[New Wave] Cloud Transforms Global Education Sites

Digital transformation through the cloud is often thought to impact only businesses, but it is also making a significant impact in global educational settings. As the pandemic (global outbreak) shifted on-site education worldwide to remote learning, this demand has been increasing. The most notable change is, of course, in school education environments.

These days in the United States, to cope with situations where students cannot attend school, remote learning equipment such as iPads and Chromebooks are being provided for home use. However, vocational and technical education has faced challenges. Subjects like CAD/CAM, electrical and mechanical engineering applications, and machine learning training are nearly impossible to conduct at home. Yet, the Regional Information Center under the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in the south-central region of New York State solved vocational education for high school students in grades 9 through 12 across 50 school districts using the cloud. They utilized a high-performance software streaming technology called app streaming among cloud services. This allowed students to easily access and run software directly on expensive computing equipment in the cloud using only a web browser at home. Previously, this technology was used in areas requiring large installation files and high-performance graphics cards, such as PC games, but now it is being applied for educational purposes.

One major concern for schools after transitioning to remote education has been handling educational support inquiries from students and parents. It was nearly impossible to respond to each call with the limited staff available. Here, cloud services that allow the setup and operation of call centers with just a few clicks have shone. Not only traditional phone lines but also mobile apps can automatically handle frequent inquiries via voice and chat. Voice recognition and conversion technologies also enable immediate assessment of satisfaction with the inquiries. The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the U.S., provides IT services and remote support to 700,000 students during unprecedented school closures. After the shift to remote education, the education hotline was able to quickly meet a demand increase of over 40,000 calls per day through the establishment of a cloud-based call center.

Millions of students usually experience foreign cultures and self-development through international exchange student programs, but these opportunities have disappeared due to global travel bans. As a result, virtual educational exchange platforms are emerging. Class2Class, a platform created by the education startup ImmerseU, offers students access to multicultural exchanges through global collaboration across universities, nonprofit organizations, governments, and the private sector. Such rapid digital education transformation demands are also creating many opportunities for education startups.

Online education businesses are often thought of as one-sided private tutoring or supplementary materials focused on entertainment. However, new education startups armed with cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) are differentiating themselves by interacting with students. Ecree evaluates and corrects students’ essays in real time through deep learning language models. Duolingo recommends appropriately challenging courses tailored to individual users among its 300 million users participating in 32 multilingual education programs, enhancing learning satisfaction. The Korean startup Masspresso allows users to take pictures of math problems, and through deep learning-based optical character recognition, it immediately identifies the problem-solving type. Thanks to this, 10 million people worldwide have been able to solve 1 billion math problems.

The global changes in school education environments and the rise of new education startups will open new opportunities for us as well. The cloud provides the agility to not miss these opportunities. It will be one of the things we can do well in this era of transformation.

Seokchan Yoon, AWS Senior Tech Evangelist