Category: Education

Today more than 200,000 volunteers around the world are helping accelerate research toward COVID-19 therapies—by walking away from their computers. That’s because of a concept called distributed computing, which allows anyone with a home computer, laptop, or virtual machine to contribute computing power to a common cause. This month, nonprofit Folding@home has started sharing one of the world’s largest public protein simulation databases as an AWS Open Data Set so that researchers around the world can easily access this data to speed up the search for therapies for COVID-19.

This week, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and the Arizona Commerce Authority (ACA) announced a statewide plan to train and certify at least 5,000 Arizona students in cloud computing by June 2022. The state’s Career and Technical Education Districts (CTED), community colleges, and universities will train students using the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs. Arizona is the most recent state to collaborate with HAQM Web Services (AWS) to transform their future workforce with cloud readiness and technical education programs.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems handle everything from accounting to marketing, finances to inventory, human resources to customer relations, and more. Colleges and universities commit significant infrastructure and personnel resources to run and manage these vital applications. But shifts in technology adoption, reduced availability of skilled labor, and increased economic pressures push colleges and universities to assess the return on their material ERP system investments. One way higher education institutions realize additional return on their scarce resources is by using cloud technologies. After Arizona State University (ASU) moved to AWS, the university was able to effectively allocate resources to benefit its students and solve operational problems that would otherwise require additional investment. Check out three benefits higher education institutions can recognize by moving ERP systems to the cloud.

Last month, the AWS Public Sector Blog covered building business resiliency, upskilling the next generation of cloud talent, machine learning in college sports, and more. Check out the latest episode of The Brief to learn more about business resiliency, and check out the other top stories linked below.

HAQM Web Services (AWS) EdStart Members and founders—Jennifer Larson of SchoolBzz and Reva McPollom of Lessonbee—are changing the way that parents, teachers, and students interact with schools and in the classroom. With SchoolBzz, the focus is on easing the parent-teacher load and changing the standard school communication model. With Reva, the focus is on modernizing how we approach “health” class and what it means to be healthy in the twenty-first century. For the first installment of the AWS EdStart Global Founders Series, read on to learn about how two EdTech founders are developing the next generation of education solutions in the AWS Cloud.

Driven by the need for greater productivity, lower costs, and more recently being able to scale a remote workforce, organizations around the world are moving their IT workloads to the cloud. Planning a move to the cloud requires upfront pre-migration planning; this is as important as the implementation itself. But it can be daunting to know where to start or what needs to be in place for a successful migration. The HAQM Web Services (AWS) Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) can help provide insight into your level of readiness and what you can do to improve it.

Educational institutions are responding to challenges that have become more complicated since the start of the pandemic. New learning models, declining enrollments, rising health and safety costs, and cuts in public funding are forcing education leaders to rethink ways to deliver quality education in a more cost-effective, agile, and scalable way. Despite these challenges, educators report that technology has made it easier—and faster—to innovate, and to meet students’ evolving needs. In this recently released paper, learn the seven trends in the new world of education that most commonly arise during our interactions with customers and education leaders, and how the cloud can help.

The global network of Cloud Innovation Centers (CICs) powered by HAQM Web Services (AWS) aims to empower public sector organizations to quickly create and test new ideas using HAQM’s innovation methodology. The CIC program brings students, researchers, and the technology expertise of AWS together to solve public sector challenges and gives students the opportunity to engage in project-based learning. Check out some of the CIC challenges during the third quarter of 2020.

In October 2018, the Florida panhandle was hit by Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm that set a new record for the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the area. Florida State University (FSU) already understood the need for a long-term continuity of operations plan, and the devastation Michael wrought on the surrounding areas solidified how critical a disaster recovery (DR) service is to their overall operations. Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is the business world’s advanced solution to unexpected disruption. Whether the threat comes from natural disaster, technical failure, human error, or malicious action, the result is still unplanned downtime and the need for recovery. Learn how FSU designed and launched their DRaaS solution on an accelerated timeline while optimizing costs.

Swinburne University, in collaboration with HAQM Web Services (AWS), announced the creation of Australia’s first cloud degree program. The associate degree of applied technologies – cloud technologies will help undergraduates prepare for in-demand careers in cloud computing. Swinburne created the degree through a collaboration with AWS Educate, HAQM’s global initiative to provide students and educators with resources for building skills in cloud technology.