 From Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in Seattle, Washington, downtown, right next to the convention center for the AWS Imagine EDU show. It's a second year of the show, put on by Andrew Coe and his crew, part of Teresa's public sector group, really focused on education. Education means everything from K through 12, higher education, community college education, getting out of the military and retraining education, it's a really huge category. And it's everything from getting the colleges to do a better job by being on cloud infrastructure to innovating and really thinking outside the box. We're really excited to have the man who's doing a lot of the work on the curriculum development in the education. He's Kent Eisner, he's the director of worldwide education programs for AWS Educate. Kent, great to see you. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely, nice shout out this morning by Teresa. She said she just keeps asking you for more and you keep delivering. You want to deliver for Teresa Carlson. She is a dynamo and she drives us all. She does. So let's dive into it a little bit. So there was a great line that they played in the keynote with Andy talking about, we cannot be protecting old institutions, we need to think about the kids. There's a story I hear all the time where somebody came from a time machine from 1776 and landed here today. They wouldn't recognize how we talk, how we get around, but they would recognize one thing and unfortunately that's the schoolhouse down at the end of the block. So you guys are trying to change that. You're really trying to revolutionize what's happening in education. Give us a little bit of the background of some of the specific things that you're working on today. Yeah, I think Andy, one of the things that he mentioned at that time was that education is really in a crisis and we need to be inventing at a rapid rate. We need to show that invent and simplify inside education. And he's incredibly, he's correct. The students are our customers and we've got to be changing things for them. What we've been really excited to see is that with this giant growth in cloud computing, AWS, yeah, it was the fastest IT vendor to ever hit $10 billion a yearly run rate. We're now growing at a 42% or 41% year-over-year growth rate in $31 billion a yearly company. It's creating this giant cloud computing opportunity. Cloud computing's been the number one LinkedIn skill for the past four years in a row. And when we look at that software development, to cloud architecture, to the data science and artificial intelligence and data analytics and cybersecurity rules, but we're not preparing kids for this market. Gallup ran a study that showed about 11% of business executives thought that students were prepared for their jobs. It's not working, it's got to change. And the exciting thing that's happening right now is workforce development governments are really pushing for change in education and it's starting to happen. Right, it's pretty amazing, because we were here last year, the theme last year was very much around the community college releases and the certification of the associate programs and trial down in Southern California. And this year, I've been surprised, we've had two guests on, where it's the state governor has pushed these initiatives, not at the district level, the city level, but from the state level, I think both Louisiana as well as Virginia. That's pretty amazing support to move in such an aggressive direction and really a new area. Yeah, I was actually just moderating a panel where we had Virginia, Louisiana and California all sitting down talking about that scaling statewide strategy. We had announcements from the entire CUNY and SUNY or City University of New York and State University of New York system to do both two N4 year programs in cloud computing. And Louisiana announced it with their K-12 system, their community college system and their four year with Governor John Bell Edwards making the announcement two months ago. So right, we are seeing this scaling in storeshima play where institutions are collaborating across themselves, they're collaborating vertically with your higher ed and K-12 and yet direct to the workforce because we need to be hiring people at such a rapid rate that we need to be also putting a lot of skin in the game and that's starting to happen. So again, I agree with Andy said, education is at a crisis, but now we're starting to see change makers inside of education making that move. Right. It's interesting, I wonder, is it, I don't want to say second tier that's the wrong word, but it's kind of what I'm thinking. Kind of these other institutions, the schools that don't necessarily have the super top-end cachet who are forced to be innovator, right? We're number two, we try harder as they used to say in the Hertz commercial. It's really a lot of creativity coming out of, again, the community colleges last year in LA which I was blown away. That you kind of understand because that's specifically to skill people up to get a job. But now you're hearing it in much more kind of traditional institutions and doing really innovative things like the thing with the Marines, teaching active duty Marines about data science. Who came up with that idea? That's phenomenal. Well, you know, data permeates everything. It's not just in pure data science jobs and machine learning jobs. Those are brilliantly important, but it's also in marketing jobs and business jobs and so on. Data analytics, data intelligence, security, cyber security, so important that, you know, thank God, Northern Virginia Community College and US Marine Corps are working to make these programs available to their veterans and active military. The other thing is they're sharing it with the rest of the student bodies. So that's, I think, another thing that's happening is this sharing, this ability, all of for this cloud degree program that AWS Educator is running, all of these institutions are sharing their curricula. So the stuff that was done in Los Angeles is being learned in Virginia, the stuff that the US Marine Corps is doing is being available to students who are not in military occupations. I think that collaboration mode is amazing. The thing that I'd say about community colleges and just this new locus of control for education and why it's changing, community colleges, you're right, they're moving fast. These institutions have a bias for action. They know they have to change the ROI, right? It's about preparing students for this workforce, but they also serve as a flywheel to those four-year institutions, back to the 12 and to the workforce. And they hid underserved audiences so that we're not all picking from the same crew. You cannot keep going to just your elite institutions and recruit, we have to grow that pipeline. So thank these places for moving quick and operating for their students. Right, right. And that's where the innovation happens, right? I mean, and that's goodness. And the other thing I thought was pretty interesting was obviously skilling people up to get jobs you need to hire them, that's pretty obvious and simple, but really bringing