Category: Higher education

The undergraduate students from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) didn’t just build a race car from scratch—they built a world-record-holding solar electric race car: the Sunswift 7. In three years, they engineered everything from the aerodynamic design to the software used to run the car. After going live with their telemetry system on AWS, the racing team set a new Guinness World Record for the World’s Fastest Electric Vehicle going over 1,000km (621 miles) on a single charge.

To celebrate the leaders and organizations that are propelling the academic landscape forward, AWS announced the 2023 cohort of Education Champions at IMAGINE: Education, State and Local Leaders 2023 Conference. The 2023 AWS Education Champions are pioneers that demonstrate meaningful digital transformation at their education institution to improve student outcomes, build institutional resiliency, accelerate research that can lead to life-changing discoveries, and more – all using the AWS Cloud.

As student enrollment begins to stabilize at colleges and universities, higher education leaders are focused on supporting equitable access to postsecondary education. Many leaders are turning to technology to address systemic barriers to education by making services more transparent, efficient, and simple for learners and staff. Together with AWS, Highline College’s financial aid department created a key tool that helped eliminate one such barrier.

In 2022, Xavier University of Louisiana (XULA) launched their journey to future-proofing with the cloud. Modernizing the university’s technology was a top priority to help improve the security of the university, improve business continuity, and solve the unique challenges of the university’s location. Working together with AWS and AWS Partners Strata Information Group and VMware, XULA migrated over 90 percent of its critical systems to the cloud, boosted its cybersecurity posture, and reduced IT costs.

AWS announced the availability of Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) for Education, an industry-specific deployment of the LZA on AWS, designed to further support education customers in designing cloud environments for their compliance needs. The LZA on AWS solution is architected to align with AWS best practices and multiple, global compliance frameworks. The new LZA for Education builds on the LZA to help customers secure their research workloads or workloads containing student data by giving them a set of default configurations that they can use as a starting point and iterate on to define security and compliance posture as code.

How can leaders transform good ideas into the kinds of services that change lives? That’s the central question of the IMAGINE conference from AWS, a two-day, no-cost event for state and local government and education leaders. From July 11-12, 2023 in Sacramento, CA, leaders from across state and local government and education will gather to learn more about how to transform public services to deliver for students, constituents, and communities. Will we see you there? Register now for the IMAGINE 2023 conference in Sacramento.

Cyber events are unfortunately becoming a common event in higher education. When Hartnell College experienced a cyber event in 2022, they used AWS while working with AWS Partner Ferrilli to recover and rebuild their systems. Based on the lessons learned from Hartnell College’s experience, higher education leaders can explore certain steps to better prevent and prepare against cyber events.

At National University (NU), a California-based university serving a high proportion of military and adult learners, the COVID-19 pandemic drove an increase in student requests for support. With nearly 20,000 in-classroom and online students nationwide, offering quality support during the pandemic was challenging. NU worked with ConcernCenter, an AWS Partner, to develop customized and scalable mental wellness support options for their students.

Building an organized system for common information—such as addresses, phone numbers, purchasing account numbers, a curated and annotated literature section, lab recipes and protocols, meeting schedules, and links to commonly used online tools—can prove extremely valuable for professors and their teams. Building this knowledge base on AWS with Amazon Lightsail can save hours of administration and maintenance time, while providing additional control and flexibility for remote access. In this blog post, learn how to set up a content management system (CMS) using Lightsail, including how to manage basic network security, backup, and upgrades, to build a knowledge base for your lab, agency, startup, or other team-based environment.

Moving a college’s or university’s on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud involves a lot of change in organization, culture, and practice. However, in my experience as a former chief financial officer (CFO) in higher education, financial planning for cloud computing is often not attended to with as much diligence. Financial planning needs to be understood as a positive feature of digital transformation, even if it means changing how financial plans are developed and managed. In this blog post, learn four strategies to consider when deciding to migrate to the cloud.