Modernizing, Learning From Data, and Staying Secure in Higher Education

Raechelle Clemmons leads the Public Sector Strategic Business Development Team for Higher Education at Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. In this Q&A with the Center for Digital Education, Clemmons explains how cloud technologies help colleges and universities modernize their infrastructure and make data-driven decisions while staying secure. To watch the video conversation click here.

How do cloud technologies help colleges strike a balance between the need to modernize and the need to stay secure?
Traditional campus information technology (IT) environments are constrained by space, data center capacity, the number and type of servers, and their ability to regularly refresh technology. Their infrastructure is susceptible to disruption by natural disasters and cybersecurity threats such as ransomware. Moving to the cloud helps institutions strike a balance of increased security, agility, and resiliency. Cloud providers like AWS manage the security of the cloud, offering an additional layer of protection. Users can scale resources without worrying if they have capacity.

How do cloud technologies help drive better decision-making in higher education?
Institutions are often data rich and insight poor. This is primarily because data is not centralized — it’s often in multiple applications, databases, spreadsheets, and under people’s desks. It’s not accessible across the organization.

Leaders at Maryville University in St. Louis recently launched an ambitious project to collect and analyze data with the goal of improving student outcomes. They created a centralized repository for student data, which they can pull from to gain holistic insights.

Maryville leaders know that students who thrive in their first semester are more likely to graduate. So, we worked with them to review and bring their data sources together. In six weeks, they started tackling the problem of who was at risk in the first semester. They created text-based nudges to improve outcomes for those students. In a cloud environment you can start small and scale. You don’t have to go all-in on a solution that could take months or years to  implement. You can get started quickly.

How does the cloud help colleges create a seamless user experience?
Cloud can play an important role in enabling continuity of teaching and learning, and equity and access to resources. For example, virtual computing labs can provide  students access to applications from anywhere. And cloud-based call center solutions can make the student experience far better than before. At the University of Texas at Austin, AWS helped implement a contact center solution with voice and text communications and an integrated chatbot. In a follow-up survey, 84 percent of students said it was easy to get technical support during the pandemic. They reduced the time it took a student to reach somebody live from 15 minutes to under 30 seconds — without changing their staffing levels and reducing their costs by 30 percent.

How do cloud technologies support research capabilities in higher education?
Researchers operate in an interesting environment with rigorous compliance standards and increasing security concerns. And they’re under pressure to deliver research discoveries quickly while keeping costs down. But researchers are

not often technologists. In the cloud, researchers have an almost unlimited amount of access to resources like artificial intelligence and machine learning. These resources can enable them to focus on new knowledge and discovery and not worry about the technology.