CI&T and AWS created a platform for delivering better services to 800,000 students at YDUQS

The first scan job focused on migrating the enrollment renewal process to the cloud. This process is conducted every six months, with students registering in classes and paying monthly fees. Renova, an AWS web platform that holds all of the student enrollment-related processes, was built by YDUQS and CI&T. At first, the platform was designed for access through the web browser. Then, it received new resources so it could also be accessed through smartphones.

Renova is based on AWS services such as Amazon CloudFront – an Amazon CDN (Content Delivery Network) service, which provides content to students, teachers and applications from the portal –, Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate – broadly used to provision, manage and run backend containers. AWS WAF – the Web Application Firewall service through which YDUQS creates security rules for requests and monitors its use; and Amazon DynamoDB – AWS scalable and high performance NoSQL database (DB).

After Renova, it was time to take the transformation to the core business at YDUQS. They took a new step by creating, in partnership with CI&T, their virtual classroom – SAVA –, which consists of a Learning Management System (LMS). The solution was built to provide everything the student needs in the learning process. It replaced a third-party solution that was hard to customize and, above all, to scale, which would be crucial in subsequent years.

The platform minimum viable product (MVP) supports the entire base of more than 1 million students, offering them a more robust and customized journey. Melo explains that robustness is the result of the high availability of AWS environment, and its capacity to support a growth in the number of accesses with no instability. This allows students to learn, get along with teachers and take tests without worrying about eventual falls.

The platform is also considered customized because it was built with YDUQS students in mind. To this end, CI&T team analyzed each persona at the institution, which led to the creation of different experiences for each profile. Thus, YDUQS could, for example, rely on functionalities built specifically for postgraduate students, or set a condition in which the course conclusion work and internship areas are only available for final-year students. The platform also includes an assessment area for monitoring students progress – if they completed the practices, which simulations they tried and if they are ready to take tests.

After finishing the LMS, CI&T started to unify YDUQS portals. The previous model had a single portal for each brand, generating high costs and requiring professional support, which made simple changes difficult. The new portal is multi-brand, running in a single customizable framework for each brand. “Today, digital transformation is in our core, thanks to the support from CI&T and AWS. The multi-brand portal is a full suite for serving all brands in the group, ensuring a much cleaner and cheaper architecture, and making our portals maintenance and operation much easier.”, explains Bruno Rocha, Digital Tech Manager at YDUQS.

The portals are supported by AWS using big products such as Amazon CloudFront (CDN), AWS Fargate (Containers), and Amazon Aurora (relational databases), hence, it’s a cloud native application. The solution consists of using a Server Side Rendering provided through Cloud Front, which is a powerful CDN able to provision cached data in an optimized way (CloudFront Egde), turning content access increasingly faster for the final user. Along with that, an architecture with BFF that uses micro-services, created internally (using MongoDB, Elasticsearch for content cache and Redis/bull for resilience treatment), offers high availability of offerings and data on the used courses in such a way that future students can choose the best course possible for their career. To wrap up, every solution is connected to a headless CMS (Strapi), is highly scalable due to AWS Fargate and RDS Aurora, and uses automated backups, scaling at the fingertip and high availability so that editors can upload their content safely. All that is achieved through an AWS infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in an integrated manner with observability, which AWS provides out-of-box through CloudWatch, generating warnings, dashboards, control and log research.
 

“We noticed that our students needed to have their registration information within reach. Many only visited Renova using web browsers. So we decided to build mobile applications specific for teachers and students”, explains Bruna. Thus, the students application was built with an aim to centralizing administrative and financial processes, such as payments for service requests and student ID requests, enabling them to access everything though smartphones.

This is a scalable solution, acting as an interface for students experience throughout their academic study. The app is multi-brand and able to meet demands from all of the learning institutions integrating the YDUQS group. “The previous application was difficult to scale and didn’t have an integration with the study journey”, says Melo.

The officer recalls that Renova offers functions like enrollment and class schedule organization, but the application destined to students enabled the inclusion of new study and administrative functionalities, expanding students access to the learning content. An example is the functionality “Continue where you left off”, which leads to the last content watched by the student. It optimized the user experience as it reduced the average time spent to find the right material from five minutes to three seconds. This button already represents 41% of access to content.

There are also self-service functionalities that allow the students to issue bills, make payments or make requests for exams or receipts. “The app is revolutionizing students’ relationship with the institution, offering a much more propositional and clever experience, that assists student learning”, states Melo.

 

 

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