Islamabad
Microsoft Pakistan signed its Empowering Education Transformation Agreement (ETA) with Punjab Group of Colleges (PGC) to provide the foundational elements for a successful education digital transformation strategy.
This ETA with its Future Ready Skills platform, will enable PGC to train their staff and students on Microsoft tools and empower them to bridge the gap between education and employ-ability.
The PGC successfully certified over 7500 students and faculty in the areas of MOS/ MTA and Fundamentals last year with a grand success rate of over 90 percent and is all gearing up for larger targets this year, said in a Press Release issued. The Punjab Group of Colleges is an avid user of Microsoft technology.
With Tower Technologies Limited (TTL) being its technical arm, PGC has built solutions that scale the entire organization using Microsoft Azure, the cloud computing platform.
Tower Technologies operates most of the business-critical infrastructure and applications for Punjab Group of Colleges and its team of developers is working continuously to modernize their applications by using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, DevOps and a host of other capabilities offered through Azure.
PGC runs one of the biggest E-learning platforms consisting of thousands of on demand video lectures for its students hosted on Azure.
Internet of Things (IoT) is another core focus area for the group and Azure IoT Hub places an integral role in connecting hundreds of devices spanning the province helping the team build monitoring solutions that can scale per demand.
Hajra Afzal, Director of IT at Punjab Group of Colleges stated, “Our Group is determined to implement digital learning tools and technologies in every single classroom in Pakistan.
We envision our students to be able to compete at the international level and we want to excel at the digital technological transformation happening in institutes across the globe. Partnerships such as the ETA help tremendously with enabling our youth to achieve more.”
On this occasion, Jibran Jamshad, Country Education Lead at Microsoft Pakistan stated, “We at Microsoft are determined to design customized education products and services to support distance learning programs across the world.
The education sector has been our prime focus in Pakistan as it has been lacking on the digitalization front.
For years, we have worked closely with PGC to introduce various digital learning platforms such as Office 365, Teams, Future Ready Skills and the three clouds.
This concentrated effort was a part of a grand vision to connect each education institution to adopt the best learning practices and bring uniformity to the system.
We help to ensure the students not only stay engaged and learn seamlessly but also become more creative and hands-on with the latest developments on the digital horizon.” The Punjab Group of Colleges has scaled its Microsoft capabilities over the years.
The College uses teams for remote learning, Share -Point and One Drive for data sharing and storage, and streams for lecture recordings.
These tools have enabled PGC to provide undistributed online education to hundreds of thousands of students across Pakistan during the pandemic. —APP
