Case Study: Idaho Digital Learning achieves always-on, secure, scalable virtual learning with Amazon Web Services

Virtual Learning and the Power of Technology for the Future of Learning

Idaho Digital Learning (IDL) is the state‑sponsored K–12 online school serving nearly 27,000 Idaho students with core, AP, dual‑credit, credit‑recovery and elective courses in cohort, flex, and hybrid formats. Facing the challenges of serving a large, geographically dispersed and rural student population, IDL needed reliable, secure, and scalable anytime‑anywhere access, continuity of operations during outages, protection of student data, and ways to reduce duplicated teacher work across multiple LMS platforms.

To solve this, IDL migrated fully to AWS in 2014, using EC2, S3, CloudFront, Route 53 and AWS networking and security services (VPNs, NAT, IAM/MFA) with encrypted Glacier backups. The move delivered always‑on access with failovers for continuity, stronger data security and simpler compliance, cost‑effective offsite backups, and greater efficiency—an S3-based, LMS‑agnostic content store let teachers develop content once and embed it across systems, saving substantial development time.

Idaho Digital Learning

William Dembi

Infrastructure Specialist