IMS Global: Microsoft obviously has played a vital role in shaping the way in which we learn. What can we expect from it in the future?

MB: As I get out and talk at conferences, and you'll hear me talk about this at the IMS Learning Impact conference, there are five key areas that we believe technology has the greatest opportunity to improve the educational experience for everybody. The first is obviously broadening access to education for all. Extending the reach of the best teachers and learning materials to anywhere they're needed, including rural and undeveloped areas. Breaking down the barriers of time, distance, and cost. There really isn't any other vehicle in the world like technology with its ability to do that. You can look at vehicles like Wikipedia and YouTube that are proof points to show what technology can do to revolutionize the way content gets distributed and used by people.

The second area is enabling student-centered learning, which I also touched on earlier. Tools and resources that allow for greater individualization of learning, insight-driven software tools that enable teachers to guide students along their own learning paths. Think of it as almost dashboard-like. Imagine if you are a teacher or educator and, in a dashboard environment, you can monitor individualized profiles of how your students are doing and whether you need to speed them up, slow them down, remediate them, know the best content to provide them to help them be successful.

The next one I would suggest would be enhancing learning with powerful software tools. Supporting the acquisition of 21st Century skills to help students become lifelong learners with critical thinking, problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills. Think of it as social networking meets education. Again, we've really only scratched the surface here.

Fourth is creating powerful learning communities at all levels. Connecting teachers with each other to collaborate and share best practices. Connecting students, parents, and administrators to share information and track student progress; and connecting classrooms with published content and subject experts from around the world. We really believe that we have a role to play in creating those powerful learning communities and know that learning is most effective in collaboration with other students, educators, parents, and entire communities.

And finally, it's about improving the efficiency of education systems. It's not as sexy and interesting as the others I've mentioned, but imagine if we could dramatically improve the efficiency and even return two, five, or 10 percent of the time back to teachers and students to be focused on learning and outcomes rather than getting tied up in bureaucracy, reporting, or measurements. You can look at multiple places where technology has streamlined processes and all of that time can be returned to teaching and learning.

IMS Global: What is the role of establishing standards in Microsoft's strategy?

MB: I'm very pleased to say that it's a very big part of what we do, which is why Microsoft is involved with IMS Global Learning Consortium and will be participating in the upcoming Learning Impact conference. It might be helpful to step back from education for a moment and speak about Microsoft's engagement with standards more generally. Standards have really been a factor in the sustained growth of the information technology industry. Individual corporations, academia, governments, we've all benefited in one way or another from this sustained investment in the hundreds of standards organizations across the world. Microsoft contributes and collaborates with more than 150 standards organizations on an annual basis. We also participate in a wide variety of other specification development initiatives with groups of industry leaders and publish Microsoft specifications in order to enhance interoperability of our products and services. If you look at some of those engagements, our work embraces the innovation of PC hardware, software, associated devices, the Internet and its infrastructure, consumer electronic devices, telecommunication, and a wide variety of industry-wide products and services. This work is really made possible through the work of core interoperability technology without which these products and services would not be able to deliver the value they do to customers. Microsoft believes that interoperability is fundamental to us and is best achieved through a balanced approach, which includes standards, products, community, and access to intellectual property. More and more, we're committed to delivering what we call interoperability of design. For example, in education, Microsoft was at the forefront of the IMS Content Packaging and the Interoperability Framework. A great example of that would be the Sharepoint Learning kit which was one of the first systems that fully implemented SCORM 2004 and has been made freely available to all through an open source project community.