AWS Educate expands access to free cloud education

Editor’s Note: Amazon Web Services (AWS) Educate is designed specifically for pre-professional learners. The program provides its members with no-cost access to learning content and AWS services designed to build knowledge and skills in cloud computing. It’s available globally to individuals who meet the minimum age requirements, which are based on their country of residence and can be found in the AWS Learner Terms.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the relaunch of AWS Educate, which is expanding access to free, on-demand cloud education for learners around the world as young as 13 years old.

With the recent relaunch, AWS Educate is now open to any individual, regardless of where they are in their education, technical experience, or career journey. AWS Educate provides hundreds of hours of free, self-paced training, resources, and labs specifically designed for the new-to-the-cloud learner. Available in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, individuals can learn, practice, and evaluate cloud skills with AWS Educate without creating an Amazon account. Previously, AWS Educate was only available to educators, students with a .edu email address, and US Military veterans. AWS Educate is one of many programs helping AWS offer free cloud skills training to 29 million people globally.

What changed?

Designed for self-motivated, pre-professionals who are not yet working in the cloud, such as students and job training participants, AWS Educate offers fundamental content through a new, easy-to-navigate, and adaptive user experience and a personalized view configured to the learner and their engagement history. New features include:

• Four new courses—Cloud Computing 101, AWS DeepRacer Primer, Machine Learning Foundation, and Builder Labs.
• A redesigned website to guide learners to training content based on their knowledge, goals, interests, and age.
• Learners can explore recommended courses organized in six content groups, such as Cloud Skill Basics and Cloud Skill Advanced. Learners’ progress is saved along the way so they can pick up where they left off at any time.
• Learners only need an email address to begin using the AWS Management Console. There are ten labs in English, with plans to offer additional languages later this year.
• A new Explore option on the homepage features supplementary content, such as new courses, Twitch videos, blogs, and white papers.
• Learners can now seamlessly access cloud training content on Twitch with no additional account or login required.

Hands-on practice via labs and the AWS Management Console

We’re offering ten new labs that allow learners to gain hands-on, real-world experience on the AWS Management Console. The labs offer a guided experience that tracks learner actions and confirms they have successfully completed the instructed steps. Previously, self-guided learners who wanted to explore the AWS Management Console had to provide a credit card to start. This created a barrier for many potential cloud-curious learners, such as minors, individuals without credit cards, or those who do not want to create an Amazon or AWS account. Now, learners can access AWS Educate labs to practice cloud skills in a sandbox environment with nothing more than an email address.

Learners have a fixed number of hours available to complete a lab and are given unlimited attempts, as long as they are within the allotted time. We offer the following labs in English, with plans to release additional languages later this year:

• Introduction to Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) Lab
• Introduction to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Lab
• Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Lab
• Introduction to Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Lab
• Introduction to Dynamo DB Lab
• Hosting a Static Website Using Amazon S3 Lab
• Introduction to Amazon Rational Database Service (RDS) Lab
• AWS DeepRacer Lab
• Jupyter Notebook Lab
• Application Security using Amazon Cognito Lab

Get help with course recommendations, or explore courses at your own pace

To help learners navigate their pre-professional journey, courses are organized into six content groups: 1) Most Popular Courses and Labs, 2) Cloud Skill Basics, 3) Cloud Skill Advanced, 4) Prepare for Workplaces, 5) Learn on Twitch, and 6) Young learner. Courses are tagged by proficiency level (i.e., 46 foundational, five intermediate, and eight advanced courses), including 30 courses specifically designed for young learners. Supported languages include English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.

All 59 available courses can now be viewed on a single page, empowering learners to select a course based on their personal interests or to easily find just-in-time learning to become quickly informed about a single topic. This allows learners—and, if applicable, their parents—to view all the courses and move from foundational to intermediate to advanced content as desired.

Learners can find and enroll in courses by clicking on cards that list the course topic, duration, proficiency level, and features, such as labs. As learners complete courses, they earn AWS Educate badges, which they can share through social media to demonstrate cloud-skills mastery to employers and their network.

Next steps

Are you curious about the cloud, or know someone who is, and aren’t sure where to begin? Are you a mentor, parent, or volunteer who’s looking to inspire a future cloud builder? Get started and share the new and improved AWS Educate program today.

About AWS Education Programs

AWS Education Programs work hand-in-hand with organizations, education institutions, governments, and private sector companies to empower individuals to upskill, reskill, and prepare for high-quality jobs. Our programs include AWS Academy, AWS Educate, AWS GetIT, AWS re/Start, and AWS Tech U. From college courses to full-time training programs and self-paced learning content, our programs provide individuals from all backgrounds and experience levels the opportunity to develop cloud skills and become the builders of tomorrow.