Eastern IT Experts Present at Conference

Two staff members from EWU’s Instructional Technology & Web Services (ITWS) recently unveiled an innovative, cost-saving method for collecting and analyzing Canvas data using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The method, say Jeff Healy, ITWS’s director, and Matt Lewis, its business analyst supervisor, will position Eastern as a leader in smart, efficient technology and data solutions.

Healy and Lewis shared details of their new approach during a presentation at InstructureCon 2025, a national conference for education technology held in July at the Spokane Convention Center. Their presentation resonated with attendees looking for practical, scalable solutions to data challenges in higher education, Healy says, while underscoring EWU’s commitment to innovation and fiscal responsibility in educational technology.

At universities such as EWU, the vast amount of data generated by a learning management system like Canvas is valuable for improving student outcomes. However, accessing and managing that data often requires expensive, dedicated servers along with significant staffing resources and ongoing maintenance. The EWU team decided there had to be a better way.

In their session, Healy and Lewis detailed how they built a sophisticated “serverless” pipeline. Instead of relying on traditional physical infrastructure, their system uses a suite of powerful AWS tools – including Lambda, S3, Glue, and Athena.

Lewis says that their goal was to create a sustainable, cost-effective way to access and analyze Canvas data that supports decision-making across the university: “Using AWS tools allowed us to build a flexible and efficient system without the burden of managing servers.”

This nimble, cloud-based architecture automates the entire process — from data collection to analysis — eliminating server maintenance costs and boosting scalability, Healy adds.

The new system also goes a long way toward providing faculty and administrators with faster, flexible access to crucial data for decision-making. More impressively, it comes with a significant financial savings, some $5,000 – $10,000 annually.

“Those are funds that can now be redirected to other strategic initiatives,” says Healy. “The intent was to demonstrate an advanced, highly functional solution that is scalable without a huge budgetary commitment or dedicated team.”