At its annual Faculty Summit in Redmond next week, Microsoft will show off the fruits of some of its latest research projects. At the same time, the software kingpin will highlight new programs it is instituting to build its base of academic developers and users.

In part, Microsoft is stepping up its academic outreach efforts in order to stave off potential encroachments from the open-source community.

As Microsoft Chief Financial Officer John Connors said at a New York investment conference last month: "We also see Linux being heavily used in the academic environment and increasingly being evaluated by government, particularly overseas. But to put that in a proper context, Unix has always been the environment that's been studied and used in academia. Windows has been a relatively small percentage of the use in academia."

But Microsoft's interest in forging tighter academic ties is hardly a new phenomenon. Indeed, Microsoft Research (MSR), like all vendor think tanks, relies heavily on its ties with the academic community to further research projects across the spectrum.

Within MSR is a group called Learning Sciences that is looking specifically at how, when and where Microsoft can contribute to the work happening in e-Learning around the globe. This team will make several presentations at the Faculty Summit next week.

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Randy Hinrichs, group manager of Learning Sciences, says Microsoft is bucking the tide with its e-Learning work.

"Research in IT is all about e-commerce," Hinrichs says. "It's hard for industry to see why they should be investing in e-Learning technologies."

Consequently, Hinrichs claims, there is a lack of good learning-sciences research. "Only $200 million is being spent on this, and mostly by the DoD (Department of Defense) for military-training research," he says.

The primary work to date of Hinrichs' unit has been to forge partnerships with other academic institutions and research bodies like the National Science Foundation that are working to come up with e-Learning solutions.

In September, Hinrichs says, Microsoft and a number of other e-Learning partners are expected to unveil an e-Learning roadmap that offers an overall vision for e-Learning and a timetable with concrete steps for making e-Learning a reality.

Simultaneously, the Learning Sciences team is working to commercialize a couple of pieces of its research by incorporating them into other Microsoft products.

One of these is ConferenceXP (Conference Experience Project), a client-server system designed to provide audio/video conferencing capabilities for the classroom. Learning Sciences developed ConferenceXP using Microsoft's old DirectShow and its Windows Media streaming media technologies.

The University of Washington has been beta-testing ConferenceXP, and Microsoft plans to distribute some of the elements of the system to attendees of the upcoming Faculty Summit so they can experiment with it. Different groups at Microsoft have been test-driving elements of ConferenceXP as well, Hinrichs says. The PowerPoint team, for example, has been checking out the ConferenceXP Presenter technology as a possible solution for adding inking capabilities to PowerPoint in the future.

Hinrichs says his team has no plans to replace any of the technology with elements from PlaceWare, the Web-conferencing company Microsoft acquired earlier this year. But he stresses that his team is working very closely with Microsoft Corporate VP Anoop Gupta's real-time collaboration business unit on how e-Learning can benefit from presence technologies, instant messaging, SharePoint Portal Services and other related technologies.

Hinrichs' team of six also are working with the Massachusetts Institute for Technology on the "Games to Teach Project." The pair is developing "educational gaming frameworks" in the areas of math, science, engineering education, and humanities/social sciences.

"Right now, e-Learning is boring. We are looking for ways to make the environments more compelling," Hinrichs says. Gaming is one way to do that.

Ultimately, Hinrichs envisions a world where universities and research institutions will create and run educational Web services- with Microsoft's assistance. Some of these will be free; some will be paid.

Hinrichs cites as one example the MIT freshman writing exam. By turning the exam into a Web service, multiple universities could administer the test at the same time and compare students' results across their databases.

Another example: An Internet lab service (also emerging out of work at MIT) that would allow students to go online and schedule/use available test equipment for research purposes - regardless of its location. Hinrichs says he could see some research entities, such as the Jet Propulsion Lab, turning this into a money-making service by charging for computer/equipment use by the hour.