Meeting Caribbean learners’ needs with secure, resilient platform built on AWS

As a result of COVID-19, the Jamaican Ministry of Education, Youth and Information (MOEY) selected One on One as the country’s official virtual school to expand online learning across the country. One on One Educational Services (One on One), a Jamaica-based e-learning solutions provider operating across the Caribbean, meets learners’ needs with their secure, resilient learning management platform built on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Meeting the needs of students in the Caribbean during the pandemic and beyond

One on One has served more than one million students over seven years, spread over more than ten countries. Their solutions lay the foundation for rapid skill acquisition across subject areas and business skills—all in a climate-resilient region, where adverse weather conditions are constant. One on One builds on AWS to reliably and securely meet user needs, all while reducing costs.

One on One’s platform One on One for Classroom® allows students to access self-paced learning with a collection of live and on-demand courses. Students can access dedicated coaches with years of expertise and subject-specific knowledge. Students can access digital interactive learning resources with over 9,500 animations and 1,000 mixed assessments. There are 75 simulated two-dimensional and three-dimensional virtual, interactive labs, and practice tests.

In Jamaica, the platform helped 44,025 students complete their school curriculum despite the pandemic’s classroom disruption. One on One for Classroom® reached a peak of 12,000 students in attendance on a single day and 235,520 students in attendance throughout the entire period.

As a result of the successful collaboration and delivery of the platform in Jamaica, One on One partnered with the Bahamas Department of Education, and more than 6,000 classes will be offered exclusively on the e-learning platform. The engagement kicked off with the first course in October 2020. Through a Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning (CELEARN) agreement with the University of the Bahamas, One On One will provide their complete curriculum online to the wider Caribbean market. Students will be able to use the school’s platform to register for classes and gain access to on-demand classes and study materials in late 2020.

One on One’s commitment to delivering quality educational content and opportunities for students extends beyond the pandemic. For example, the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC), a regional examining body, provides examinations for secondary and post-secondary school candidates in Caribbean countries. The CXC offers the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), which assesses and certifies a student’s academic achievement when secondary school is complete. One on One for Classroom® is designed to meet the needs of students taking this exam.

One on One for Classroom® finds elasticity, cost savings, and security on AWS

Building on AWS, One on One found the elasticity, cost savings, and security they were looking for when building out their LMS.

Figure 1. One on One for Classroom® Architecture Diagram – Web Front Layer

In April 2020, user requests multiplied from a few hundred to 12,000 and peaked at 20,000 users a day on the platform. One on One Classroom® successfully managed the increased connections without a single failure.

Architected on the Web Tier, the platform is built with Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing Application Load Balancer, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. The web instances are contained inside an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group.

Figure 2. User connections to One on One Classroom for April-September, 2020.

Figure 3. Platform Statistics for One on One Classroom for April-September, 2020.

At the database layer is Amazon Aurora. This layer contains essential user information such as scores, gained points, progress, leaderboards, and audit information. Developers created a customized function that monitors the platform and automates scaling the database as needed using AWS Lambda.

Figure 4. One on One for Classroom® Architecture Diagram – Database Layer

Figure 4 illustrates how the DataBase Layer is architected in order deliver the expected results. The following lines explain in detail each step of the process.

One on One for Classroom® experienced a record peak of 1,052,165 million database requests in one day. This resulted in random higher response times due to connection overload. The team rapidly leveraged Amazon RDS Proxy, which allows One on One to handle unpredictable surges in database connections.

Figure 5. Database Requests per Day for April-September, 2020

For platform security, One on One uses AWS Web Application Firewall to protect it from malicious attacks by leveraging web access control lists (ACL), rules, and conditions that analyze incoming traffic. One on One uses AWS Certificate Manager to provision, manage, and deploy Secure Socket Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates to secure network communication and establish the identity of the website over the Internet.

Figure 6. One on One for Classroom® Architecture Diagram – Security and Management

One on One optimized their operating costs with AWS—they no longer have to purchase and provision hardware that is built for peak and occasionally not used. For example, platform usage is significantly lower during the 9:00AM – 4:00PM period on weekdays. This prompted One on One to use Amazon CloudWatch, which triggers an AWS Lambda function to downsize the database instance to a minimum required size overnight, and a second function to turn it back to normal—all automatically, without manual work.

One on One has a mission to provide a secure, modern, and resilient learning alternative for the Caribbean population. The depth and breadth of services and features from AWS help One on One build a scalable, highly available, and resilient solution. The ability to reduce upfront costs has allowed One on One to focus on its mission and expand internationally in the Caribbean.

Learn more about One on One, and the cloud for K12 and primary education.