The Israel Center for Educational Technology Case Study

With schools throughout the country closed due to COVID-19, the Israeli Ministry of Education collaborated with education technology companies and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide continuity of learning for 1.8 million students.

Together with AWS, the Israel Center for Educational Technology (CET) enabled students in grades one through six to access live-streamed classes via virtual classroom instruction in Hebrew and Arabic.

As schools closed, the CET coordinated online video instruction in both Hebrew and Arabic from a live production studio. CET subsequently set up a workflow to make broadcasts of teacher-led sessions available online. Faced with the likelihood of extended school closures, CET needed to accelerate its ability to scale more content to more device types in myriad formats and protocols. However, the studio’s technology could only accommodate a single live stream per channel with limited format options.

CET turned to AWS to help devise a remote learning solution that could assure greater access for students across the country’s major broadcast channels. To avoid potential disruptions in content delivery and educational continuity, the solution would need to be fully operational as soon as possible.

AWS worked with CET to design and implement a solution. Within less than 48 hours, the team successfully tested a live, end-to-end video production workflow built with AWS Media Services and Amazon CloudFront. AWS Elemental MediaLive ingests and encodes live video feeds, which are then formatted for different mobile devices using AWS Elemental MediaPackage. Amazon CloudFront distributes the content to viewers.

AWS Elemental MediaConnect is used as an additional output channel to deliver content via the Zixi protocol to cable TV providers. Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) provide monitoring and alert notifications to the system operators, and Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight support data analysis. This provides statistics required by the Ministry of Education, such as the total number of viewers and number of viewers per channel. Israel’s major TV providers – Yes, Hot, Partner, and Cellcom — also receive the live feeds from CET to broadcast to their viewers.

For the Ministry of Education, time to market was critical as mandatory school closures prompted an immediate transition to remote learning. CET now provides a robust, scalable, end-to-end live broadcasting solution, including monitoring and viewer analytics, that allows primary school students in Israel to resume their studies. Within a week of launching the service, CET reported hundreds of thousands of unique users across all platforms and increasing demand from students.

The Center for Educational Technology (CET) is dedicated to the advancement of the education system in Israel with the mission is to provide all Israeli children with an advanced learning environment, which combines state-of-the-art technology with quality content and up-to-date pedagogy.