Millions of students, teachers learn via Microsoft Teams, Office 365 in Asia

Microsoft on Tuesday announced it has teamed up with various education ministries in Asia to transform online education during the Covid-19 pandemic via Teams, Office 365 and its Cloud service Azure, enabling millions of students to continue to learn from home.

"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," the tech giant said in a statement.

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," informed Microsoft.

In Taiwan, the Ministry of Education (MoE) has 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.

"With our IT staff and the Microsoft team working around the clock to make the course content available for the instructors, as well as the strong support of all the faculty members, we are confident that we helped minimize the impact of COVID-19 on our students' education," said Dr Huan-Chao Keh, President of Tamkang University in Taiwan.

The Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) in Thailand 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.

"We turned this COVID-19 crisis into an opportunity by allowing students from all universities across Thailand to continue their education through a 100 per cent online learning system," said Dr. Suvit Maesincee, Minister of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) Thailand.

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.

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, said Microsoft.