AWS and MortarCAPS: A game-changing partnership set to revolutionize data management in post-secondary education

The post-secondary education sector is about to experience a seismic shift in how it manages data. In a landmark announcement, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and MortarCAPS have revealed a strategic partnership that promises to transform the way that tertiary education institutions handle information, support students, and drive innovation.

What is MortarCAPS?

Developed alongside CAUDIT and in collaboration with 60+ post-secondary institutions, MortarCAPS operates as a collaborative, sector-led initiative that brings together education leaders, vendors, and government to ensure that global standards for data management meet the real-world needs of higher learning institutions.

The MortarCAPS Higher Learning Data Standard (MCDS) provides a unified framework for managing higher learning data, enabling institutions to simplify complex systems, foster innovation, and align with national and global priorities.

Breaking down the challenge

Educational institutions operate multiple disconnected systems requiring duplicate data entry. Students input identical information across multiple platforms, while administrators manually compile data for student progress tracking and performance reporting. These disconnected systems require endless manual data entry, and there is a constant struggle to get different platforms to work together harmoniously.

Current systems that track awards limit student mobility between education providers and hinder recognition of prior learning. Qualification frameworks have failed to adapt to modern learning needs and are unable to register micro credentials and short courses, which—with the impact of generative AI and the reduction in revenue from international students—will become a critically important revenue source for institutions.

This initiative is the foundation for revolutionizing the sector, and will enable portable learning histories, automate administrative tasks like reporting and credit transfers, and give students control over their data and its visibility.

Charlsey Pearce, CEO of MortarCAPS, speaking on stage

A transformative solution

AWS is the first major cloud provider to join the MCDS ecosystem, and this partnership is the first which directly tackles these data management challenges. The collaboration will allow institutions to rapidly adopt the new technical data standard, delivering transformative outcomes that enhance student success and operational efficiency.

What’s particularly exciting is the scale of adoption already in place. With 60+ institutions across Australia, Canada, and New Zealand already committed to the MCDS initiative, this partnership has the potential to create immediate and far-reaching impact. Several other countries are expected to join in the coming months, representing a truly global collaboration.

Key real-world benefits

The collaboration between AWS and MortarCAPS will deliver numerous benefits, including:

• Streamlined student experience: Students enter information once, with seamless data flowing across institutional systems.
• Proactive student support: Academic advisors receive early intervention alerts to support at-risk students before challenges escalate.
• Simplified compliance: Administrators generate complex regulatory reports with just a few clicks.
• Enhancing student mobility and lifelong learning: Transparency of student outcomes and skills, focused on supporting productivity and the future industry through lifelong-learning support.
• AI-ready infrastructure: Institutions can implement advanced analytics and AI solutions without extensive technical overhead.

Why this partnership matters

This partnership involves developing innovative reference architectures and solutions that accelerate the adoption and benefits of the MCDS data standard and streamline tertiary harmonization. Institutions will be able to implement advanced analytics and AI solutions without extensive technical overhead—democratizing access to these powerful tools across the organization. It also eliminates the need for educators to become data scientists to effectively support their students. By combining AWS’s technological capabilities with MCDS standards, institutions can drive data-informed decision making, enhance student success initiatives, and deliver more personalized learning experiences across their campus community.

The architecture leverages Amazon QuickSight for intuitive data visualization, Amazon OpenSearch Service for powerful data querying, and Amazon SageMaker for predictive analytics. These services are complemented by Amazon Q, which provides natural language interaction with institutional data, making insights more accessible to all stakeholders. The solution’s foundation is built on AWS’s secure and scalable data lake architecture, ensuring institutions can grow and adapt their analytics capabilities as needs evolve.

Looking to the future

The partnership has the potential to transform educational technology. By creating a unified foundation for data management, it opens up new possibilities for innovation in student success, administrative efficiency, and educational outcomes.

The bottom line

This isn’t just another technology collaboration—it’s a fundamental reimagining of how educational institutions handle their data. For students, it means less bureaucracy and better support. For institutions, it means improved efficiency and decision-making capabilities. And for the education sector as a whole, it represents a significant step toward a more connected, data-driven future.

As this initiative rolls out across institutions globally, it promises to set new standards for how we think about and use educational data. The AWS-MortarCAPS partnership may well be remembered as the moment when educational technology finally caught up with the needs of modern post-secondary education.

Want to learn more?

Join us for a deep dive into what this partnership means for education at the AWS Public Sector Symposium and Caudit’s 2025 Spring Members’ Meeting.