FE blog

Who will be the next Bill Gates

XMA and Toshiba have launched a competition, called “The next Bill Gates”. In a world of competitions and campaigns all the time, it’s a bit of a “does what it says on the tin” competition. It’s for students who’ll be applying for university next year, and students enter by recording a 60-second video answering the question “Why are you the next Bill Gates?”

The prize is £3,500 of tuition fees, a Toshiba laptop and a summer 2010 placement with XMA.

As far as I know, it has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft, but darn, why weren’t we quicker thinking of this idea :-)  Every year we take in about 80 interns for a full year as well as offering work experience for pupils from local schools, but hadn’t thought of offering it as the chance to become the next Bill Gates…

Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide for Direct Access

The TechNet site has a growing series of Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for all kinds of areas – virtualisation, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server, Online Services and the Optimised Desktop.

The one that jumped out as me was the IPD Guide for DirectAccess in Windows 7. This is especially useful in colleges, where you have staff who are as likely to need access to your network from home as they are in college (especially if you have a large number of part time staff).

With DirectAccess, your users can have access to your college network without having to use a VPN or Remote Access setup – whenever they have access to the internet from their college laptop, they have access to your network. To get this level of convenience  without compromising security means that you need to setup your network carefully, and the IPD guide is designed to help with that.

The Infrastructure Planning and Design series guide for DirectAccess provides actionable guidance for designing a DirectAccess infrastructure. The guide’s easy-to-follow, four-step process gives a straightforward explanation of the infrastructure required for clients to be connected from the Internet to resources on the corporate network, whether or not the organization has begun deploying IPv6.

You can download the Direct Access Guide here

On the same subject, you may find the IPD Guide for Network Access Protection useful too, as it talks you through the ways that you can allow students and staff to connect their own laptops to your network without compromising security. In an environment where students are increasingly arriving with their own laptop, it allows you to save money and improve capabilities.

South East Essex College and DMS do Windows 7

Certainly the first in the UK and Europe, South East Essex College went for a complete roll-out of Windows 7 for the start of term in September, making it the biggest educational user of Windows 7 at the start of term.They moved everything together – all of their workstations moved from Windows XP and their servers moved from Windows Server 2003 – to give all of their 950 staff and 13,000 students a new technology experience as they came back in from the summer break.

You can read more about their upgrade in this case study, published by the Microsoft partner they worked with – Design & Management Systems (DMS) – who are a Microsoft Gold Certified partner.

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

I’m sure this list is out on the web somewhere, but just in case you’ve not seen it in this easy-to-read format before, below is my list of the features of each version of Windows 7. I think this will help you to work out which one is right for your school:

• Windows 7 Home Premium is the retail version. It doesn’t allow network login (called Domain Join), so it’s unsuitable for college-based computers, and unlikely to be useful for student laptops owned by the college, unless you don’t plan to manage them or connect them up to your network except via the web. It is also unable to run XP Mode, which might be useful for some of your older software.
  And it’s probably the one on laptops your staff/students buy themselves.
  
• Windows 7 Professional is the minimum version you’ll need in-college as it has network domain join and XP Mode.
  
• Windows 7 Enterprise is the right version if you believe that you should be encrypting any laptops used by staff (this is something I believe strongly!), because it comes with BitLocker and BitLocker To Go. And in addition it also adds AppLocker – which you may want on all of your devices too.
  
• Windows 7 Ultimate is in the table below for completeness, but you are only likely to get this version if you buy it in a retail store with it pre-installed (which is an expensive way to get the functionality in Enterprise or Professional edition)

See below the table for my “How to Buy Windows 7” guide

What features are in which version of Windows 7?

How to buy Windows 7 for your college

So now you’ve worked out which version you want, you may want to know the best way to buy the right version!

Existing computers

• For any existing computers running any version of Windows XP or Windows Vista, you are probably already covered for the upgrades to Windows 7 Enterprise on your Campus Agreement. If you don’t have a Campus Agreement, or you need to buy some extras for staff laptops, you can buy a Windows 7 upgrade on a Select licence. If it’s basic Select, the upgrade is to Windows 7 Professional, with the Software Assurance option, you’ll get Windows 7 Enterprise.

New computers

• For Professional edition, you can either buy a new PC with it pre-installed, or buy a PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then add an upgrade (again, if you have a Campus Agreement this upgrade will already be included in it for you).
• For Enterprise edition, the best way is to buy a new PC with Windows 7 Home Premium, and then upgrade via your Campus Agreement , or with the Select licence plus Software Assurance (which gives you the right to keep upgrading, and adds the Enterprise features)

Here’s some links to find out more about Campus Agreement, Select Licences and Software Assurance.

Your existing Microsoft partner will be able to give you a quote. I’ve just checked on the Pugh site*, and they quote £43 for a Select Windows 7 Professional upgrade.

