Tag: education

In my keynote at the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Partners Forum, I spoke about, “celebrating, listening, and acting on your input”—highlighting our customer obsessed approach to AWS Partners and customers. I shared many exciting stories from our AWS Public Sector Partners as well as some of the great programs we’ve rolled out to help accelerate missions, migrations, and modernization. Check out the stories and announcements you might have missed.

The Barnes Foundation is home to a legendary art collection, including some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings. At the core of its mission is the advancement of education and art appreciation. When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down in-person tours and classes, the Barnes Foundation used the cloud to quickly pivot to develop and launch new online programming to continue to deliver their educational mission, and allowed them to triple enrollment in online courses for adults and reach 40 percent more school-age students during the 2020-2021 school year compared to in-person courses in pre-pandemic years.

The Allen Institute seeks to understand how our brains, cells, and immune systems work when we are healthy and, ultimately, how they go wrong in disease. Allen researchers have generated and shared atlases that map the brain, gene-edited stem cell lines, and many more resources that have been used by millions of scientists around the world to accelerate their research. In collaboration with AWS and the Registry of Open Data on AWS, they make many of their datasets publicly available. In celebration of Open Science Week, check out some of these open datasets from the Allen Institute, and their impact on the research community.

At the AWS Digital Experience Latam 2021, AWS announced that AWS EdStart, the AWS educational technology (EdTech) startup accelerator designed to help startup EdTech companies build teaching and learning solutions on the AWS Cloud, is now available to customers in Mexico and Colombia.

Higher education institutions that hadn’t previously considered the cloud prior to the pandemic are now investigating how to begin their cloud journey. In this blog post, we highlight some strategies and first projects to help higher education institutions get started with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud simply and efficiently. 

To solve some of the most pressing water and energy challenges, scientists and engineers need access to robust, reliable data that is often sensitive and protected. Data providers, researchers, and host institutions need to adhere to strict requirements for protecting and securing this data. The Center for Water-Energy Efficiency (CWEE) at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) used AWS to create a centralized, secure data repository that streamlines data sharing.

The Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN) uses email as their main communication method, with over 800 email accounts using up to 50GB of storage space each. IHVN used AWS to migrate their email to Amazon WorkMail to reduce the cost of each mailbox by 64 percent, allowing their IT team to easily manage the corporate email infrastructure and get enterprise grade security.

At the AWS Summit Online – Americas fireside chat hosted by Max Peterson, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector, three public sector leaders discussed recovery and digital transformation across education and healthcare in the Americas following the COVID-19 pandemic. The fireside chat panelists experienced firsthand the need to scale rapidly due to the pandemic and their stories illustrate the transformational power of the cloud to drive impact in the public sector.

According to EdTech Magazine, at the height of the pandemic, 94 percent of educators agreed that students will need increased social and emotional support throughout the school year. There’s a renewed focus on social-emotional learning (SEL) support in the classroom, with educators looking for additional ways to help students be healthy and engaged in class. Four AWS EdStart Members are addressing different aspects of SEL and helping to positively impact the student experience.

Recent events, from public sector cyberattacks and severe weather events to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic, have revealed that many educational institutions, as well as regional and local governments, are not fully prepared to respond to these incidents. At the same time, large-scale disruptive events illustrate how important it is for public sector organizations to respond rapidly to keep essential services running as well as quickly pivot to offer new services. In an IDC survey of 2,000 U.S. residents in September 2020, 31% said they would like to continue virtual government services as a replacement for in-person interactions, while another IDC survey of U.S. teachers revealed that 38% expect a growth in hybrid or remote learning to be a lasting change.