When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, educational organizations had to quickly reinvent themselves to enable online learning and maintain academic activities.

The Universidad de Los Lagos in Chile faced the challenge of moving to the cloud and building a highly available and secure system to serve 15,000 students – all in three weeks.

The mission was assigned to CloudHesive, a cloud solution consulting and managed services provider, which developed and deployed an entire learning management system, from connection with academics to video infrastructure and security, in record time. The project earned the “Most Customer Obsessed Mission-based Win – Education” award from Amazon Web Services Inc. during the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. This is the second consecutive year that CloudHesive has been awarded by AWS.

“We started conversations to make these scale up and move everything to the cloud – this was the main, the first decision. So, we decided to use Amazon, and with CloudHesive we were able to organize the academics structure in the same platform,” said Luis Muñoz (pictured, right), information director at Universidad de Los Lagos. “This allowed us not to fall behind in the first semester of the educational needs of the students.”

Muñoz and Fernando Castillo (pictured, left), expansion manager at CloudHesive, spoke with Donald Klein, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. They discussed the technology needs of the Universidad de Los Lagos facing the COVID-19 pandemic, the main features of the program developed by CloudHesive, the achievements so far and the next steps of the project. (* Disclosure below.)

Program overcame connectivity issues

As with all large technology projects, the University of Los Lagos program had several challenges to overcome. One was the issue of connectivity in a varied geographic region, which includes mountains and lakes.

“In addition, the Universidad de Los Lagos has the characteristic of receiving students from very poor sectors within the region,” Muñoz said. “So, one of the technological challenges was for these students to receive the mechanisms and technology to have the connectivity they need.”

The organization also had to go through a noticeably large training plan to enable infrastructure usage and management. In this way, it was able to get very quickly 100% of its target audience logged into the platform.

A major achievement, according to Muñoz , was the implementation of analytical control tools that allow the university to collect real-time data and monitor students’ attendance and performance.

“We can reach them directly or indirectly to know what is happening, what they’re needing, which is the kind of academic support that they need,” he explained. “We have a communion between technology and social services that we can provide as a university.”

System can grow with the organization

CloudHesive relied on an AWS reference architecture, which is an open-source platform, to build and accelerate the Universidad de Los Lagos project. It divided the program into stages to develop new features each week and address each of the university’s requirements specifically.

“Within the first week, the Universidad de Los Lagos had the connectivity with the academic sector, on the second week, they had the infrastructure to support two-way videos, and on the third week, they already had the platform completely deployed with all the security safeguards that we already have in all our products and services,” Castillo explained.

One of the main focuses was to build an infrastructure capable of supporting the entire workload of the university when all 15,000 students are on board. Another main objective was to create a platform that could grow without the need to look for new resources as the university increases the number of students and professors.

“Taking the project with the University de Los Lagos, this shows the importance of looking at technological advances and to improve the universities and research centers and how to focus on innovation and bringing the future education now,” Castillo concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the 2021 AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for 2021 Global Public Sector Partner Awards. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE