AWS Public Sector Blog

Data is helping EdTechs shape the next generation of solutions

teacher in front of chalkboard lecturing students on laptop

Forrester estimates that data-driven businesses are growing at an average of more than 30 percent annually. This is also happening at education technology companies. With new data sources emerging, including real-time streaming data from virtual classrooms, mobile engagement, unique usage, and new learners, these data sources are shaping the next generation of EdTech products that engage learners meaningfully around the world.

Often however the challenge is not the lack of data, but how to harness the data to get the desired output and utilize the data in meaningful ways such as identifying at risk and high achieving students, powering personalized recommendation engines, creating dashboards for decision making, and extracting user engagement data. For EdTechs, third party data sources can provide the missing link. EdTechs can integrate with learning management systems (LMS), single sign on (SSO), and student information system (SIS) providers. They can also incorporate institutional, demographic, or performance data to develop dashboards, and provide analytics to customers. Learn how four AWS EdStart Members are utilizing data to power their solutions.

Save educators time with automated text correction

Created by teachers, Gomining, based in Brazil, analyzes and automates text evaluation and corrections, using artificial intelligence (AI) and data mining. With Gomining, students receive personalized feedback on assignment submissions, enabling teachers to save time and scale their grading efforts. Using AI, the algorithm interprets the data and information being reviewed and populates a grading assignment and test correction data base. Later this is used to improve the algorithm for the tool to review and improve future content by using AI to extract and interpret information from each assignment and analyze content for accuracy, coherence, and cohesion. Based on the material provided by the teacher’s education institution to populate the content review database, students can have content and ideas assessed and audited for missing information from their assignments and receive content recommendations for how to improve the quality of their assignments. This process of extracting data from curriculum text and supporting materials allows the analysis of content from different areas, without the need for human intervention, and with confirmed accuracy of up to 99.3% of accuracy.

“AWS has played a central role in helping us scale our solution. Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon DocumentDB services, we have been able to create a complete environment for our company, capable of scaling without the need to dive deep into micromanaging our solution, since AWS services manage everything. In addition, AWS EdStart provided us with the funding we needed, via AWS Promotional Credit, to get our solution up and running, the training to improve it, and even connected us with customers and partners to leverage our business,” said Daniel Epstein, chief technology officer (CTO) and co-founder ofGomining.

Maximize student achievement through data-driven, community-centered approaches

Intellispark, based in the US, redefines how schools, families, and communities work together to prepare successful, future-ready kids. Parents and educators agree that education is about much more than academic proficiency, yet today’s education data generally refers to grades and test scores. Integrating into existing student records systems, Intellispark helps teachers and families understand students’ daily academic performance, sending teachers weekly recommendations of helpful content and techniques to incorporate into their classrooms. Educators can quickly evaluate key student development initiatives, and focus on providing a student care team of teachers, school counselors, students and parents to help make sure children receive support and succeed in and outside of the classroom. To support their platform as they quickly grow, Intellispark uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to set up, operate, and scale their databases in the cloud. They also use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), for secure and resizable compute capacity, and Amazon CloudWatch to monitor applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, and optimize resource utilization.

“Meeting the needs of today’s kids requires schools to augment traditional indicators such as attendance, behavior, and course grades with resiliency, well-being, and other measures that are correlated with long-term success as well as observational data that provide insight into opportunities and barriers facing each student. Thanks to AWS and the resources available through AWS EdStart, we’ve been able to build data-rich products more quickly and cost-effectively than ever before,” said Stephen Smith, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Intellispark

Streamline and visualize analytics to empower students and teachers

Octopus BI, based in Australia, is a unified platform that uses education analytics to turn organizations into data-driven institutions. Using Octopus BI, educators can view learner profiles that help predict and support student growth through in-time interventions and personalized learning content paths. With user friendly dashboards, educators gain actionable insights and a holistic view of each student, the broader classroom, and business operations. As a result, educators can unify student performance insights to engage parents, create genuine feedback loops, and create more time for teachers to spend in the classroom by eliminating manual reporting tasks. Octopus BI leverages Amazon Redshift to gain insights from data in seconds, Amazon RDS to quickly scale, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to run secure, reliable, and scalable containers.

“With the increasing demand for data literacy and action-oriented analytics in the classroom, school, and jurisdictional level, OctopusBI is very proud to be an early member of AWS EdStart. Leveraging AWS’s secure and scalable technology has allowed us to experiment with new technologies, helped connect us with other leaders in our field, and enabled us to grow significantly,” said Trevor Furness, chief revenue officer (CRO) of Octopus BI.

Increase student engagement with live reporting

SeligoAI, based in the US, uses advanced analytics to integrate probability analysis into recruitment and retention systems for higher education. Probability analysis is generated by machine learning (ML) through the application of multiple algorithmic calculations. The resulting probability values help teachers by identifying core strengths and opportunities in each student’s portfolio and providing contextual intelligence during the enrollment periods. These individual evaluations are supplemented with data points, cohort-based analytics, and unique software applications that allow insight into recruitment and retention trends. To power its platform, SeligoAI uses Amazon Aurora, for high performance and availability at a global scale, AWS Fargate to deploy and manage applications, as well as remove the operational overhead of scaling, patching, securing and managing servers, and AWS CodePipeline, a fully managed continuous delivery service that helps automate release pipelines for fast and reliable application and infrastructure updates.

“On-demand resources such as Amazon Aurora, serverless computing, and AWS Fargate have reduced our costs of idle development, stage, and quality assurance application stacks to near zero. DevOps tools like AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodePipeline have allowed us to launch new application silos for our customers with a few clicks, saving hours of environment creation and configuration,” said Gregory Jordan, CEO and president of SeligoAI.

Explore more

AWS is committed to helping entrepreneurs build the next generation of online learning, analytics, and campus management solutions on AWS. The global focus of AWS EdStart enables EdTech startups from around the world to move faster by providing AWS Promotional Credit, community engagement, customized trainings, joint marketing opportunities, technical support, and access to the same scalable technology used by established companies. To learn more about how AWS and AWS EdStart can help your education startup meet these trends and drive innovation forward, download the 2022 AWS EdTech Startup Guide.

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