Category: Higher education

At the Education World Forum (EWF) in London, global leader for workforce and education at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Andrew Ko discussed the workforce shortage in cloud skills – and the importance of piloting initiatives that “cloudify” curriculum to skill-up, upskill, and reskill students, educators, the current workforce, and IT leaders.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 is now integrated with the Global Grid for Learning (GG4L) School Passport and available in the GG4L Catalyst Catalog. With the Amazon AppStream 2.0 integration, students can access the software applications they need for class through any computer anywhere, anytime via School Passport.

University Hospitals of North Midlands Trust’s Breast Care Unit approached Redmoor Health to discuss innovative ways to improve patient engagement. Turning to social media, the Health Innovation Campus at Lancaster University, Redmoor Health, and the National Health Service (NHS), began using Facebook to reach the at-risk demographic (women 49+ years old). Through this collaboration, they saw the number of patients attending vital breast screening appointments increase by 13% – among the best in the country.

Social information systems – how we share information – use both public systems such as social media and private systems internal to organizations such as internal blogs and wikis. The MUAS Digital Transformation Lab is experimenting with a number of theoretical concepts to create a research framework on social information systems. The goal is to reduce polarization in opinion-forming processes, help people avoid false news, and increase social cohesion by reducing social media “bubbles” and increasing the range of information sources.

The ubiquity of always-on, high performance infrastructure is fueling the rapid pace of innovation. Now more than ever, government and private companies can take advantage of affordable and scalable systems to test new ideas, evolve more quickly to meet the needs of their citizens and customers, and operate more securely. And yet, many institutions have not started on their digital journey because they lack a workforce with the advanced skills they need to drive transformational change.

Modo Labs®, an AWS Advanced Technology partner and creator of the no-code app building platform for higher education and enterprises, announced the winner of the 2019 national student Ideathon competition. The winning app, Bear Appétit, tackles food insecurity by facilitating the anonymous donation of meal swipes from those who have swipes to share to those that need them, and connecting those in need to resources such as the food pantry and food assistance programs.

Welcome to 2020! In 2019, the AWS Public Sector Blog featured stories from the education, nonprofit, government, and healthcare sectors, showcasing topics from customer-centric healthcare to cloud degree announcements to technical how-tos. As we look back on 2019, let’s recap our top ten posts of the year.

Education Dive announced George Mason University (GMU), Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA), and AWS Educate earned the Higher Ed “Partnership of the Year” award for collaborating to launch a two and four-year cloud degree pathway. Education Dive, a digital publication for the education industry, gives out the annual Dive Awards to the industry’s top innovators for their efforts to shape the future of education.

In July, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new contest in collaboration with SXSW EDU designed to find the best application of voice technology in education. Our challenge to the EdTech world? Tell us how you would use Alexa to transform education. From tutoring help and language learning programs to teaching guides and career planning tools – we’ve been amazed by the creativity and potential impact of the ideas EdTechs sent us.

At CODE University of Applied Sciences, we aim to educate the digital pioneers of tomorrow. For us, that means teaching talented students from around the world modern digital product development using real-world technology and challenges. One of our initiatives to work toward this mission is the Better Future Lab (BFL) – the Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) at CODE. A CIC is a long term, public-private collaboration between a public sector organization and AWS.