Industry: Higher Education / Digital Learning & Educational Technology
Location: Tempe, Arizona (main campus), with additional campuses across Arizona and global online presence
Customer Profile: Leading public research university serving thousands of students and faculty members, focused on innovation in education technology, digital transformation, academic credentialing, learning management systems, student engagement platforms, and AI-powered support systems
Customer Challenge
In 2023, Arizona State University modernized its course provisioning system to streamline enrollment processes, reducing delays and minimizing the need for manual intervention at the start of each semester. Robots & Pencils partnered with ASU to build the Canvas Enrollment System (CES), a modern Canvas LMS integration that automates course creation and roster syncing. This new system reduced wait times that occurred previously from more than three days to less than 30 minutes and decreased manual requests by 40%, saving hundreds of administrative hours each term.
Robots & Pencils’ Solution
By modernizing the course enrollment process using AWS managed services, including Amazon SQS, SNS, Step Functions, Lambda, OpenSearch, and DynamoDB, the organization achieved a remarkable reduction in processing time from three days to only 30 minutes.
- Amazon SQS and SNS enable reliable, asynchronous communication across components, eliminating processing bottlenecks and ensuring seamless handling of large enrollment volumes.
- AWS Step Functions coordinate and monitor the end-to-end workflow, improving transparency, error handling, and operational resilience.
- AWS Lambda delivers compute power on demand, automatically scaling to meet workload spikes without provisioning or maintaining servers.
- Amazon DynamoDB provides a low-latency, fully managed NoSQL database for high-speed data access, enabling near-instant retrieval and updates of student and course records.
- Amazon OpenSearch supports fast, flexible search and analytics, allowing administrators to instantly view enrollment progress and gain actionable insights.
Results & Benefits
The new event-driven, serverless architecture replaced a batch-based legacy system with a scalable, resilient, and highly automated solution.
- Reduced processing time by more than 99% moving from three days to 30 minutes and enabling near real-time student onboarding
- Increased scalability and reliability, allowing the system to handle thousands of concurrent enrollments during peak periods with no downtime.
- Decreased operational costs through serverless compute and managed services that minimize infrastructure maintenance.
- Enhanced data visibility and decision-making, empowering staff with real-time reporting and faster issue resolution.
By leveraging AWS’s cloud-native capabilities, ASU has transformed its legacy process into an intelligent, automated, and scalable system that advances institutional growth and optimizes operations in service of enhancing the student experience.
“The new Canvas Enrollment System brings real speed, clarity and reliability to a process that is central to student success. This transformation reflects our commitment to innovation on AWS and how we can collaborate with teams like Robots & Pencils to make improvements to core systems that empower our teams to deliver an exceptional student experience with efficiency and confidence.”
Kyle Bowen, Deputy CIO, Arizona State University
About Arizona State University
Arizona State University, ranked the No. 1 “Most Innovative School” in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for 11 years in succession, has forged the model for a New American University by operating on the principles that learning is a personal and original journey for each student; that they thrive on experience and that the process of discovery cannot be bound by traditional academic disciplines. Through innovation and a commitment to accessibility, ASU has drawn pioneering researchers to its faculty even as it expands opportunities for qualified students.
About Robots & Pencils
Robots & Pencils is an Applied AI Engineering Partner that builds AI systems designed for enterprise velocity and measurable business impact. With delivery centers in Canada, the United States, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, the company combines world-class UX with elite engineering talent for rapid, enterprise-grade delivery. Founded in 2009, Robots & Pencils has earned the trust of leaders in Consumer Products and Retail, Education, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing industries, gaining a reputation as a high-velocity alternative to traditional global systems integrators. Robots & Pencils is an AWS Advanced Tier Partner and one of the 11 inaugural AWS Pattern Partners, selected to help define how enterprise AI systems are productized, deployed, and scaled through AWS Marketplace.
