Category: Education

Over the past decade, cloud technology has been the driver of digital transformation, allowing organizations to operate with greater efficiency—and more importantly, innovate at speed. But as institutions of every size and type have discovered, keeping up with the pace of technological change can be difficult. The key hurdle? Skills.

AWS, together with EdTechReview, announced a voice technology in education contest at the EdTechReview 2020 conference. The competition, open to EdTechs in India, aims to build skills that address education challenges and positively impact students, faculty, administrators, and other educational stakeholders using Amazon Alexa in education. We received over 100 applications and selected five as finalists to compete for the title of “Best Amazon Alexa EdTech Skill 2020, India.”

Voting is now open for the 2020 Amazon Alexa Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) EdTech Skills Challenge. The competition challenged EMEA-based EdTechs to use voice technology to transform education. The six finalists designed Alexa skills to positively impact challenges in education such as improving teaching practices, learning throughout life, continuing professional development, and simplifying administration and assessment processes. Public voting is open until July 25, 2020.

Chesterfield County Public Schools (CCPS) in Virginia uses machine learning on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to predict the county’s rate of chronic absenteeism in high schools. CCPS includes 64 schools and over 63,000 students. They started with a high-impact project that would use data the school system was already capturing about its students. to tackle predicting chronic absenteeism.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that seven higher education institutions in India will adopt cloud computing curricula from its AWS Educate initiative to help develop the next generation of cloud professionals. The cloud computing content will be offered as part of undergraduate degree and postgraduate diploma programs starting in September 2020.

Excellent Long-Established (ELECT) University Consortium of Taiwan and Amazon Web Services (AWS), through AWS Educate, launched a new cloud computing degree program to prepare students for cloud-enabled jobs. The new four-year program will help to prepare the next generation of cloud professionals with specific skills needed for in-demand entry-level cloud careers in Taiwan.

Research is done differently in the cloud than in an on-premises lab. Research labs looking to move computational research to the cloud should start with their workflows. There are common themes across computational research workflows that researchers should consider as they begin to move their research workflows to AWS.

Unravelling the relationship between COVID-19 and air pollution is vital for protecting public health. For example, preliminary works suggest that those living in environments with polluted air are significantly more likely to be adversely affected by COVID-19. At the same time, air pollution is already known to cause an estimated one out of every eight deaths globally. The decrease in human activities due to COVID-19 lockdowns across the world has people wondering how air pollution levels are being impacted—and what valuable public health and policy lessons we can learn.

This morning, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector Teresa Carlson kicked off the AWS Public Sector Summit Online. Teresa reflected on the challenging times during these past few months, shared key trends and lessons learned and spoke about AWS’s commitment to helping people around the world continue to deliver on their missions. In her keynote address, Teresa highlighted AWS customers’ impressive global efforts and how AWS is helping support those customers’ missions. She also shared the latest news and announcements, resources, and more. Here’s what you missed.

To address the cloud computing skills gap, global learning company Pearson is collaborating with AWS Educate to develop the Business and Technology Education Council (BTEC) Higher National qualifications at levels 4 and 5 in cloud computing. The BTEC Higher Nationals are internationally recognized higher education qualifications and are delivered at colleges and universities at more than 60 countries around the world. These are the first BTEC High Nationals available in cloud computing.