2U

2U, Inc. (NASDAQ: TWOU) is an educational technology company that partners with nonprofit colleges and universities to offer online masters degree programs and short skill acquisition courses. The company manages online graduate degree programs for some of the world’s leading institutions of higher learning (such as Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, and NYU) and provides its partner universities with a cloud-based software platform that is used to mediate all interactions between the students and instructors, including the delivery of rich, interactive learning content. 2U also provides technology-enabled administrative services, including coursework design, infrastructural support, and capital to launch the online degree programs.

EBD designed the core foundational asset of 2U (which has now been branded as 2UOS) that powered 2U’s growth and its subsequent IPO. We designed, architected, and developed the cloud-based Learning Management System that is now used to deliver all of 2U’s online degree programs. 2UOS is a secure, 24/7 accessible, learning and teaching platform that can deliver intimate live classes and educational content to tens of thousands of students globally, regardless of their location with a predictably reliable performance (due to its auto-scaling architecture). Given the large user base of the program and episodic usage-patterns, consistent peak-performance and hyper-scalability were key requirements. The EBD-developed platform is being used daily by leading universities of the world to deliver their graduate programs; they include Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Northwestern, University of California at Berkeley, USC, UCLA, and Yale.