The UN International Computing Centre (UNICC) and Microsoft Tech for Social Impact have launched new features and content for the UN Digital Academy, a central repository of digital learning resources to enable continuous learning and digital capacity-building for UN staff and stakeholders to assist in the delivery of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
Indeed the project and portal itself supports SDG Goal 4 (Quality Education) and Goal 17 (Partnerships for the Goals, including Capacity Development in Developing Countries).
Developing a tech-savvy workforce is critical to the success of UN Agencies that deploy these modern productivity tools.
Franca Vinci, Head, Learning Services, UNICC
The UN Digital Academy offers UN Agencies a learning platform to deliver training to staff and stakeholders in an easy and efficient way. It also supports the commitments in the Secretary General’s strategy to deepen the UN’s internal capacities and exposure to new technologies. It does so by offering Microsoft knowledge and engagement for its current and continuous technology solutions that UN Agencies have deployed or may be deploying within their organizations.
The platform was presented at a Microsoft UN Tech Huddle in June. To date, four UN organizations have subscribed to the service, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), UN Volunteers (UNV) and UNICC. Additional organizations are expected to onboard shortly to help their digital-capacity building needs.
What’s New!
The new version of the learning platform has additional content, with courses on Microsoft 365 applications including Forms, Planner, To-Do as well as Microsoft 365 Administrator training in English, Spanish and French.
There are also new courses on Power Apps and Power Automate, and Azure certification training including Data Science basics, Azure and Azure AI Fundamentals, Azure Administrator, Developer, IoT Developer and Solutions Architect.
This release comes with new features such as courses for IT Professionals in line with popular Microsoft certifications, quizzes for 90% of the courses and certificates for M365 courses. Additionally, the mobile application for Android is already available in the Google Play Store.
The UN Digital Academy, developed jointly by Microsoft and UNICC, hosts bite-sized courses that are meant for end-users to develop their digital and technology skills. As the platform develops, it is expected to evolve more broadly with additional quality content from other sources than Microsoft, always tailored for the UN.
A further release is planned for December 2020. In the meantime the team will continue to publish more content and exams as soon as they are available.
