Category: Higher education

Around the world, exams are administered to help students and adults further their education and advance their careers. In the US, approximately eight million high school students took a single standardized college entrance exam in 2019. As the pandemic shifted life to virtual work and learning, it also interrupted high stakes exams typically administered in person. For years, EdTechs like ExamSoft, Sumadi (part of Laureate Education), and ProctorFree have been developing remote proctoring and digital assessment solutions using the cloud.

Before the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first-ever picture of a black hole in 2019, nobody had ever seen one. Black holes are a region of space with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape them. The cloud is helping accelerate research into black holes.

Did you know that the unemployment rate for the formerly incarcerated is five times higher than the general population? The implications of this stat are significant—affecting not only an individual’s livelihood—but also their family and future. Research shows that post-release unemployment is the most significant predictor of eventual recidivism. That’s why programs like Columbia University’s Justice Through Code are so important. Justice Through Code is a free, semester-long program, developed in partnership with the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School and the Center for Justice at Columbia University, providing formerly incarcerated individuals with technical and interpersonal skills training, mentorship, and job placement support.

Do you favor that points-earning credit card? Or stick with the same airline to rack up miles? These are examples of gamification in action. While the term is relatively new, gamification has been around as long as people have tried to make boring activities interesting. Humans have a natural desire to compete, be social, and gain rewards. Elearningindustry.com found that 67 percent of students feel gamified courses are more motivating than traditional ones. And with educators shifting to virtual or blended classrooms worldwide, it’s worth making the effort to create a gamified classroom. Here are four tips to mastering gamification in your classroom.

Since universities typically face reliable bursts of traffic, such as on admissions day, they are not often concerned with the ability to scale infinitely—a key reason for going serverless. By doing so with AWS, the University of York now has the ability to scale down to zero, which helps the university better manage applications, reduce costs, and increase agility.

Modern data engineering covers several key components of building a modern data lake. Most databases and data warehouses, to an extent, do not lend themselves well to a DevOps model. DataOps grew out of frustrations trying to build a scalable, reusable data pipeline in an automated fashion. DataOps was founded on applying DevOps principles on top of data lakes to help build automated solutions in a more agile manner. With DataOps, users apply principles of data processing on the data lake to curate and collect the transformed data for downstream processing. One reason that DevOps was hard on databases was because testing was hard to automate on such systems. At California State University Chancellors Office (CSUCO), we took a different approach by residing most of our logic with a programming framework that allows us to build a testable platform. Learn how to apply DataOps in ten steps.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in the initial months of 2020, colleges and universities saw their regular learning plans upended. In many instances, in only a week, higher education institutions reconfigured their pedagogical infrastructure for hundreds or thousands of students with widely varying requirements and learning environments. Given the circumstances and the tight timeframe, it was natural for many schools to rely on their existing learning management systems (LMS) in order to transition to fully online learning. Learn how Simpson College went several steps further, leveraging its Moodle LMS not only to provide its courses but also to fuel success for students and the institution, and set up a new way of operating beyond the pandemic.      

Western Governors University (WGU) announced the launch of critical updates to its Bachelor of Science Cloud Computing (BSCC) degree program, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The degree program is designed to prepare students with the skills they need to succeed in today’s economy and meet the demands of employers seeking cloud professionals. 

This week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) announced a statewide plan to train and certify at least 5,000 Arizona students in cloud computing by June 2022. The state’s Career and Technical Education Districts (CTED), community colleges, and universities will train students using the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs. Arizona is the most recent state to collaborate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform their future workforce with cloud readiness and technical education programs.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems handle everything from accounting to marketing, finances to inventory, human resources to customer relations, and more. Colleges and universities commit significant infrastructure and personnel resources to run and manage these vital applications. But shifts in technology adoption, reduced availability of skilled labor, and increased economic pressures push colleges and universities to assess the return on their material ERP system investments. One way higher education institutions realize additional return on their scarce resources is by using cloud technologies. After Arizona State University (ASU) moved to AWS, the university was able to effectively allocate resources to benefit its students and solve operational problems that would otherwise require additional investment. Check out three benefits higher education institutions can recognize by moving ERP systems to the cloud.