Case Study: University of Western Australia achieves scalable, low‑cost MOOC delivery and streamlined student email with Amazon SES

University of Western Australia - Customer Case Study

The University of Western Australia’s Centre for Software Practice built Class2Go, a MOOC platform that needed a highly scalable, low-cost infrastructure to deliver video, quizzes and automated coding assessments to thousands of students while operating on a limited budget. To handle student mail and notifications the team used Amazon SES as part of their cloud stack alongside other AWS services.

The solution deployed multiple Amazon EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon SQS, Amazon RDS and Amazon S3, and ran Amazon SES to manage student email and communications; a dedicated instance processes and grades submitted code. Using Amazon SES and the broader AWS platform, UWA launched Class2Go quickly, cut startup costs from a prior $300,000 project to about $200 for the first month, reduced ongoing costs to roughly $1,500/month, earned a $10,000 AWS in Education grant, and gained the ability to scale from a few thousand to tens or even hundreds of thousands of users.

University of Western Australia

David Glance

Professor