Enabling learning, whether at school or at home during Covid-19
The following post is sponsored by Amazon Web Services
As the impact of Covid-19 percolates around the world, students and teachers facing disrupted school semesters are forced to learn and teach without the benefits of proper facilities, or without in-person engagements. To help students across ages with continued access to learning during the ongoing pandemic, education partners in India have turned to the cloud to enable remote learning at scale.
Online school management
MasterSoft offers e-learning capabilities as part of its cloud-based e-Governance school management system for schools. To support educational institutes and help them deal with the sustained disruptions during the pandemic, MasterSoft launched an initiative to help schools to enable online registration and fee collection, as well as to access basic online assessments during this trying period.
Teachers are empowered by the cloud-based e-learning platform to conduct lessons. Students can assess course material, view learning and media content, submit their assignments, or take tests online. MasterSoft relies on AWS to scale quickly and deliver a high service level.
Hands-on-practice with virtual training labs
Hands-on practice doesn’t have to stop just because the computer lab is not accessible. Educators can quickly set up fully configured ready-to-use computer labs for student projects with Nuvepro Virtual Training Labs. Built on the AWS cloud for the training needs of colleges, universities, and other educational institutions, Nuvepro also offers a range of ready-to-use labs for immediate deployment.
With hands-on practice as well as assessments, students get the real-world training to develop the skillsets they need, with zero capital expenditure. The labs can be accessed at students’ own time and from a web browser regardless of where they are for unhindered learning. Aside from learning new skills, the virtual lab environments can also be used to conduct hackathons, or as engineering sandboxes for more advanced learners.
Go to school from home
To help students keep learning during the lockdowns, India-based Extramarks offered its Go-To-School (GTS) for free till 30th April 2020. GTS is a learning platform for teachers to conduct virtual classes for students, empowering them with a variety of teaching tools in an online learning environment that mirrors a real classroom. Teachers can create classroom schedules, send out worksheets, field questions in real-time, assign homework, and even conduct tests.
On its part, School@Home sees teachers from Extramarks conduct curriculum-mapped live classes for students in Grade 6 to Grade 12. This allows students to proactively employ the lockdown period to continue their learning journey with the official syllabus. Extramarks delivers its digital education solutions for students and schools by leveraging various AWS services such as ) and Amazon CloudFront. Extramarks successfully onboarded more than two million new subscribers, managing prolonged app usage that saw increased traffic of more than 25 times the usual.
A video-based platform for learning
To ensure that students have access to live and interactive access during the pandemic, Bangalore-based Impartus hosted free live virtual video classrooms using AWS services for more than 1.2 million students and 25,000 teachers across India. This is the equivalent of more than 10,000 physical classroom sessions served by the video-based learning platform.
To deliver the lessons to as many students as possible, Impartus rapidly onboarded more than 200 educational institutions including the Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi (IIT Delhi), Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS, Pilani), Sri Ramaswamy Memorial (SRM) Institute of Science and Technology. As of end-April 2020, more than 1.5 million lectures were recorded.
Training teachers on virtual teaching techniques
To help train teachers on effective virtual teaching techniques and technologies, CareerLauncher uses its Aspiration.ai portal that is built on AWS. The portal makes learning fun and interesting for students with a blend of educational games, rewards, and regular appraisals. A pilot program across 55 public schools in Delhi reaching 15,000 students was launched on March 26, 2020. The program has since rolled out to an additional 1,200 schools and 190,000 students in Delhi.
Educators transitioning to remote learning can visit our Webinar Series on Remote Learning for on-demand webinars put together by other educators. The AWS Educate site also offers additional resources to help you and your teams.