SINGAPORE—May 29, 2025 — The National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NIE NTU, Singapore) and Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), have signed a three-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to accelerate educational innovation and advance research in educational technology.
This partnership will empower NIE staff and students to transform ideas into functional prototypes, enhancing learning and addressing real-world issues. It will also provide learning opportunities for Singapore’s educators to deepen their competencies in cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and emerging digital tools. A key initiative under this MOU is the launch of the Technology for Education Centre (TEC), a new innovation hub located on the NIE’s campus that will drive digital transformation in education.
This collaboration paves the way for an innovative journey in Singapore’s education system—one that reimagines what it means to teach and learn in the age of intelligent technologies. It envisions a future where every educator is empowered with AI-driven insights, classrooms transform into agile experimentation of educational innovations, and research and practice converge to fuel educational breakthroughs. By focusing on three strategic priorities—preparing future-ready educators, accelerating applied innovation, and positioning Singapore as a global beacon of educational technology excellence—this partnership signals a collective ambition to shape not just the future of teaching but the future of learning itself.
Together, AWS and the NIE aim to collaborate on advancing applied innovation in education and supporting educators in utilising technology to address real-world challenges. The partnership will facilitate the development of new ideas and digital competencies in response to the evolving needs across academia, industry, schools, and beyond. This aligns with the NIE’s mission to develop future-ready educators, reinforcing the Values, Skills, and Knowledge (V3SK) framework that forms the cornerstone of Singapore’s teacher education model.
Key highlights of the collaboration include:
- Establishment of the Technology for Education Centre (TEC)
Creation of the TEC on the NIE’s campus provides frictionless access for staff and students to co-develop applied education technologies through prototyping, testing, and industry collaboration. - Cloud-focused learning initiatives
Learning initiatives, including AWS Skill Builder and cloud-based simulations, will provide NIE staff and educators with opportunities to strengthen their competencies in cloud technologies and the use of AI technologies in teaching, learning, and research. - Advancing applied research in AI, data analytics, and emerging technologies
Joint research initiatives will enable the NIE researchers to go deeper into data-driven approaches to education, translating AI and analytics into actionable insights that improve teaching practices, learner outcomes, and policy development. - Service-learning projects creating real-world impact
By leveraging AWS’s generative AI (Gen AI) technologies such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q Developer, student-led service-learning initiatives will design and deploy practical solutions that address real-world issues, fostering student agency and problem-solving skills, and a deeper sense of community responsibility. - Experiential platforms to spark student innovation with AI
Through hands-on workshops, hackathons, and technology showcases, students and staff will explore real-world applications of AI for education — creating prototypes, testing ideas, and developing the confidence and creativity needed to become future-ready innovators.
The Technology for Education Centre
Located on the NIE's campus, the TEC will be a collaborative hub where educators, students, researchers, and staff can develop pedagogically sound and ethically responsible technological solutions for education with AWS and industry partners. The Centre will provide a secure environment to explore state-of-the-art technologies and applications, while also allowing industry partners to test their technologies in educational settings. With dedicated prototyping zones, the TEC aims to shape the future of technology-enhanced teaching and learning guided by sound learning principles. More features of the TEC in Annex B.
Advancing Singapore's AI-Ready Education Ecosystem
This collaboration exemplifies educational innovation as a core pillar of the NIE’s AI for Education strategy under AIEd@NIE, aligning with Singapore’s National AI Strategy 2.0’s (NAIS 2.0) vision for building an AI-ready workforce. It also aligns with both the Research and Development (R&D) and Community pillars of AWS’s AI Spring Singapore initiative, which seeks to accelerate the adoption of AI by nurturing community development and advancing research in AI technologies and their applications.
Professor Liu Woon Chia, NIE Director, said, “This strategic partnership signifies a shared commitment to leveraging cutting-edge technologies to transform education in Singapore. Together, we are transforming how teachers teach, how students learn, and how research shapes real-world policy and practice.”
Elsie Tan, Country Manager, Worldwide Public Sector, Singapore at AWS, added, "Educators shape our future workforce. By combining the NIE's expertise with AWS's AI technologies in experiential learning, we're supporting Singapore's Smart Nation vision to develop digitally - empowered teachers ready to address tomorrow's challenges with confidence and digital fluency."
New Pathways to Educational Excellence
This partnership will also drive applied innovation in education by focusing on the practical use of cloud and emerging technologies in teaching and learning environments. As part of the collaboration, AWS will provide access to a range of digital learning resources, including self-paced courses and training programmes such as AWS Skill Builder. These resources are designed to enhance the existing digital curriculum at the NIE and strengthen competencies in cloud technologies among educators and NIE staff.
Future initiatives include co-hosted hackathons, hands-on workshops and student-led roundtables or forums discussing ethical considerations of AI in education. Discussion topics include biases, surveillance, data privacy, and human-AI collaboration. The future initiatives will provide platforms for educators, researchers, and industry to experiment with and adopt new education technologies.
Through this partnership, the NIE reaffirms its position as a global leader in educational transformation, shaping the future of learning in the ASEAN region and beyond. This collaboration is not just about today’s advancements but about continuously (re)defining the possibilities of 21st-century education.
For other current partnerships between AWS and the NIE, kindly refer to Annex A.
ABOUT THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION (NIE), SINGAPORE
The National Institute of Education (NIE), an autonomous institute of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore is among the world's top education institutes, renowned for its excellence in teacher education and education research. Founded in 1950, NIE has played a pivotal role in developing Singapore's teaching workforce.
In a dynamic education milieu, NIE prepares teachers with the requisite values, skills and knowledge to meet the continuous demands of diverse learners across the lifespan. The quality of NIE programmes is based on evidence-informed reviews and enhancement, and delivered through innovative pedagogies in digitally-mediated learning spaces. NIE’s degree, higher degree and professional development programmes offer global perspectives through international practicum and semester exchanges, while 21st Century pedagogies, multidisciplinary curricula and service-learning initiatives help to develop the holistic reflective practitioner and educational leader. To further Singapore’s expertise and capabilities in Character and Citizenship Education (CCE), the Singapore Centre for CCE was established with the MOE in 2023. The Institute also offers the only local sports-related undergraduate degree programme in Sport Science & Management that provides academic and professional pathways to sports-related careers.
NIE is ranked among the world’s top institutions for research in education and the education-related disciplines. Its research philosophy is focused on impacting school practices, enhancing programmes, informing policy formation and, ultimately, improving student learning. With its highly reputable education programmes and rich research culture, it has built strategic alliances with renowned institutions in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific regions.
NIE has recently identified five strategic growth areas under a new institute-level initiative, Learning Initiatives for the Future of Education at NIE NTU Singapore (LIFE@NIE SG ®). Over the coming years, NIE will grow its regional and global impact in these five priority areas – Child and Human Development, Values and Ethics, Science of Learning, Emerging Technologies, and Assessment and Evaluation – to lead the future of education and play its part in helping to address Singapore and humanity's grand challenges in an ever-evolving world.
For more information, please visit: www.ntu.edu.sg/nie.
ABOUT AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 114 Availability Zones within 36 geographic regions, with announced plans for 16 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Chile, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.