How AWS and its customers are helping India’s students and teachers learn and educate without disruption

Across India, students and teachers are waking up to a new reality as COVID-19 forces them to continue to learn and teach, without the benefit of on-premises classrooms and books, or in-person engagement. Impartus and CareerLauncher, and partners like Intel are using AWS, to quickly and securely enable remote learning solutions at scale, so students can continue their education anywhere, anytime - without compromising their learning experience.

Impartus – a Bangalore-based education technology company specialising in online video technology solutions – will host free live virtual video classrooms on AWS untill April 30, 2020, for more than 400,000 students and 24,000 teachers across India. That’s the online equivalent of 10,000 physical classrooms. Using AWS services, Impartus has on-boarded more than 50 educational institutions such as 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, and many more, as they moved quickly to deliver education virtually.

CareerLauncher is working with the Delhi Government to help train teachers in India’s national capital on effective virtual teaching techniques and technologies using CareerLauncher’s Aspiration.ai portal built on AWS. The portal blends learning, fun, parenting, and mentoring to provide offline learning resources with practice tests, educational games, and career guidance. A pilot program across 55 public schools in Delhi reaching 15,000 students launched on March 26, 2020. By April, the program is expected to roll out across an additional 1,200 schools and 190,000 students in Delhi.

A critical component in fighting COVID-19 is tapping into the collective intelligence of India’s technology-savvy population, including students and Information Technology (IT) professionals across the country. The Ministry of Human Resource & Development (MHRD), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), MyGov.in, and industry trade associations such as the National Association for Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) are using AWS to build citizen services, online hackathons, and solution challenges aimed at addressing problem statements specific to worldwide pandemic situations.

In April, AWS will launch a challenge as part of the Smart India Hackathon 2020 for students in India to work on solutions to specific problem statements addressing COVID-19. AWS also sponsored the Fight Corona Ideathon, working with AICTE and the MHRD to channel the efforts and knowledge of students, researchers, scientists, educators, startups, and working professionals to fight COVID-19. The online event was held March 27-28^th, and attracted participation from over 4,000 educational institutions, 10,000 startups, and several research organizations. It was supported by the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs.

Working together, and leveraging the power of the cloud, AWS, its customers, and partners are demonstrating how a combination of resources, expertise, technology, and human ingenuity can solve future challenges around health education, disease transmission, and public resources management.