When COVID-19 began shutting down schools across the country earlier this year, the University of Maryland Baltimore County had a big problem on its hands. There were many of its 14,000 students who could no longer attend learning sessions in on-campus physical labs.

The school turned to eLumin LLC, a provider of cloud-based technology solutions for enhanced learning. In less than three weeks, UMBC students and faculty had an accessible way for students and faculty to resume instruction, which earned both the school and eLumin a “Best Remote Learning Solution” award from Amazon Web Services Inc.

“They needed a remote solution for being able to access those high compute, high graphics, memory-intensive applications through the cloud,” said Mohammad A. Haque (pictured, left), co-founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering at eLumin, an AWS partner. “We had to provide a solution fairly quickly because schools were shutting down and they needed to continue with their coursework.”

Haque spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. He was joined by Damian Doyle (pictured, right), associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure solutions at the UMBC, and they discussed expected use of remote learning post-COVID and the flexibility of cloud-based tools. (* Disclosure below.)

New expectations

The shift to remote learning for most schools around the country has accelerated momentum for cloud adoption. UMBC and other institutions are recognizing that students will likely want to continue with the platform implemented by providers such as eLumin and AWS long after the pandemic has ended.

“We also looked at this outside of COVID as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so they could work from anywhere at any time rather than being tethered to a physical lab,” Doyle said. “Coming out of COVID, they’re not going to want to go back to that model where they have to get permission to go in under limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward, that they have this kind of access and flexibility from now on.”

The disruption and necessary adjustments generated by the current crisis have been a learning opportunity for users and tech providers alike.

“One of the biggest lessons learned here is you don’t necessarily have to get it right the first time,” Haque said. “We took feedback from faculty members in how they were using the system and tweaked the presentation or applications on the back end. That’s the power of the cloud, being able to adjust on the fly.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector 2020 Partner Awards Program. Neither AWS, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE