MSVirtualAcademy

It's not a bad idea. At this point we have erred on the side of caution because we don't want people wasting time on something that is out of date. But we understand that depending on your specific needs even the old stuff can be helpful. Another factor is that we have over 2,000 courses and managing the catalog is something we're still getting good at.

Abhishek Nandy has a great story. https://www.facebook.com/abhishek.nandy.7?fref=ts He was working as help desk support but started using MVA courses to teach himself app development. He's used MVA to learn how to write his first app for the store, and has gone on to win a bunch of awards. Currently I think he's got a start up he formed with a few other developers. In terms of lots of people getting trained, our Virtualization and Hyper V course had almost 10,000 people watching concurrently. That was a big one for us.

A journey not a destination.

For a long time, the points were just for fun. We are looking to do a few things and trying to consolidate the point system with other Microsoft sites (forums, certification, etc). Short story, we're working on it. Stay tuned!

That's a great question and something we think about a lot given the same team here at Microsoft looks after certification as well. MVA is a great way of getting quickly skilled up on tech in a variety of areas, while certification is validating/proving your knowledge and skills. As a result, MVA does have certification related courses but it also has a much larger variety of topics than what can be covered through certification.