The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated challenges already facing institutions of secondary and higher learning globally, forcing rapid change in their models for teaching, learning and administration.
This is according to AWS Senior Account Manager, Agnat Max Makgoale, who says a recent AWS white paper on Emerging Trends in the New World of Education indicated seven key trends that have emerged among secondary and higher education leaders. “We see a strong focus on flexible learning, employability, assessment, research, student well-being, privacy and security and the digital divide,” he says.
The pandemic fast-tracked moves to hybrid remote and in-person learning, and also illustrated that digital technologies enable more personalised education and assistance, which delivers a better experience and outcomes for students. It also prompted a newfound urgency to develop flexible, stackable learning models in which learners can achieve multiple modules across multiple fields, all online, and stack them up to achieve a larger credential or degree.
“We are also seeing moves towards more authentic, ongoing assessment, and better ways of managing and administering educational institutions,” says Makgoale “All of these advances rest on digital technologies and the cloud.”
Makgoale notes the pandemic highlighted the importance of the cloud, when universities and schools had to quickly enable remote learning in the early months of the outbreak.
“For example, AWS came to the assistance of the University of Witwatersrand (Wits), when the university experienced an outage on its on-premises Sakai learning management system (LMS), when, at its peak demand, 15 000 students were simultaneously online. Wits urgently needed to explore solutions to provide students and faculty with reliable access to the LMS to facilitate uninterrupted learning.
Through AWS, it migrated its LMS to the cloud in just two weeks and ensured its LMS environment had high availability and fault-tolerance in providing uninterrupted learning to students and post-graduates during the COVID-19 national lockdown.”
Dr Stanley Mpofu, chief information officer at Wits, noted: “AWS came at the right time for Wits University in that a perennial problem of the learning management system going down during critical times became a thing of the past. Other than just scaling issues, the negative experience on Sakai was caused by electricity outages that left the university vulnerable to the provision of service to the students and lecturers when hosting the LMS in the data centre.”
AWS, in partnership with ITWeb, will host a webinar on cloud technologies facilitating online learning on Thursday, 22 July 2021. The webinar will include a keynote presentation by the Deputy Minister of Higher Education, Buti Manamela and will examine how local and global learning institutions are leveraging the cloud, addressing the students' experience, and how to improve student retention and improve student throughput. This webinar is part of the second annual edition of the AWS Cloud technology as a driver for growth and innovation webinar series. For more information and to register for this event, go to: http://ad.itweb.co.za/adclick.php?bannerid=49394&zoneid=0&source=&dest=https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/cloud-technology-as-a-driver-for-growth-and-innovation-2021-webinar-series/