MEDIA ALERT
Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University Selects AWS as Strategic Cloud Provider to Become a Digital University
One of Thailand’s leading open universities delivers improved online education to 200,000 learners over two years in 64 countries with AWS
BANGKOK, Thailand—October 6, 2022— Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU), one of Thailand’s leading universities, today announced that it has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its strategic cloud provider. By moving its entire information technology (IT) infrastructure, including 137 server instances, to AWS, STOU is the first Thai university to go all-in on AWS and is now fully operating on the cloud, aligned to the university’s vision of becoming a digital university. Using the breadth and depth of AWS, including storage, analytics, and networking and content delivery services, STOU can deliver a seamless and engaging e-learning experience to 200,000 learners over two years in over 64 countries. With AWS, STOU built an e-learning platform available to students and learners already in the workforce looking to reskill or upskill, enabling 60 university departments to deliver 700 online courses over three months, compared to the five years that STOU would have taken if it had built and hosted the platform on-premises. The university also developed STOU Media, a mobile application built on AWS to help students register courses across 12 faculties[1] and access examination results.
Previously, STOU’s on-premises IT infrastructure lacked the capability to manage more than 7,000 concurrent users at once, limiting the university’s ability to effectively and efficiently scale and hold multiple online courses and examinations. Those limitations prevented more learners from joining courses to further their education. Before moving to the cloud, STOU required students to take their examinations in person. This proved expensive and impractical as staff had to be present for each in-person examination, so STOU needed an online solution that was convenient for students and efficient for the university.
STOU now uses AWS’s world-class global infrastructure to achieve low latency and the scalability to seamlessly offer online services to students, including 20 online examinations that can each support 20,000 students, an increase of 186%. STOU’s vision has been to leverage the cloud to become a fully digital university that allows learners to access education resources globally and enable a seamless teaching and learning environment. To achieve this vision, the university built a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a scalable, high-speed, web-based cloud storage service, which the university uses to securely collect, store, and process data, such as examination records, student registration, and course curricula data. Using the data lake, which stores information such as class size, course history, examination content, and e-learning modules at scale, university staff and educators can streamline administrative work, such as grading and allocating students to different classrooms. This allows STOU to gain insights to make predictions, like number of student registrations or students’ preferred courses, to better plan for upcoming semesters.
For learning content delivery, STOU uses Amazon CloudFront, a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers videos to consumers globally at high transfer speeds. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), a web service that helps customers securely control access to AWS resources, helps STOU manage access to its departmental websites, student learning sites, and online examinations. STOU also uses Amazon Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud, to create real-time dashboards that track and analyze student learning progress. The dashboards help STOU better predict course usage and more effectively manage online operations like examinations.
“Moving our entire IT infrastructure to AWS was a critical step in our journey to becoming a digital university,” said Dr. Sarun Nakthanom, IT Director, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University. “With AWS, we can easily build and scale innovative learning content and solutions, delivering better learning experiences for our students. Our ability to hold online examinations has made life easier for both faculty and students as they are not bound by location.”
“AWS is committed to supporting leading education institutions like Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University with the latest cloud technologies to improve the lives of learners globally with online content that is presented in a seamless and user-friendly way,” said Eric Conrad, Regional Managing Director for Public Sector, ASEAN, AWS. “As the first university in Thailand to go all-in on AWS, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University is benefitting from cloud technology to make better data-driven decisions to digitally transform the way they deliver education and engage with learners off-campus.”
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For media inquiries, please contact:
Saiwaroon Tiranonrungrueng, AWS PR, ASEAN | tiranon@amazon.com
Jidapa Parry, TQPR (Thailand) Co., Ltd. | mint@tqpr.com | 02-260-5820 ext. 113
- The twelve faculties include: Faculty of Liberal Arts; Faculty of Nursing Science; Faculty of Communication Arts; Faculty of Economics; Faculty of Education; Faculty of Economics; Faculty of Home Economics; Faculty of Political Science; Faculty of Law; Faculty of Agricultural Extension and Cooperatives; Faculty of Health Sciences; Faculty of Science and Technology ↑