AUT scores Microsoft award for interactive app...

An interactive ‘student scorecard’ application by the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) has won the Supreme Award and the Excellence in Technology Delivery category prize at the 2014 Microsoft Tertiary ICT Innovation Awards.

As the winner of the Supreme Award, AUT was also presented with the Microsoft Innovation Award trophy.

The ‘scoreboard dashboard’ app assists staff and students to track and manage their academic journeys, and helps improve decision making.

The app is a business analytics engine, built on Microsoft Sharepoint 2013 and SQL Server 2012. Staff across the 18 AUT schools have instant access to key performance measures for any date, for the past four years.

Student enrolment, human resources information, research publications, timetabling, completion rates and students surveys are just some of the metrics tracked with the app.

“The awards are an opportunity to acknowledge the outstanding passion, commitment and innovation we are seeing in the application of technology to support, improve learning and research results in the New Zealand tertiary education sector,” says Matt Bostwick, Teritary Education Sector Manager at Microsoft New Zealand.

He adds that it is hugely satisfying to see education institutions in New Zealand leading the way in the implementation of innovative ICT services that directly enable better outcomes for staff and students.

The Awards were part of the 32nd Annual Tertiary ICT Conference held in Palmerston North in the first week of September 2014. In addition to the Excellence in Technology Delivery award, there were two other categories.

The Excellence in Technology Innovation award was presented to the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic for its Student Service Provisioning and Identity Management project, and the Excellence in Technology for Learning, Research and Students was presented to Victoria University of Wellington for its Student-Led Learning Spaces project.

Each category winner received a $3000 prize package.

“The Microsoft Tertiary ICT Innovation Awards are another example of Microsoft’s commitment to the education sector," Bostwick says.

“Other initiatives include the Partners in Learning programme, the Student Advantage programme and leading software solutions designed to facilitate learning through the use of ICT.”