaded on MoE’s Digital Learning portal (Ruang Ilmu), enabling over 430,000 teachers across the nation to review training materials at their own time.
Behind the successful deployment of these learning tools came an equally steep learning curve, as educational institutions stepped up to mobilize and equip educators with the proper skillsets for online learning.
