Serverless Application: Walking into the Cloud at the University of Georgia

An online P.E. course presented a creative opportunity and some challenges to instructional designers at the University of Georgia. The course was designed to manage students’ heart rate activity, but the challenge was that students had to manually download the data from their fitness trackers to send to the instructor. Many students found the difficulties presented by data management and formatting confusing.

“With the wrong report or the wrong format, the data could be unusable. For some students, data management became a barrier to learning,” said James Castle, Lead Instructional Designer at the University of Georgia’s Office of Online Learning. The students and faculty needed a simple yet reliable way to track their activities and monitor their heartrate from places as far as Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Therefore, Castle took to developing a new way to collect the data. Along with the help of Chuma Atunzu, a junior at the University of Georgia majoring in computer science, a serverless application was built.

Students can now deliver their heart rate activity data directly to their instructor simply and easily. “Our students are able to earn the physical education credit they need from almost anywhere on earth,” said Castle.

This article was modified by an article published by Amazon Web Services.