Silicon Valley High School serves a diverse student population. Reaching learners across the country, this online school is a resource for students who want to get ahead on courses, those who need to catch up and anyone who struggles to follow a traditional school schedule.
“We help students who can’t do regular school because they’re elite athletes, like soccer players or ballet dancers, or actors,” says co-founder and CEO David Smith. “We like sports students because they’re driven, and online education works for them.”
The school also serves other K–12 institutions. Students can take Silicon Valley High School courses when certain offerings aren’t available at their local school district or when there aren’t enough teachers for a class. “If schools have a shortage of teachers in Spanish or math, for example, they put their students in our courses,” Smith says.
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Recently, Smith and his team worked with Amazon Web Services to scale up the school’s offerings with various artificial intelligence chatbots and failover configurations for classes and data.
Hosting an Exclusively Online School
Building out an online-only school for students across the country has unique challenges. “We have 13,000 videos in our courses,” Smith says.
AWS offered a lot of the benefits Silicon Valley High School was looking for. “It had the most complete architecture, and our engineering team was familiar with it, so we switched over from another platform about five years ago,” Smith explains. “It was the largest and the most established, with capable security.”
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More recently, when the AWS team saw the high school’s capabilities, its team reached out to Smith to work on scaling up the project with new features.
Scaling Up and Backing Up for Students Everywhere
AWS engineers assisted the school in building a scaling platform, Smith explains. “This scalable solution will enable us to grow from the 70,000 students we have today to, potentially, millions.”
The school employs a containerized architecture to achieve this rapid scaling potential. “The way you grow is that when your website hits a threshold, it spawns identical clones of itself,” Smith says.
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To ensure learning is possible without interruption, AWS also worked with the high school to implement failover measures.
“They helped set up a fault tolerance system so if things fail, there are backups,” Smith says. “We’re running in one AWS region, and we have an identical operation in another AWS region. So, if an AWS region goes offline — like the entire AWS U.S. — it’ll switch to an AWS Asia region.”
Fetching the Answers Students and Staff Need
Another key component of the school is its AI-powered chatbots. There are different bots for different tasks, each designed to look like a different dog breed, complete with spectacles and a name.
“Sid” is the school’s most general AI chatbot and can be found in the bottom corner of most webpages. There are also bots for teacher assistance, student tutoring and proctoring tests.
“Our online proctoring solution uses AI to track the students’ eyes,” Smith says. “It locks the screen and uses AI to track the students’ eyes to make sure they’re not looking at secondary devices.”
Smith says his team has spent the last two and a half years building these capabilities. “We’ve upgraded our mission to change the world one student at a time through personalized AI-driven education,” he adds.
