Chris Bunio, Senior Director for Higher Education at Microsoft, an EDUCAUSE Platinum Partner, offers his perspective on the challenges facing higher ed IT today.
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Chris Bunio
Senior Director for Higher Education
Microsoft
Q: What do you consider the biggest challenges in higher education and how can technology leaders address those challenges?
Bunio: It's interesting if you'd asked me the question 12 months ago I'd probably have a different answer. Right now globally the biggest challenge that we're seeing is institutions adapting to what's a bit of a new normal. So higher ed traditionally has not moved quickly to adapt new teaching modalities, new technology for the faculty-student interaction, I think this has really forced everyone too through the pandemic so that's been a massive shift for the industry and a big place where Microsoft has been very focused. But I think after we sort of went through a response piece there, where Microsoft Teams became our platform, we've looked at kinda the backend and the other areas where higher-ed institutions need to be thinking about how they're going forward in the future. And we've gone deep into systems for analytics to look at student success, and student dropout rates, we've been working with universities on how they look at student recruitment, and student retention, and trying to apply analytics and AI to improve outcomes there. And one of the key areas that we've been working with as researchers, is they look at, you know, how do they shift their workloads to the cloud and continue doing research even though it's remote. So it's been pretty holistic from a Microsoft perspective.
Q: How is Microsoft assisting higher ed IT to take on the challenge of operating during the pandemic?
Bunio: Okay, absolutely a few key areas. I think one of the main areas where we saw a massive shift was really in faculty readiness and being able to help faculty adapt to kind of a new teaching model and leveraging the systems that they have, like learning management systems, but then also having all these new tools that are in their hands. One of the things that we saw was this rapid, grab whatever tool you know and start using that, and I think as people started shifting, and looking forward, they're starting to consolidate and think about what's the right platform versus what's the platform I have at my hand. So as we go through that we're looking at how does, you know, Teams and the Microsoft Office Suite really become something that's a tool for doing teaching, and how does it become more integrated into that process and using analytics and other things to gauge student engagements, to really think about the learning process holistically and how that's going to be impacted. So that's been a huge area of focus for us.