This month, Microsoft and MIT embarked on Microsoft's largest ever collaboration with a university--a five-year, $25 million project aimed at expanding information technology's role in higher education.

This project comes in the wake of two $20 million private donations given by Microsoft executives Gates and Ballmer, one to MIT and one to Harvard. The money is being used to build new labs for technology research at each school.

Last week, Harvard celebrated the dedication of its facility, the Maxwell Dworkin building. MIT's laboratory building is scheduled to be finished in 2004.

MIT's new joint venture with Microsoft, called "I-Campus," hopes to narrow the gap between educational facilities and major technological firms.

Harold Abelson, co-chair of I-Campus, said Microsoft's involvement in this area is different from Gates's and Ballmer's private gifts because it means MIT and Microsoft employees will continue to work together.

"Research contracts are a different thing--you're going into an agreement to develop stuff," Abelson says.

Projects on the I-Campus docket include expansion of the MIT Shakespeare Electronic archive and distance-learning projects.

Microsoft's decision to work with MIT on I-Campus is the first of five collaborative projects with universities that it hopes to fund, Abelson says.