Tag: higher education

The College of Liberal Arts at University of Texas at Austin wanted to make it simple for students, faculty, and staff to contact support agents. This is how they built and scaled a contact center solution on AWS with Amazon Connect that reduced call wait time, cut costs, and more easily resolved technical issues — all while call volume more than quadrupled.

AWS and Howard University announced an initiative to upskill its students and build pathways to technical careers with cloud computing courses and training resources for educators. Learn more about how the collaboration will prepare students for the workforce with hands-on experiences, how Howard University is launching a master’s program with the support of AWS experts, and more.

This is a guest post by Maria Teleńczuk, research engineer at the Paris-Saclay Center for Data Science (CDS), and Alexandre Gramfort, senior research scientist at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology. Maria and Alexandre explain how they adapted their open source data challenge platform RAMP to train the models submitted by student challenge participants using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Spot instances, and how they leveraged AWS to support three student challenges.

The Urban Analytics Lab at the National University of Singapore (NUS) spearheads research in geospatial data analysis and 3D city modelling. The lab’s work underpins the development of smart cities and provides scientists, architects, urban planners, and real estate developers with data insights. These insights help parties make informed decisions about projects ranging from energy modelling to urban farming. To meet rising global demand for its data analytics and planning tools, Urban Analytics Lab turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Times Higher Education (THE) is a data-driven business that, with the help of AWS, is now realising the value of their data, which enables them to be better informed and make faster decisions for customers. THE provides a broad range of services to help set the agenda in higher education, and their insights help universities improve through performance analysis. THE worked with the AWS Data Lab to create a centralised repository of their data. Launching a data lake helped with providing a cost-effective platform and cataloguing data so they could understand their data and design new products to make use of it.

Research exploring how humans work with machines to solve problems in fields ranging from space to sustainability has established the potential to create far-reaching change in children’s education. The test-bed project is part of a wider program set up by Oxford University with support from AWS. Researchers have been as surprised by how quickly they have reached results as they are pleased with the outcomes. One of the test-beds, the Oxford X-Reality Hub Ed Tech project, set out to investigate how virtual reality (VR) could transform the classroom experience and close the gap between disadvantaged groups of pupils who statistically do less well than their peers.

Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) aim to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using Amazon’s innovation methodology. In the second half of 2020, all those who participate in the CIC program, from students and researchers to the technology teams from AWS, worked on wide-ranging societal problems. Their focus was on improving education with virtual computer labs, working on climate change initiatives, improving economic and healthcare research, and supporting at-risk high school students. What were they up to at the end of 2020?

Do you ever get overwhelmed by the thought of preparing and teaching your students online? It’s a challenging task at best but remember to keep it simple. Leveraging cloud technology can help make teaching and learning remotely more manageable for our students, our community, and us. Picking the right tools in the AWS Cloud can help you with course development. Let’s explore a research-based method called technological pedagogical and content knowledge (or TPACK) that helps plan learning experiences.

Now, students have an even higher expectation for seamless digital experiences to register for classes, apply for financial aid, and access social services right from their phones—anywhere, anytime. As institutions scrambled to fulfill student demand and convert workflows to digital, COVID-19 made administrators aware of the need to create flexibility, help staff work as efficiently as possible, and overhaul processes. Read on to learn how Troy University used AWS Partner Ellucian Workflow to digitize important protocols and improve service to students and prospective students while reducing manual errors.

AWS announced that six institutes of higher learning in Singapore—including all five national polytechnics and a private education institution—will bring AWS Cloud courses and learning resources into their diploma programs. By collaborating with AWS education programs, these institutions are developing the next generation of cloud professionals. The courses, which include the fundamentals of cloud computing, application development, and cloud security, are available now as part of the institutions’ diploma and short course programs.