AWS Public Sector Blog

Tag: AWS for higher education

Banner image with headline, "How the Wharton School built a virtual TA chat assistant with generative AI on AWS"

How the Wharton School built a virtual TA chat assistant with generative AI on AWS

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has been at the forefront of business innovation for over 140 years. Recently, Wharton found an opportunity to use generative AI to enhance their students’ learning experience. With support from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Wharton will roll out a virtual teaching assistant (TA) in the autumn of 2024, powered by generative AI, to answer students’ specific course-related questions in real time.

Collaborating for sustainability: How higher education and cloud providers foster change

On the journey of finding answers and solutions to address global sustainability challenges, universities are integral in delivering ground-breaking knowledge and scientific advancements. Collaborating with industry can in turn accelerate innovation through to practical implementation. Arizona State University (ASU) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been effective in joining forces to drive innovation and impact through the creation of ASU’s Smart City Cloud Innovation Center (CIC).

Kim Majerus at the IMAGINE conference.

Top highlights from the 2023 IMAGINE: Education, State, and Local Leaders conference

From July 11-12, 2023, the IMAGINE: Education, State, and Local Leaders conference from AWS gathered public sector leaders from around the world in Sacramento, CA to reimagine the future of state and local government and education. At the keynote address, Kim Majerus, vice president of global education and US state and local government at AWS, shared stories of education and state and local organizations using cloud technology to provide meaningful services for their communities. Three guest speakers joined the stage to share how they’re using AWS to protect education services against the rising threat of cyber attacks, advance cutting-edge research, promote innovative citizen services, and more.

AWS celebrates 2023 cohort of Education Champions

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.

Making financial aid simple for students and staff: How Highline College collaborated with AWS on a financial aid tracking tool

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.

How Xavier University of Louisiana’s migration to AWS is creating a “technology renaissance”

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.

Higher education cloud financial planning: A former CFO’s perspective

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.

Three Champions joined Mike Hofherr (right) on stage to share more about their journeys in education. From left to right: Noora Siddiqui, Baylor College of Medicine, Human Genome Sequencing Center Scientist, cloud engineer; Dr. Andrew Williams, The Citadel College of Engineering Professor, dean; and Don Wolff, Portland Public Schools, chief information officer (CIO).

What you missed at the IMAGINE 2022 conference for education, state, and local leaders

The IMAGINE conference from AWS in Seattle, Washington brought together education, state, and local leaders to learn, connect, and get inspired about how the latest innovations in cloud technology are transforming what’s possible for local communities. During the keynote, Kim Majerus, vice president of US state and local government and education at AWS, and customer guest speakers shared with attendees how innovators in education, state, and local leadership use AWS to help deliver for their communities, expand digital equity, accelerate workforce development, and more. Find out some of what you missed at IMAGINE 2022.

AWS launches the AWS Education Champions community to recognize digital transformation leaders

At the IMAGINE 2022 conference in Seattle, Washington, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the inaugural class of the AWS Education Champions community. The AWS Education Champions community is a new program to celebrate and support influential individuals whose work accelerates the digital transformation of education with the AWS Cloud. The 10 inaugural Champions are nationally recognized speakers and authors who inspire the next generation of educational leaders.

Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab helps educators focus on teaching rather than technology

The browser-based computational notebook tool, Jupyter, provides students and educators with an interactive learning environment to accelerate programming learning. But setting up collaborative Jupyter notebooks at the classroom and institutional level can be time-consuming and costly. Amazon SageMaker Studio Lab is a no-cost service built on Jupyter notebooks that takes care of the configuration and security of setting up multi-user Jupyter notebook environments – so educators can focus on teaching and learners can accelerate their journey in ML.