AWS and Northern Virginia Community College announce 'groundbreaking' cloud computing degree

Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) declared Tuesday that they have made a first-of-its-kind partner degree in distributed computing.

"This is earth shattering," said Teresa Carlson, VP of the overall open division for AWS, amid a morning keynote address at the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. "It's the principal cloud relate degree ever. This can and ought to be a model for instructive organizations the nation over and the world."

Courses will be accessible to understudies starting this fall and can be earned as credit toward a distributed computing specialization under NOVA's Information Systems Technology (IST) Associate of Applied Science degree.

NOVA is the biggest open school in Virginia, the second-biggest junior college in the nation and honors more IT degrees and cybersecurity degrees than some other junior college in the nation, as indicated by Scott Ralls, its leader. "What's more, our plan is to grant more cloud degrees than any junior college in the nation in only a couple of years," he said amid the AWS keynote.

The two-year, 63-credit program looks to meet the requests of the workforce, Carlson said — for a long time in succession, LinkedIn has named cloud and conveyed registering as the No. 1 aptitude managers are searching for in new contracts.

Amazon, through AWS Educate and its associations with schools and colleges, needs to have a functioning influence in setting up the future workforce. "We're putting intensely in a pipeline of tech ability," Carlson said. "It's essential that we get those aptitudes moving — quick, at all levels."

In a meeting with EdScoop after the declaration, Vincent Quah, the territorial head of instruction, research and not-for-profits for AWS, underlined that the distributed computing degree at NOVA is planned to fill in as a diagram for other training organizations. "This is something that ought to be imitated the world over," he said.

The educational modules will cover an extensive variety of themes — from virtualization, server administration, stockpiling and systems administration to application organization, security, equipment and programming.

"This partner degree is mapped to the abilities and necessities that the business is searching for — that is a basic piece of it," Quah said. "Understudies will graduate with genuine, hands-on involvement, and that is critical."

NOVA is now working with four-year establishments to build up a four year certification in distributed computing, Carlson said. George Mason University — additionally situated in Northern Virginia, where a high convergence of the country's tech segment lives and works — is one of the state funded colleges hoping to pilot the degree program.

"I believe it's a characteristic movement," Quah said. "We begin with a two-year junior college. The following movement is clearly an entire, four-year degree program."

In a video communicate to a room loaded with a portion of the AWS summit's 14,000 participants, Ralph Northam, the legislative head of Virginia, commended the association.

"A key piece of the new Virginia economy is developing our ability pipeline to coordinate our instruction frameworks, from K-12 to advanced education, and adjusting our preparation programs around the aptitudes required for 21st century occupations," said Northam, a Democrat. "The new distributed computing system will offer NOVA understudies the chance to pick up an expansiveness and profundity of information in distributed computing, learn important programming dialects and gain the abilities important to achieve significant competency-based confirmations as often as possible requested by the business."

The news from NOVA and AWS takes after ongoing declarations that Carnegie Mellon University will before long start offering a college degree in man-made reasoning and that Virginia Tech is building a blockchain-centered educational modules, with an undergrad minor anticipated that would wind up accessible in the following two years.