Over the years many TeachNet blog contributors have waxed lyrical about the Microsoft Educator Center (MEC) and rightly so IMHO as MEC has been the stellar educator portal since its inception, providing a fantastic range of resources and development opportunities to teachers for free, including courses, classroom resources, lesson plans, options to connect with other educators and to connect your students with students around the world. However, last December, John Heffernan flagged that changes were afoot in his ‘Viva Forever’ post…
The other major announcement is the merging of Microsoft Education Center (MEC) into Microsoft Learn which was the repository for a lot of Microsoft courses that would have led to Microsoft certifications.
As of last month this transition is now complete and the new Learn Educator Center is Microsoft’s one-stop-shop training and professional development platform Here teachers can explore free resources and learn about programs, professional development offerings, and Microsoft technologies that advance teaching and learning practices. and have the potential to change the education landscape.
The Learn Educator Center has replaced the Educator Center as the new home for Microsoft’s education community and many existing courses and learning paths have been migrated to Learn. In addition, this content has been expanded to include custom pathways to enhance professional skills, provide free resources that support teachers along their own personal up-skilling journey, and connect them with the content and certifications needed to enable students to develop 21st century skills for the jobs of tomorrow.
For teachers who were already using the now decommissioned Educator Center and want to migrate achievements, certificates, and transcripts compiled previously to the Learn Educator Center, they just need to sign in using the same credentials used on MEC. To aid this transition Microsoft is giving teachers 12 months from May 1, 2022,to transfer their achievement records, once the same credentials are used. If you do not yet have a Microsoft Learn profile, you will need to create one and once sign-in and profile creation are complete, you will be asked if you would like to move your data to the Microsoft Learn Educator Center. A new Navigate Microsoft Learn for Educators and School Leaders module is also recommended to familiarise yourself with the new platform.
So why use the Microsoft Learn Educator Center?
The Microsoft Learn Educator Center currently hosts more than 360 modules, 21 learning paths, 80 modules, and 11 product pages. Teachers and school leaders can easily search and discover all available learning content through the Browse page. It provides the ability to search and filter results by different tags, including:
- Job role: educator, school leader, and student
- Level: beginner, intermediate, and advanced
- Products: Microsoft Teams, M365, Minecraft, Immersive Reader, and more
Personalise your learning experience and share it with colleagues, students, and parents through Learn Collections, which allows you to curate a custom collection of content and share through social media platforms or a unique URL and through your profile, you can create, name, manage, and share these collections.