Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced that Firstlight, a leading educational content management platform in the Philippines, is using AWS generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) to make education more accessible worldwide.
Now using AWS, Firstlight delivers high-quality, interactive elearning content—including dynamic graphics, structured lessons, and short films—for subjects like history, economics, and current events. The platform serves more than 30,000 learners in the Philippines and has partnerships with over 1,500 learning institutions in 80 countries. With AWS Gen AI services, Firstlight has cut full-length documentary production time from two years to just three months. The EdTech company can also produce short explainer videos and develop curricula and training kits in mere days rather than weeks, helping meet the growing demand for educational multimedia content.
Juhainah Turqueza, Social Studies subject area coordinator of De La Salle Santiago Zobel School, said, “Firstlight has amplified the voice of humanity in the age of AI, nurturing responsible citizenship, socio-cultural sensitivity, and sustainability among our young learners. Firstlight has empowered us to help students think critically and engage meaningfully with the world around them. Through impactful storytelling and the dedicated work of the Firstlight team, our community continues to contribute to nation-building and to bring positive change to society with purpose and heart.”
Recent research shows that well-designed eLearning courses can improve academic performance by combining structured resources like text with interactive tools and multimedia content like video, pictures, and animation. Firstlight previously used online stock video libraries that lacked precise scenes, requiring costly and time-consuming physical video shoots or old-fashioned animation. These manual production steps restricted scalability and slowed content delivery. The EdTech streamlined its production processes on AWS to deliver engaging material easily and cost-effectively.
To accelerate and simplify video production, Firstlight uses Amazon Nova Reel, a proprietary multimodal foundation model designed for enterprise-level use via Amazon Bedrock. This service creates photorealistic videos and high-quality animations from text prompts or existing materials, reducing manual filming efforts. For example, with AWS, Firstlight staff can easily create a 60-second explainer video using natural language prompts to illustrate global events like volcanic eruptions or superstorms, immersing the viewer to drive better understanding of the world. Firstlight can then upload the video for embedding in course material.
This process streamlines editing, rapidly generates precise scenes, and accelerates the delivery of content tailored to learning institutions’ needs and student performance. At the same time, it significantly improves the scalability of content production.
“With AWS, we’ve dramatically improved our content production and reduced timeframes from months to just weeks,” said Chrissie Bellosillo, chief operating officer, Firstlight. “Amazon Nova Reel helps us instantly generate precise, engaging educational content, so we can quickly reach tens of thousands of learners and keep pace with growing demand across the Philippines. The scalability and agility of AWS services have made content creation seamless, helping us meet surging demand with speed and confidence. With AWS, we’re engineering a future in which every student, no matter where they live, has access to high-quality learning—bringing hope to every corner of our country and the world.”
Firstlight also enables institutions to customize eLearning lectures, track student progress, and monitor classroom performance through intuitive dashboards built on AWS. The EdTech analyzes student engagement and responses in real time, highlighting areas for improvement. This allows institutions to quickly spot struggling students, flag learning gaps, and predict potential learning difficulties, empowering teachers to help students improve outcomes. The solutions on AWS are fully customizable, with Firstlight designing elearning content, data models, and dashboards tailored for the specific needs of school leaders and stakeholders.
“The EdTech sector across Southeast Asia is rapidly adopting cloud technology to make quality education accessible and engaging. AWS is proud to empower Firstlight’s mission to transform education through the latest Generative AI capabilities,” said Gunish Chawla, managing director, Commercial Sector, ASEAN, AWS. “By using Amazon Nova Reel, Firstlight is rapidly delivering high-quality, immersive learning experiences that have raised the bar and set a new standard for innovation and accessibility in the EdTech sector.”
