Students in Louisiana will soon be earning four-year degrees in cloud computing.

Governor John Bel Edwards, in partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., announced this week that students in the Louisiana Community and Technical College System will now be able to receive an associate degree in cloud computing that will extend into University of Louisiana’s four-year institutions.

The announcement followed a previous collaboration between Louisiana and the AWS Educate program, Amazon’s global effort to support cloud learning.

“The governor of Louisiana just took it to the next level,” said Andrew Ko (pictured), managing director of global education for the worldwide public sector at AWS. “It’s important at a massive scale.”

Ko spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Imagine event in Seattle, Washington. They discussed various AWS initiatives across the world to support cloud learning and programs that facilitate education through the Alexa digital assistant (see the full interview with transcript here).

Striving to improve employability

The latest news from Louisiana was one of numerous initiatives started by AWS to further cloud education. The company has also developed the California Cloud Workforce Project, a consortium of 19 Los Angeles County community colleges and sister high schools offering Cloud Computing Certificates to graduates.

AWS has also formed cloud computing degree programs with community colleges in Northern Virginia and George Mason University.

“We really want to help and assist when it comes to employability,” Ko said. “As we talk about the growth of AWS Cloud, we’re finding there’s a tremendous lack of skilled talent to fulfill the demand.”

AWS has been active in forming education initiatives to further skills training using platforms such as the Alexa digital assistant. Through an Amazon partnership with the game-based learning platform Kahoot!, high school students can now use an Alexa skill to prepare for the ACT college entrance exam.

“It’s one of the larger interactive ways of students learning from gamification,” Ko said. “Now they can actually speak to it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Imagine event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE