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ZDNet EducationChristopher Dawson

April 30th, 2009

Learning in the cloud with AmazonPosted by Christopher Dawson @ 9:28 am

Amazon announced its AWS in Education program yesterday, opening up cloud-based services

to students, faculty, and researchers at accredited universities via grants and/or free access to

its services. AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is used by everyone from the Indianapolis Motor

Speedway to Twitter to host applications and is highly scalable and flexible.

According to Amazons press release,

With AWS in Education, educators, academic researchers, and students worldwide

can obtain free usage credits to tap into the on-demand infrastructure of Amazon

Web Services to teach advanced courses, tackle research endeavors and explore new

projects tasks that previously would have required expensive investments in

infrastructure. AWS in Education also provides self-directed learning resources on

cloud computing for students.

Harvard, along with several other schools, has already begun moving coursework to the cloud:

In Fall 2008, we moved Harvards 300-student introductory Computer Science

course into the cloud via Amazon EC2, said David J. Malan, Lecturer on ComputerScience, Harvard University. Our goals were both technical and pedagogical. As

Computer Scientists, we wanted full control over our courses infrastructure so that

we could install software at will and respond to problems at any hour. As teachers,

we wanted easier access to our students work as well as the ability to grow and

shrink our infrastructure as problem sets computational requirements demanded.

Moreover, because of AWS we were able to integrate into the courses own syllabus

discussion of scalability, virtualization, multi-core processing, and cloud computing

itself. What better way to teach topics like those than to have students actually

experience them.

The University of Maryland, the University of California, and the University of Texas, among

others, have all taken advantage of this resource. Researchers are also turning to the cloud for

massive data storage and processing capabilities. Malaria researchers at the University of

Oxford, for example, will be mapping the disease using AWS:

Current knowledge is surprisingly patchy and this hampers efforts to target funds

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and resources to the people that need them most. Our research grant from Amazon

Web Services means we now have access to the kind of serious parallel processing

that we need to implement our work in feasible timescales and the storage to deal

with the massive output of that work.

Finally, students interested in cloud computing can make use of AWS in Education to support

their own applications and initiatives, as well as learn about the next generation of computingfirst hand:

Amazon has made a number of tutorials available online to help students begin

exploring cloud computing concepts in a self-directed manner. These tutorials

include advanced computing topics such as asynchronous messaging, consensus

algorithms, priority queues, and more.

Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts. See his full profile and disclosure of hisindustry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and

not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.

Email Christopher Dawson

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