* Pugh is one of our partners, but there are plenty of others. You can find them all on our website

The Saïd Business School website in SharePoint

When I wrote about the Brighstarr “How to build rich and interactive websites for education” event being held on 4th November, it was in advance of the new Saïd Business School website actually going live. Which meant he couldn’t point to what had been done.

Now however, you can visit the website, on the University of Oxford domain, at http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/Pages/default.aspx. I’m really impressed with the way that they have managed to squeeze so much content in, with very easy navigation.

It’s definitely worth a visit if you are thinking of pepping up your own website. And perhaps putting time aside to visit the event in London, to meet the minds behind it.

South West Windows 7 event in Bristol

Trinity Expert Systems, one of our Gold Certified Partners, is running a free Windows 7 Preview Workshop next Thursday, 15th October. Some colleges have already started deploying Windows 7 widely, and I’m sure that many of you will be evaluating it even before it’s official launch on 22nd October.

There’ll be experts at the workshop from both Trinity and Microsoft, and it runs for the whole afternoon – starting at 12:30 and running through until 4:30.

The agenda is packed into the afternoon, so you can definitely be sure that you’ll leave with a brainfull of information.

12:30 Arrival & Coffee
12:45 Desktop O/S Strategy and Vision
1:15 Lunch
1:45 New Features
2:15 Planning and Assessment Strategies
2:45 Coffee Break
3:00 Deployment Strategies
3:45 Windows 7 ‘Hands On’
4:15 Trinity Windows 7 Assessment Days
4:30 Close

You can find out more, and book your attendance on Trinity’s website

Special Student Deals on Office and Windows

You know what it’s like – you have a brilliant plan, and then something gets in the way. And this term, we’d hatched a brilliant plan to launch our Ultimate Steal offer on the International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Which is why we went with a nice Piratey theme for the launch. Oh, how we were going to laugh – with plenty of piratey jokes, piratey blog posts and other such sea-shanty-silliness. (We’d done our homework on the UK Yarr site, international talklikeapirate.com and the facebook group)

But ‘twas all blown to smithereens when ITLAP day was a Saturday. “Shiver me timbers!” said the crew of the vessel HMS Office, “We can’t be launching a campaign on the high seas on a Saturday.” And no amount of treasure could change their course. And so it quietly slipped out of port on the 17th September instead, and sailed into the wide blue yonder.

But it did at least get going – and we launched the Ultimate Steal offer of Office Ultimate 2007 for £38.95 - only available to students and staff with a .ac.uk email address. And this year, it will stay available permanently, not as a short-term offer

But what was even better is that our friends on HMS Windows also set sail on a Windows 7 offer for staff and students, with a special price of £29.99 until the end of December.

You can get both offers on our website at www.ultimatesteal.co.uk

ps if you want to tell your staff and students about it, there’s a sample email here, and there are some less piratical graphics on this SkyDrive link.

A free seminar on How to Build Rich and Interactive Websites for Education and Research

The University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School recently asked BrightStarr, one of our education partners, to create a website that would help it promote its courses and research. The Business School wanted a rich and engaging website that would capture imagination and make it easier to communicate with stakeholders.

By building the site in Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007, not only does the Business School get a functionally rich internet site, the powerful collaboration and document management features in SharePoint support the complex information needs of administration and research workers.

BrightStarr are hosting a seminar in our offices in central London, in partnership with speakers from the Saïd Business School, Playgroup and from Microsoft (including my trusty colleague Dominic Watts, our Higher Education Business Manager) on 4 November 2009 to demonstrate how you can use SharePoint to build a great looking and functionally rich content managed website that will help you connect with students and staff, and support the work of research teams.

Judging by their funky website design, it should be an interesting and informative session, with real world examples of SharePoint as a content management system, and detail on what has been achieved at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School.

The event starts at 10:00 and finishes at lunchtime, so it leaves plenty of time to travel up/down/across to London on the 4th.

To find out more, and to book your place, pop over to BrightStarr’s website.

Windows 7 meeting for early adopters on 7 October

Mike Herrity, at Twynham School, is hosting a meeting for schools and colleges who have adopted Windows 7, to allow early adopters to share their experiences, and the lessons that have been learnt over the last 5 weeks since it was released for Volume Licence customers.

Instead of having to head down to the south coast, I’ve offered to provide a meeting room here in Reading, at the Microsoft Campus, on Wednesday 7th October.

There’s space for 20 people available, so if you’d like to attend, zip over to Mike’s excellent blog, or just drop Mike an email. He’s managing the attendee list, I’m just providing the room and the free lunch!

If you have started deploying Windows 7, this is going to be a valuable day, and I am pretty sure it will save you more than a day of your time in learning from other people’s experiences.

