Apeejay Stya University Meets National Education Policy Requirements through Digital Transformation on AWS

India’s National Education Policy 2020 (NEP), is a revolutionary step that will completely change education in India. NEP 2020—which is a major transformation and reform of Indian education policy and systems—deeply emphasizes student-focused learning, technology-led teaching, research, and institutional interconnection and regulatory reform leading to innovation in the ecosystem. It requires institutions to fundamentally change what they teach, how they teach, and how they are structured within the ecosystem. To accomplish this dramatic transformation, the NEP relies greatly on technology, with institutions rethinking their delivery of education as well as their internal and external systems and processes

 

To implement NEP at scale, accessible and inclusive technology is key. Furthermore, as part of this framework, each institution must secure modern technology solutions to support online learning, the creation of virtual labs and digital repositories, continuous teacher training, and modern blended classroom learning. NEP 2020 also emphasizes the need to invest in open, interoperable, evolvable, public digital infrastructure that can be used by multiple platforms and solutions.

 

Apeejay Stya University—part of Apeejay Education—is a leading educational institution in designing and implementing frameworks to support the NEP, with more than a decade of experience in implementing its best practices. Apeejay Education currently has 35,000 students and 2,500 faculty members across 26 campuses throughout India.

 

Says Aditya Berlia, co-founder and pro-chancellor at Apeejay Stya University, “As NEP implementation continues, it will require institutional policy changes every few months, with continuous changes in delivery, processes, and systems. Managing this at scale and cost requires a level of agility not possible with traditionally architected IT systems.”

 

The university supports the NEP’s blended learning model which requires a flexible and accessible learning management system (LMS) that can scale up or down based on virtual student numbers. “Blended learning requires strong connectivity and availability to all students across campuses and their homes, alongside broad scalability during critical peaks,” says Berlia. “We knew we needed a huge amount of compute power on demand to ensure that we deliver for our students.”

Since 2010, Apeejay Stya University has stored its data, file servers, and student information on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The university decided to expand its AWS infrastructure to accommodate a growing number of virtual students and ensure easy access to online courses and examinations. It chose to migrate its Moodle LMS to AWS, relying on AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda, and Amazon CloudFront content delivery network to scale according to student demand.

 

Apeejay Stya University also migrated its fee and billing system—managing student fees across multiple institutions— and admissions system to AWS. The systems leverage AWS Elastic Beanstalk to automate deployment and Amazon Aurora as its relational database. Additionally, the university also runs its credit management system and business process management solution on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), with the latter using AWS Lambda and API connectors as a serverless solution for fast adoption and implementation of evolving educational systems regulations.

 

Additionally, the university uses business process management systems broken into microservices that allow it to react to regulatory changes in an agile manner. “We’re all-in on AWS, because we can trust AWS to provide agility, scalability, and cost savings,” says Berlia.

By running its critical governance, administration, and academic systems on AWS, Apeejay Stya University can quickly adapt to NEP policy changes as they happen. “We can adopt and implement changes in days, not weeks or months, because of the agility AWS provides,” says Berlia.

 

Furthermore, because the university’s fee, billing, and credit management systems leverage microservices, the university’s IT team can seamlessly meet evolving NEP financial requirements. For example, as more international students attend the university, the institution will need to add new external payment systems. “We have decentralized layers in AWS that help us manage information and quickly update or add features,” says Berlia. “That would be difficult to achieve with a monolithic system, which doesn’t let you make changes on the fly.”

Apeejay Stya University can now rapidly scale its critical systems to meet student and teacher demand. For instance, when the pandemic engendered virtual-only learning, the university scaled its Moodle LMS from several hundred users to 35,000 in under a day.

 

“We went fully online within 24 hours of the initial lockdown and started offering classes to students. Without AWS, we wouldn’t have been able to purchase and deploy servers that quickly. We were literally innovating by the hour on AWS,” says Berlia. Additionally, the school can scale the Moodle environment down, allowing for flexibility to support both peak and non-peak workloads. Berlia adds, “We have a lot of work taking place online during school hours and a huge lull after that. With AWS, we can manage workloads more easily.”

 

Apeejay Stya’s IT team is also innovating faster with AWS, implementing pilot projects in as little as one week, instead of the six months to a year it would take previously. “Using AWS, we can implement a new solution and scale it up quickly at a low cost, then rapidly discover if it works or not. We’re not spending thousands of dollars on equipment and then waiting for it to arrive,” says Berlia.

Using Amazon CloudFront and leveraging Availability Zones, the university is able to ensure reliability and high availability for Moodle and other systems, ensuring access to learning materials wherever students are located. “We have many virtual students using different devices. Using AWS, we can offer a consistent speed and strong performance because of the localization we have with the Availability Zones,” says Berlia. “Whether they’re on a video conference or downloading assignments, all students have the same reliable experience.”

 

Security is also enhanced by running on AWS. “As an educational institution, we experience potential cyberattacks on a regular basis,” says Berlia. “It’s much easier to have a lower attack footprint with a serverless environment on AWS versus running more exposed servers. We have a clear view of our systems on AWS, and everything is centralized, making security management simpler.”

 

The university also plans to implement a data lake on AWS to gain new insights from the data stored on its systems. “We’re looking to increase our data analysis and reporting as part of our ongoing digital transformation,” says Berlia. “As India transforms, we know the cloud will play a crucial role. There’s so much to be done in this space, and we’re excited to see how far our teams can push the envelope. For India as a country, the only way NEP can be implemented at scale and at a reasonable cost is by fully embracing the cloud.”