Following a partnership with Anthology, Blackboard Learn’s African EdTech services will be hosted by AWS in Cape Town

Blackboard Learn’s African EdTech services will be hosted in Cape Town by Amazon Web Services.  Hosting Blackboard Learn in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region will enable Blackboard to deliver lower latency services to learners, as well as better performance, flexibility and scalability for learning management system (LMS) clients.

The move closely follows Anthology and Blackboard’s previously announced merger and expands the company’s footprint in Africa— particularly South Africa — where several major institutions have deployed Blackboard solutions to support remote and blended learning models in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blackboard worked closely with AWS to support this unprecedented surge in users.

“We have worked hand-in-hand with AWS to facilitate access to uninterrupted, anywhere-anytime learning, which became particularly crucial to institutions navigating the pandemic,” said Oleg Figlin, Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Blackboard. “With AWS as our cloud provider, we are helping to ensure academic continuity and learner success in this time of flux. Over the last year, we have seen continuing growth across the African region — by relying on the global footprint of AWS, and by leveraging their expertise and technology, we managed to efficiently scale our presence and our solutions to meet this increased demand,” he said.

The new regional deployment is available today for new Blackboard Learn SaaS deployment instances and also supports transition from managed or self-hosted Blackboard Learn instances.

AWS Africa (Cape Town) marks AWS’s twenty-third Region, and its first in Africa. Like all other AWS Regions, it is built to meet high levels of security and data protection, and will support clients in their compliance with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA).

“We are proud to support Blackboard as they partner with the education community to steer them through this rapidly evolving landscape. With Blackboard’s shift to the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region, its clients will benefit from a faster user experience and lower data transit costs. We will continue to work with Blackboard to scale its reach, its platforms and to transform digital teaching and learning around the world,” said Linda Siso, Head of Education South Africa at AWS.

About Anthology

Anthology offers the largest EdTech ecosystem on a global scale for education, recently combining with Blackboard to support more than 150 million users in 80 countries. With a mission to provide dynamic, data-informed experiences to the global education community, Anthology helps learners, leaders and educators achieve their goals through over 60 SaaS products and services designed to advance learning. Discover more about how we are fulfilling our mission for K-12, higher education, business and government institutions at www.anthology.com.

New to EdTech?  Read our EdTech 101 guide: https://global-edtech.com/edtech-definitions-products-and-trends/