HEC accord to help learning outcomes for students

Islamabad: The Higher Education Commission (HEC) and Microsoft in Pakistan has renewed the Education Transformation Agreement (ETA) to help enable positive changes to learning outcomes for the students in the country.

Both organisations partnered once again to re-imagine the education landscape, which is facing a lot of challenges, especially in post-pandemic recovery. Under the umbrella of this academic alliance, Microsoft and HEC will be providing number of services to all HEIs in leveraging new technologies to make learning inclusive, personalised, and student centric by blending remote and physical classrooms.

This ETA will be providing universities with knowledge transfer workshops and trainings on trending Microsoft technologies including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Azure. So far during Pandemic, more than 150 universities and 500,000 plus students took advantage of effective learning, all in one place, which let students, faculty, educators, and staff meet, work together, create content, and share resources in Office 365 Education featuring the simple, intuitive power of Microsoft Teams.

One of the flagship programs of this agreement is ‘Imagine Cup’, a global students technology competition organised by Microsoft with the local support of the Higher Education Commission. It provides an opportunity for student technologists, developers, and aspiring entrepreneurs from all academic backgrounds to collaborate, develop a technology application, and bring their passion to life while gaining a perspective of what is needed to bring a concept to market.

In ‘Imagine Cup’, the brightest young minds join to exemplify the power of student innovation. Each year, a team is chosen from Pakistan that competes against the best from around the world, to get a chance to win $100,000 and a mentoring session with Microsoft' s leadership team.

This year, 'Imagine Cup' is live again and students can register athttps://imaginecup.com/Pakistan. Our long-term partnership with Microsoft empowers the students to use their creativity in addressing real societal problems using Modern Technology.

Microsoft has been very helpful in nurturing creative minds through Imagine cup competitions so many of the participants practically implement their ideas into successful startups and turn it into companies.

It is proud moment for HEC that our talent is being exposed at Global events and bring laurels for Pakistan, said HEC Director General IT Nazeer Hussain. Country Education Lead for Microsoft Pakistan Jibran Jamshed express his views ‘We know that technology is a key to fuel economic development, increase work force competitiveness, transitions to a knowledge-based economy and help drive job creation.