A Lightbulb moment for digital education – how one edtech company learned to scale in the face of unprecedented demand
Schools, companies and industries need to maintain their competitive-edge to ensure their workforce or learners maintain high levels of education, skills and productivity. In a cloud-based, work/study from home world, that’s where solutions like Lightbulb Education come in to provide quick and easy training delivery, anywhere in the world.
As Africa’s leading learning management system and solutions provider, Lightbulb Education provides quality education and training solutions for users online. “We strive to ensure that we provide technology solutions that are of the highest standard,” explains Melandi Booyens, operational administrator at Lightbulb Education.
Its edtech solutions and services enable its subject matter experts and trainers to reach and teach any user regardless of geographic location.
“Our mission is to provide mechanisms for quality, innovative and result-oriented teaching and training services,” enthuses Booyens, “thereby enabling them to educate and train users with ease, and at the same time navigate hurdles that might include logistics, cost, time, administration and scalability.”
The edtech company was having problems with the efficient and effective development of its resources. Other problems that cropped up include scalability, on-demand computation and performance requirements.
"With AWS, we experience easy deployment and scalability due to its diverse range of technology solutions and the great support we get from them,” she states. “The range of AWS products that make this possible includes EC2, S3, Cloudwatch, Route 53, IAM, Workmail and Wowza.
Booyens cites one of the reasons for choosing AWS is that it can offer an elastic expansion of services. "This is critical for our Lightbulb LMS service as it allows us to provide the best performance and quality to our end-users.”
Lightbulb LMS allows students to easily communicate with subject-matter experts through mobile phones, laptops, tablets and other devices.
AWS enables Lightbulb Education to increase its operating efficiencies, reduce costs, improve scaling and provide a decentralised service to its users. The edtech company can increase the speed, quality and performance of content delivered to end-users.
The most recent AWS product adopted by the edtech company is AWS Wowza. This server software is a robust, customisable and scalable server solution that powers reliable streaming of high-quality video and audio to any device, anywhere in the world.
The Wowza Streaming Engine software that runs on Amazon EC2 enables you to take advantage of the technology's extensive streaming capabilities as well as the flexibility and scalability of Amazon Web Services.
"We can take any video format and reliably stream it on multiple formats with the highest possible quality to any connected device, anywhere,” Booyens exclaims. “It allows you to build solutions for your evolving streaming needs and also includes multiple levels of content security as well as high-performance and scalability so you can build your streaming workflow with confidence.”
Lightbulb Education operates in multiple markets and industries, including agriculture, construction, education, energy, financial services, health, industry, legal services, marketing and advertising, professional services, retail and sales. Therefore, it requires learning management systems and solutions that enable organisations and institutions to educate and train online.
"We can now scale our services with ease and on-demand while ensuring content is efficiently and effectively delivered to our end-users,” Booyens concludes. “Thanks to AWS, we are now firmly entrenched in becoming more innovative and technologically advanced.”
AWS, in partnership with ITWeb, will host a webinar on cloud technologies facilitating online learning on Thursday, 22 July. Buti Manamela, deputy minister of higher education, science and technology, will deliver the keynote address.
Click here to register.