Tag: education

Before the Event Horizon Telescope project released the first-ever picture of a black hole in 2019, nobody had ever seen one. Black holes are a region of space with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing—not even light—can escape them. The cloud is helping accelerate research into black holes.

At re:Invent 2020, Teresa Carlson, vice president and leader of AWS public sector and industry business units, shared stories of how cloud technology has proven critical for organizations to move fast and respond to a new reality shaped by COVID-19. Teresa also welcomed customers UK Biobank, Capella Space, and Wefarm to share their own experiences with solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges using the cloud. Here are 10 key takeaways that show what’s next for the public sector.

At AWS, we are mission focused. A mission is a purpose—supported by but not driven by IT. How can the AWS Partner Network (APN) help public sector partners and their customers meet their missions? No matter where you are in your journey to cloud adoption and IT modernization—from getting started, to easing the adoption of technology, to planning to take the solution to market, to growing beyond storage and compute, to renewing and scale—APN and its programs and initiatives can help. During my leadership session at AWS re:Invent 2020, I shared new and noteworthy AWS Public Sector Partner programs available to help partners keep their focus on their mission-critical work while also keeping it simple—and I shared some partner successes along the way.

Did you know that the unemployment rate for the formerly incarcerated is five times higher than the general population? The implications of this stat are significant—affecting not only an individual’s livelihood—but also their family and future. Research shows that post-release unemployment is the most significant predictor of eventual recidivism. That’s why programs like Columbia University’s Justice Through Code are so important. Justice Through Code is a free, semester-long program, developed in partnership with the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School and the Center for Justice at Columbia University, providing formerly incarcerated individuals with technical and interpersonal skills training, mentorship, and job placement support.

As schools and other educational institutions turn to remote learning solutions, organizations are reconsidering traditional IT infrastructure, aligning digital solutions to current learning and teaching models, and gearing towards the industry’s new measure of success: student engagement. A hybrid approach allows schools and districts to deploy both on-site and in the cloud, allowing staff and students to take advantage of productivity and collaboration services, to provide business and learning continuity. For more than a decade, To support critical learning applications and infrastructure during natural disasters and other disruptions, West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District chose to use VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS) to extend its on-premises VMware vSphere environment.

AWS re:Invent is back for 2020, and for the first time it’s all virtual and free. AWS re:Invent has become the world’s premier cloud learning event, and this year, we’ll feature sessions focused on how public sector organizations are using the cloud to improve the lives of constituents, patients, customers, and more. The event, kicking off on November 30 and lasting three weeks through December 18, will feature keynotes, leadership sessions, lightning talks, and core sessions tailored for the public sector. To help you make the most of re:Invent 2020, we created the AWS re:Invent Public Sector Virtual Attendee Guide, and the latest episode of The Brief.

Do you favor that points-earning credit card? Or stick with the same airline to rack up miles? These are examples of gamification in action. While the term is relatively new, gamification has been around as long as people have tried to make boring activities interesting. Humans have a natural desire to compete, be social, and gain rewards. Elearningindustry.com found that 67 percent of students feel gamified courses are more motivating than traditional ones. And with educators shifting to virtual or blended classrooms worldwide, it’s worth making the effort to create a gamified classroom. Here are four tips to mastering gamification in your classroom.

Since universities typically face reliable bursts of traffic, such as on admissions day, they are not often concerned with the ability to scale infinitely—a key reason for going serverless. By doing so with AWS, the University of York now has the ability to scale down to zero, which helps the university better manage applications, reduce costs, and increase agility.

Modern data engineering covers several key components of building a modern data lake. Most databases and data warehouses, to an extent, do not lend themselves well to a DevOps model. DataOps grew out of frustrations trying to build a scalable, reusable data pipeline in an automated fashion. DataOps was founded on applying DevOps principles on top of data lakes to help build automated solutions in a more agile manner. With DataOps, users apply principles of data processing on the data lake to curate and collect the transformed data for downstream processing. One reason that DevOps was hard on databases was because testing was hard to automate on such systems. At California State University Chancellors Office (CSUCO), we took a different approach by residing most of our logic with a programming framework that allows us to build a testable platform. Learn how to apply DataOps in ten steps.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe in the initial months of 2020, colleges and universities saw their regular learning plans upended. In many instances, in only a week, higher education institutions reconfigured their pedagogical infrastructure for hundreds or thousands of students with widely varying requirements and learning environments. Given the circumstances and the tight timeframe, it was natural for many schools to rely on their existing learning management systems (LMS) in order to transition to fully online learning. Learn how Simpson College went several steps further, leveraging its Moodle LMS not only to provide its courses but also to fuel success for students and the institution, and set up a new way of operating beyond the pandemic.