Tag: education

With the global shift to remote learning during this year’s back-to-school season, the need for flexible and comprehensive learning tools is more important than ever. To help, AWS Educate introduced new features including the Cloud Builder Badge for students and no-cost learning content and professional development for educators.

Due to COVID-19, schools quickly shifted to remote education to meet students’ needs and wrap up the school year. But with a new school year upon us and social distancing measures still in place, many classes will not gather in traditional classroom settings. Millions of students are now learning in their homes. And public sector leaders are creating new models to ensure learning is sustainable and accessible to all. These changes certainly carry their own set of challenges, but they also open new possibilities for the coming school year. Check out examples of how the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred important solutions to existing problems from primary school to higher education, and how the cloud has opened up new possibilities for educators and students as they start the new school year.

Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University (HBMSU) successfully completed the full migration of its systems and applications from its on-premises data centers to AWS. The move provides immediate benefits to HBMSU such as cost savings, flexibility, and security, and opens up new horizons for innovation, research, and global expansion. With the move to the cloud, the university is working toward its mission to reshape the future of education in the Middle East.

While disruptive events are challenging for any organization, sudden and large-scale incidents such as natural disasters, IT outages, pandemics, and cyber-attacks can expose critical gaps in technology, culture, and organizational resiliency. Even smaller, unexpected events such as water damage to a critical facility or electrical outages can negatively impact your organization if there is no long-term resiliency plan in place. These events can have significant consequences on your employees, stakeholders, and mission, and can result in long-term financial losses, lost productivity, loss of life, a deterioration of trust with citizens and customers, and lasting reputational damage.

University students in the United Kingdom and Ireland can now register for the AWS Educate University Challenge for a chance to win prizes for their university while building skills in the cloud. In the inter-university competition, students from the UK and Ireland earn points for their university by completing AWS Educate Cloud Career Pathways and Specialty Badges.

In August 2020, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered cloud workforce development, partner programs for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and minority-owned businesses (MOBs), and more.

As screen time dependence has increased, education technology companies (EdTechs) are looking for new ways to engage students and create a more natural interaction with their products. One way to do so is using voice technology to help students, teachers, and administrators stay informed, be productive, and create more meaningful learning opportunities. To help, the AWS EdStart and Alexa in Education teams are launching the AWS EdStart Voice Builder course and badge. The AWS EdStart Member exclusive offering can help EdTechs build voice-first experiences that create fun and engaging learning experiences, reach new users, and save time by streamlining access to their products with Amazon Alexa.

In July and August on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Fix This podcast, we heard from customers on their solutions for the classroom, in diagnostic research, for working from home, and in the great outdoors.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies including machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) can transform the way government agencies operate and enable them to provide improved citizen services. AWS Partner Network Partners have been working with AWS to accelerate solutions development using AI and related technologies for our public sector customers. To further assist partners in the acceleration of AI and ML, AWS is launching a new partner initiative: the AI and ML Rapid Adoption Assistance Initiative.

AWS Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) focus on solving real-life societal challenges facing the public sector. These public-private partnerships between a public sector organization—like a university or local city—and AWS can help unlock innovation, faster. Through the CIC challenges, organizations and students work to solve societal problems through digital solutions and Amazon’s innovation processes while providing students a platform to learn. These solutions and results are published open source, so others can benefit from this innovative work. This past quarter, CICs worked on address Alzheimer’s, citizen services, and coronaviruses.