Category: Education

With Amazon Web Services (AWS), education technology (EdTech) companies and universities are transforming the video learning experience for students and families.

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.

According to a recent study conducted by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), less than half of all US students are back in the classroom full time a full year after the start of the pandemic. As schools look to safely bring students back onsite the fall, with cloud technology, schools can manage their large populations through robust reporting of test results with meaningful statistics around clusters of students who live, learn and play together while meeting state reporting guidelines for point of care testing.

Using AWS, Edunation seamlessly responded to increasing demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. Edunation collaborates with top educational institutions across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and provides all-in-one learning and school management solutions. Today, the EdTech is on a mission to push learning management systems (LMS) beyond virtual classrooms.

The surge in cloud-based online learning is “positive disruption,” said Melissa Loble, chief customer experience officer at Instructure, the maker of Canvas. She believes online learning has transformed the classroom on a global scale—in many ways for the better. Read four ways that Canvas and other cloud-based learning platforms have disrupted the educational landscape, both for traditional colleges and universities and global programs.

Families and students now learn with Alexa in their homes, and EdTech companies are using Alexa to help bridge the gap in engaging and accessible at-home learning. Two EdTech startups, NuMoola and Ecree, announced Alexa skills to help facilitate student learning using voice.

Located in Aragon, the new AWS Europe (Spain) Region will consist of three Availability Zones, giving organizations of all sizes—from startups to enterprises and public sector—access to local infrastructure, while meeting the highest security standards, regulations and data protection, reducing latency, increasing security, improving scalability, and boosting innovation and digital transformation in Spain.

The Global Data Egress Waiver (GDEW) program helps eligible researchers and academic institutions use AWS cloud storage, computing, and database services by waiving data egress fees. GDEW can be a valuable tool that gives eligible researchers and institutions a more predictable budget, which in turns allows them to have more direct access to the cloud than they might otherwise. Find out if your team is eligible to take advantage of the data egress waiver program.

The world’s waters are largely unknown, with vast areas still unmapped. To protect and preserve the oceans, we need to extensively understand its systems, and data is at the core of that process. The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is committed to enabling better access to the foundational data that can help researchers, businesses, and policy-makers better monitor and manage the ocean’s valuable resources.

Vaccine demand brought unprecedented load to the launch of Texas A&M Health’s vaccination sign-up site. The Texas A&M Health team used AWS to develop a solution to reduce outages and errors, and scale REDCap to get vaccines to Texans.