CI&T and AWS Develop Platform to Enhance Services to Over 800,000 Brazilian Students

AWS Partner CI&T helped YDUQS, a Brazilian education organization, ensure reliable access to over 800,000 students by migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This migration resulted in a 90 percent reduction in the average time students spend on enrollment and curriculum changes. YDUQS in collaboration with CI&T developed a modern digital ecosystem for integrated education. This ecosystem includes applications and teaching platforms, enabling students and teachers to access online services and content. 

Yduqs Participações S.A. (YDUQS) is one of Brazil’s largest education organizations. The company operates universities, colleges, and distance learning campuses across the country with a distinct brand for each one. They serve over 90 locations across 22 Brazilian states. It offers undergraduate, graduate, and professional designation programs to its students. The main challenge YDUQS faced was delivering content to students and teaching centers quickly and at scale. The previous system was based on a third-party platform that lacked agility, exclusivity, and stability. “We realized that in order to serve our students and to expand our education services, we would need technology that could change with our needs and offer scalability,” said Bruna Bueno, director of digital transformation and digital products at YDUQS.

YDUQS conducted a thorough analysis of their needs, which included curriculum development, enrollment processes, collection of student monthly payments, and scalable and reliable applications. Based on these requirements, CI&T, an AWS Partner, was chosen to support the institution’s migration onto AWS. “We chose CI&T because they are an expert in digital transformation and they have a track record of accelerating businesses with the use of AWS. They determined the best digital platform and process to meet our requirements”, says Bueno. The solution focused on scalability, reliability, and security. “Due to the students' confidential information in the system, strict security measures needed to be in place,” said Diego Ferreira de Melo, executive manager at CI&T.

The initial digitization work involved migrating the analog registration renewal process to the cloud. YDUQS and CI&T developed Renova, an AWS web-based platform. Renova handles all enrollment processes for students and is offered through web and smartphone access. "We recognized the need for students to access registration information easily. To address this, we developed dedicated mobile apps for teachers and students. The students' app centralizes administrative and financial processes, including service requests, payments, and card orders, accessible via smartphones. It is a scalable, multi-brand solution that caters to all education institutions within the YDUQS group, enhancing the students' academic experience," said Melo.

Renova utilizes Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network (CDN) service, that serves content for the students, teachers and portal applications. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate help to provision, manage, and run backend containers. AWS WAF, the Web Application Firewall (WAF) service, creates security rules for requests and monitors usage, while Amazon DynamoDB, offers scalability.

After Renova was implemented, YDUQS and CI&T created a virtual classroom called Sala de Aula Virtual (SAVA). SAVA is a Learning Management System (LMS), and it replaced a third-party solution, that lacked scalability. The LMS supports over 800,000 students, offering a robust and personalized learning experience. The AWS environment ensures high availability, allowing students to study, interact with professors, and take tests without interruptions.

CI&T unified YDUQS’ brand and portals, replacing the previous model featuring different portals for each brand, by creating a multi-brand portal that runs under a single framework, but is customizable for each brand. “Today, digital transformation is at our core thanks to the support from CI&T and AWS. Our multi-brand portal is a complete suite for all our brands, allowing us to manage a streamlined, less expensive architecture, and easy oversite of our brand portals,” explains Bruno Rocha, digital technology manager at YDUQS.

The portals are hosted on AWS and utilize Amazon ECS, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Fargate and Amazon Aurora, a fully managed relational database and high-performance storage subsystem. The cloud native solution uses server-side rendering (SSR) available via Amazon CloudFront, enabling faster content access. The architecture incorporates microservices using MongoDB, Amazon OpenSearch Service, and Redis for resilience, ensuring high availability of offerings and course data for future students. The solution is connected to a highly scalable headless content management system (CMS), Strapi, supported by AWS Fargate and Amazon Aurora, allowing publishers to securely upload their content.

YDUQS’ new digital environment offers several benefits to the institution and students. The platform ensures high availability and scalability. “Even if my base rises to two million students, I know that our services will be able to meet the demand,” Bruna says. YDUQS can deliver tailored features for each student’s profile, and easily integrate new brands in the future.

Over 90 percent of the student base use the app, with more than 570,000 monthly active users. Students’ satisfaction with the new system has increased by 20 percentage, and the average time spent by students on enrollment and curriculum changes reduced by 90 percent. More than 7,000 teachers have utilized their app to support their teaching activities. “AWS and CI&T have been instrumental in enabling YDUQS to bridge the gap between face-to-face and digital environments, offering us more options and flexibility for students. The partnership continues to help us think about the future and drive digital innovation in education,” concluded Bruna.