kind of big data attitude, analytics attitude into the universities across into the research departments and the medical schools. And you think at first, well, of course, researchers are data centric, right? They've been doing it that way for a long time, but they haven't been doing it in kind of the modern big data, real-time analytics, you know, streaming data, not sampling data, all the data. So even bringing that type of point of view, I don't know, mindset to the academic institutions outside of what they're doing for the students. Absolutely, I mean, machine learning is really changing the game. The notion of big data, the way that costs have gone down in terms of storing and utilizing data, and right, it's streaming data, it's non-columner data as opposed to the old pure SQL setup, that is a game changer. No longer can you make a theory and test it out. The theories are coming, streaming by looking at that data and letting it do some work for you, which is kind of that machine learning, artificial intelligence path, and it's all becoming democratized. So yes, researchers need to learn these new paths to make sense and to leverage this with that big data on the medical center side. There are cures that can be discerned against some of our most pressing diseases by leveraging data. So yeah, we got to change, and by the way, we got to change that mindset, not just at the PhD level, but actually at the K-12 level. Our kids learning the right skills to prepare them for this new big data world once they get into higher ed. And then the last piece, which again, we've seen on the enterprise, we've kind of seen the movie on the enterprise side in terms of cloud adoption, what AWS has done, at first it's a better, more efficient way to run your infrastructure. It's, there's a whole bunch of good things that come from running a cloud infrastructure. But that's not the end, right? The answer to the question is the innovation, right? It's the speed of change, the speed of development, and some of the things that we're seeing here around the competitive nature of higher education trying to appeal to the younger kids because you're competing for their time and attention and their dollar. Really interesting stuff with Alexa and some of these other innovations which is where the goodness really starts to pay off on a cloud investment. Yeah, without a doubt, Alexa, we, AWS came up with RoboMaker and DeepRacer at our last re-invent. And there's organizations at the K-12 level like First Robotics and Project Lead the Way that are doing really cool stuff by making this relevant. Education becomes more relevant when kids get to do hands-on stuff. AWS lowers the price for failure, lowers the ability, you can just open a browser and do real world hands-on stuff. Robotics, AR, VR, all of these things again are game changers inside the classroom. But you also have to connect it to jobs at the end. And if educational institutions can become more relevant to their students in terms of preparing them for jobs like they've done in Santa Monica College and like they're doing in Northern Virginia Community College and across the state of Louisiana, and by putting the real world stuff in the hands of their kids, they will then start to attract students. We saw this happen in Santa Monica. They opened up one classroom of 35 students. That sold out in a day. They opened another cohort of 35 sold out in another day or two. They then went from 70 students last year, about 325. They opened up this California Cloud workforce project where they now have 825 students out of five. These Northern Virginia Community College, their cloud associate degree that they ran in tandem with AWS Educate grew from 30 students at the start of the year to well over 100 now. These programs will drive students to them and the students will get a job at the end. Right, right. Well, and can the school support the demand? I mean, that's the problem we see with CS, right? Everybody says, tell your kids to take CS. They want to take CS. Guess what? There's no sections open in CS. So, thinking of it in a different way, a little bit more innovative way, providing that infrastructure kind of ready to go in a cloud-based way. Now, we'll hopefully enable them to get more kids and really fulfill the demand. Absolutely. There's another thing with professional development that I think you're hitting on. So, we definitely have a shortage in terms of teachers who are capable to teach about software development and cloud architecture and data sciences and cybersecurity. So, we're putting AWS Educate is putting a specific focus on professional development. We also want to bring Amazonians and our customers and partners into the classroom to help with that, because the work-based learning and the focus on subject matter experts is also important. But we really need to have programs both from industry as well as government to help support new teachers coming into this field and in-service training for existing teachers to make sure, because yes, we launch those programs and students will come. We have to make sure that we're adequately preparing teachers to talk. It's not easy. Right. But again, we're seeing whether it's Code of Coal out of Roosevelt High School or the people that we're working with out of George Mason University and so on. We're seeing such an appetite for making change for their students. And so they're putting in those extra hours. They're getting that AWS certification and they're getting stronger prepared to teach inside the classroom. That's amazing, because right, teachers have so many conflicting draws on their time, many of which have nothing to do with teaching, right? Whether it's regulations and there's just so many things that teachers have to deal with. So, the fact that they're encouraged, the fact that they want to spend and invest in this is really a good sign and really a nice kind of indicator to you and the team that you guys are hitting something really positive there. Yeah, I think we've had, it's this FOMO fear of missing out opportunity. There's the excitement of the cloud. There's the excitement of watching your kids really transform their lives. And it could be Alfredo Colón who came over from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, yeah, wiped out his economic potential and started taking AWS Educate and learning some of these pathways and then landing a job as a DevOps engineer. When you see the transformation in your students, no matter what their background is, it is a game changer. This has got to be, listen, I loved watching that women's team when the World Cup and the excitement. Cloud is like the new sport. Robotics is the new sport for these kids to help bring them on pathways to careers. Right. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes. Can the passion come through? Andrew Coe's a big passion guy and we know Teresa is as well. So, it shines through and keep doing good work. Thank you so much for the time. All right. He's Ken, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're here in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine EDU. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.