Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) was awarded university status in 1992. The University is the largest campus-based undergraduate university in the UK and one of the most extensive education centres in Europe. It has a total student population of more than 37,000 students. One of MMU’s claims is to be the University for World Class professionals with an emphasis on vocational education and employability.
MMU has been very successfully delivering Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) training and certification Program to students in the University since 2010. They have consistently delivered over 500 MOS exams a year and are a Prodigy Learning “Centre of Excellence”. Dr. Julie Hardman (Associate Head of Department, Deptarment of Marketing, Operations and Digital Business) provides an insight into their success: “We deliver MOS as part of our MMU Futures Programme; a series of activities for students to engage in extra-curricular activities to improve their employability prospects. We offer MOS to students from all faculties within MMU and it is principally a third term activity with the majority of the accreditation exams scheduled for after the summer exam period.”
“We have found this to work very well with students being very engaged with the programme. We give the students complete freedom to take whichever of the MOS exams they wish and have found that many students take multiple exams as they appreciate the employability benefits that MOS offers them. Our problem now is managing the volume of students who want to take the MOS exams; but this is a nice problem to have!”
In 2014, if MMU continues to deliver the same volume of exams as the past three years, they will be eligible for Prodigy Learning’s new “Outstanding Centre of Excellence” award for customers that deliver of over 450 exams in a calendar year.