However, if you haven’t started deploying Windows 7 yet, then Mike will be aiming to write up lessons from the day to share with others, so keep an eye on this blog later for when it’s published.

Improving student services, and saving money - How Brockenhurst College did it

I hope that you’ve already heard about the Live@edu service, which provides a free, hosted email service for your students, based on Exchange 2010. It allows you to provide each learner with a free 10GB inbox as well as an additional 25GB of online storage space. Over the last couple of years, 10% of UK colleges have implemented it, along with a large number of universities.

One of the challenges for colleges is to provide an effective communication method to all of their students without breaking the bank – as an example, Brockenhurst have 3,000 sixth form students, and 9,000 adult learners to provide a service for. The end result is that either the service is limited (eg very small mailboxes) or expensive to run – which means that in many cases students either don’t have, or don’t use, a college email account.

What Brockenhurst have seen is that student use of their email service has gone from almost none to over 70% of students using it with anytime, anywhere access. And the college and students benefit from the wider collaboration that has resulted from the service.

Robin Gadd, who’s the college Head of Information and Systems Development, put it bluntly:

Providing technology that reflects what students use socially increases their perception of the college as a modern educational institution.

You can read the full case study on our worldwide case studies website

You may also appreciate reading what the University of Aberdeen have done too

How fast can Windows 7 go

Earlier last week PC Pro ran an article stating that Windows 7 is “already used on 1% of PCs”. This was lifted from some Internet metrics measured by NetApplications. It’s easy to do – each time you visit a website, your browser tells the website what version it is, and what operating system it is running on.

Given the buzz this summer about Windows 7, I thought I’d have a quick look at the stats for this blog. And the answer surprised me. (Or at least it did once I’d learned from Wikipedia that Windows 7 reports itself as Windows NT 6.1)

What this table shows is the last 2,000 visitors to the blog – and 1 in 8 are running Windows 7!

Now I reckon that this is partly because the readers are more technical, and there’s been quite a buzz about Windows 7 – and lots of early deployments in education. Given that there have already been half a dozen schools who’ve told me they’ve already rolled out Windows 7 to all their desktops, and plenty of early adopters in colleges and universities, perhaps Windows 7 is going to overtake even Windows 95 in it’s speed of adoption.

I was genuinely surprised at what I saw. Are you?

Online learning is better than face-to-face learning?

The US Department of Education sponsored the Center for Technology in Learning to look into the effectiveness of online learning – and to specifically compare the effectiveness of using online learning compared to face to face learning. The results, published in May, are on the www.ed.gov website, for all to see.

What I’ve seen of the reporting seems to take the simple line that “online learning is better than face-to-face learning”. Hmmm, having read more than the first highlighted sentence in the abstract, I think there’s a lot more to it!

The inescapable conclusion is that with students changing, and their lives changing, methods of supporting online and blended learning are not only more convenient for many different types of students, but also more effective at ensuring that the student achieves the required learning outcomes.

What the researchers did

The researchers looked at 1,000 pieces of research, over the last 12 years, of online learning. After throwing out those pieces that didn’t compare online and face-to-face learning, or didn’t measure the impact on student learning, or didn’t take a rigorous approach to the research, they were left with 51 pieces of research – which is a large enough group to make effective comparisons.

Then they crunched all the conclusions together from all of the reports, to arrive at an overarching conclusion – answering the question “What do we know about the effectiveness of online learning compared to conventional, face-to-face learning?”

The headline conclusions

The simple conclusion was:

students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction

Which is the bit that has been reported widely.

But read on a little further, and the report went on to say:

The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes…was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face

Which is saying that a combination of online and face-to-face learning (ie blended learning) is more effective than online learning alone.

Although there are some provisos around this finding – eg theories that blended learning often includes additional learning time and additional face-to-face learning not included in standard courses – it is still significant.

Key Findings

Further in (starting on page xiv, if you’re following along) are some key findings that are good summary conclusions:

• Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction
  This conclusion speaks for itself

• Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction
  Which may result from the approach a teacher takes – do they feel more engaged too, when the learning is mixed?

• Studies in which learners in the online condition spent more time on task than students in the face-to-face condition found a greater benefit for online learning
  I’d suspect this is a factor of students being able to each learn at their own pace, and pause or repeat sections of their learning – something that’s all but impossible in face-to-face learning.

• Most of the variations in the way in which different studies implemented online learning did not affect student learning outcomes significantly
  I suspect that if we had the data for all e-learning in UK universities we’d see something similar – that the biggest difference in learning outcomes is achieved by a decision to support blended online learning effectively, however that happens. The two factors that did make a difference were the use of blended learning (as opposed to online only) and the amount of time students spent on task.

• The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types
  Although, because the schools research sample was so small, there are few strong conclusions for school-age learning specifically.

• Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online and face-to-face conditions varied in terms of curriculum materials and aspects of instructional approach in addition to the medium of instruction
  ie don’t just put your existing course materials onto a website – you need to plan to deliver your course differently

Although this report was produced in the US, for the US education system, the conclusions are relevant to the UK. Whatever your strategy is to support e-learning within your college, could this report provide some compelling support to help you to work with less IT-friendly academics, and to get more support from the leadership team in making the right resource and budget investments for the future?

You can read the full 93-pages of the report on the US Department of Education website

It’s also interesting to read the Comments debate on the New York Times website, which started when it reported the findings.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 – in Tony Hart mode

This collection of videos is very clever – as you work your way through it, you’ll see that you eventually end up with some screencasts showing particular features of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. But what is riveting on the journey is the way that you navigate your way around the videos – using hand drawn animations and hotspots on each video to give you a route to learn more.

It comes from the team of DeepFat and JamesOne (some of you will have met James at our Windows for Education event) who are part of our evangelism team. They have been exploring the features of Win7 and WS2008 via the medium of art, some YouTube annotations and then some screencast videos. You can start here and then click through to the stuff you're interested in.

I wonder if this has also got potential for revision gateways and other learning resources – basically linking a series of videos together, with some navigation – rather than the conventional channel/menu approach.

Your invite to the UK Launch for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Exchange 2010

From now through to January, it’s going to be a season of launches. And the kick-off event for the whole series is the UK Technical Launch for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, which is going to a big event at Wembley stadium on the 6th October.

The agenda is packed – with a ‘desktop’ and ‘server’ stream (time to make it a team trip?), and we’re also expecting the event to be packed too – with a thousand spaces available.

The theme for the event “The New Efficiency” is something we’ll be talking about more during the year, as it’s something that fits in with the current budget climate in education.

Join us on 6 October in the conference rooms at the spectacular Wembley Stadium to hear from Microsoft's technology specialists on the new efficiency of the server and desktop. We have two tracks of content for you to choose from, one covering Windows 7, and the other covering Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. If you can't watch it all on the day - don't worry, all the content will be available online after the event.

For those who couldn’t make it to the Windows in Education event last week, this is a good alternative. Although it isn’t specifically for education, we had some of the same speakers – James & Gareth – and I know that there will be plenty of things covered which fit into your IT thinking.

If you only do two things before you head off for the Bank Holiday weekend, I’d recommend:

• Register for your place (as the event is currently full, you can only add yourself to the waitlist for a place, either because somebody drops out, or if we manage to squeeze more chairs in!)
• Add it to your Calendar (to stop anybody inviting you to a dull meeting on that day)

Another take on qualifications – have you thought about the Microsoft IT Academy?

If you’re running the ICT systems in your college, and NOT involved with delivering the ICT curriculum, then you may want to forward this onto somebody in charge of curriculum side. Although it’s got ‘IT’ in the title, the IT Academy is actually all about curriculum development and helping your students/staff (or potentially others in the community) to gain commercially valuable qualifications.

I’ve spent a few hours in the company of the team who promote the Microsoft IT Academy scheme in the UK. Basically the scheme offers colleges, universities and schools the chance to deliver Microsoft’s IT training and qualifications to your students, staff and your wider community. The qualifications that you can deliver will help your students (or parents in your community) raise their skills to prepare for employment – either business or technical roles as web developers or systems administrators.

The chart on the right (click on it to see the BIG version) shows the routes to the qualifications that students can attain. And because the qualifications are instantly recognisable in the commercial sector – like MCSE qualifications – it is an instant help with preparing for employment.

But this isn’t just about student qualifications – it can also be used to provide training and qualifications for the wider community, and this is exactly how some of the current IT Academies use it – to generate a revenue stream and to increase community and business engagement.

Once you’ve signed up to be an IT Academy, the scheme includes:

• Free Microsoft eLearning (over 300 courses)
• Free Microsoft software licences
• Big discounts on Microsoft Certifications and Courseware
• Free MSDNAA & TechNet Plus Subscription
• Free Microsoft Certified Trainer Membership

Currently about two-thirds of UK colleges and universities offer the IT Academy programme. So it could be that your college is already doing it (in which case you might have some of these benefits already).

But the key question I asked the IT Academy team was about cost. Because although they describe everything above as ‘free’, I’d assumed that the annual fee would be prohibitive. The actual answer is that it costs around £1,100 for a college to become an IT Academy. Especially if you factor in the cost of an MSDNAA & TechNet Plus subscription, this is a great deal.

Although there’s tons of information about IT Academy on our education website, I think there’s probably too much info there, so instead of reading it all I’d recommend giving the Prodigy team a call, or dropping them an email, to get them to explain it to you in plain English. (Just like buying software, IT Academy works the same way – you get access through our partners, rather than directly from us. In this case the partner is Prodigy)

Email the IT Academy team or call them on 0845 3991553.