AWS Public Sector Blog

Category: Amazon Aurora

How the cloud can help educational institutions with grading, assessments, and admissions

During the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions that operated on in-person model shifted many of their traditionally in-person operations and activities—including grading, assessments and testing, and admissions—to a virtual format, where many had never been before. Educational technology (EdTech) companies around the world used the cloud to help quickly create and scale to meet the needs of these academic institutions while maintaining a consistent and smooth student experience.

How UCL migrated its Moodle virtual learning environment to the cloud in 10 weeks

University College London’s (UCL) virtual learning environment, built on the Moodle learning management system, is at the heart of its digital education infrastructure and used by students all over the world. Before migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its system could handle 2,500 concurrent users. But when the pandemic drove schools and universities to predominantly online teaching, the UCL team wanted to support six times this amount in just 10 weeks. Here’s how they did it with AWS.

hospital staff standing close together with arms crossed torsos only

Digitally revolutionizing workforce management in healthcare

COVID-19 highlighted the existing shortage in personnel within healthcare and is now challenging many hospitals with high staff turnover and sick leave. Planerio created workforce management solutions that help healthcare organizations modernize their workforce administration. Their shift planning software uses artificial intelligence (AI) and takes into account a range of planning variables such as employee qualifications and availabilities, employee preferences and requests, requirements of different shifts and workplaces, legal regulations and tariffs, and more.

iCivics

Using digital games to teach civics

iCivics is the education nonprofit that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor founded in 2009 to transform civic education and rebuild civic strength through digital games and lesson plans. It is the country’s largest provider of civic education content and is currently used by more than 120,500 educators and 7.6 million students annually. All of its games are free, nonpartisan, and available at www.icivics.org. Through their use of Amazon Aurora, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS CodeDeploy—and AWS security automation tools including AWS Security Hub, Amazon Inspector, and Amazon GuardDuty—iCivics has been able to scale and increase student engagement.

flag in front of government building

Scaling to share unprecedented volume of election donation data, quickly and cost-effectively

Campaign contributions have grown exponentially in the United States. In 1980, there were around 500,000 contributions made; in 2020 alone, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) expects 500 million contributions. Meanwhile, the evolution of technology has changed the way Americans contribute to political campaigns, making it easier to make many small contributions. To meet unprecedented demand for data transparency, the FEC turned to the cloud.