Lincoln Learning Scales Generative AI on AWS for Education

There were a few challenges that CleanSlate was tasked with when building generative AI applications on AWS. These include:

Client Feedback and Demand

The primary driver for the project was consistent feedback from clients and partners requesting scalable student study guides and robust teacher-centered course guides, which the Lincoln Learning team could not deliver at scale with their existing tooling.

Human Capacity and Standardization

While Lincoln Learning’s internal team was decently-sized, it was not big enough to handle the amount of content creation necessary with hundreds of courses and subject-matter experts required. By relying solely on the size of their internal team while they were also handling additional priorities, they were limited in the amount of content that could be delivered. As one would find with a team of any substantive size, there exist nuanced styles and approaches that can be made more uniform through a standardized approach like the one established through this effort.

Manual Content Creation Limitations

Lincoln Learning recognized the need to create content elements at scale to support their 800+ courses, including both base/national and state-specific offerings. With growing demand and the potential need to support thousands of course variations in the future, it became clear that manual content creation was no longer sustainable. This prompted the decision to integrate AI to accelerate and standardize the creative process.

Lack of Internal AI Expertise

The Lincoln Learning team lacked the necessary skill set and experience with AWS AI services, making it difficult to quickly build and deploy the desired solutions internally. Lincoln Learning reached out to AWS for recommended partners and ultimately selected CleanSlate to provide the required technical expertise and accelerate project delivery.

After meeting with the Lincoln Learning team, CleanSlate designed a plan that included a multi-stage workflow with Amazon Bedrock at its core for content generation. Through this implementation, Lincoln Learning could establish a comprehensive, secure, and flexible platform for building generative AI applications and agents. The AWS technology would provide Lincoln Learning with leading foundation models (FMs), services to deploy and operate agents, and the necessary tools for safeguarding and optimizing models, along with knowledge bases to connect applications to their latest data to quickly move from experimentation to deployment.

Additionally, CleanSlate provided Lincoln Learning with:

Faster Content Creation and Efficiency

The AWS and CleanSlate solution enabled the Lincoln Learning team to generate guides for teachers and guides for students significantly faster, reducing the time required to produce and distribute resources. Amazon Bedrock allows content to be generated much more quickly, which is also expected to help with time to market.

Diverse Educational Models

Lincoln Learning understood the importance of creating flexible solutions that could be implemented in both asynchronous online and traditional classroom settings. To ensure the product could serve a wide range of educational institutions, CleanSlate helped build a platform using Amazon Bedrock that not only supports scale and flexibility but also meets the organization’s high standards for quality and consistency.

To maintain alignment with Lincoln Learning’s accredited curriculum, AI models and agents were specifically trained on the organization’s existing content. Every AI-generated output is reviewed and edited by a human before release, ensuring the final materials meet Lincoln Learning’s rigorous quality expectations. This hybrid approach, powered by scalable AI and grounded in human oversight, helps deliver consistent, high-quality learning materials that support both current needs and future growth.

Consistency and Coverage

Through CleanSlate’s implementation of AWS’ ecosystem including data and AI resources, Lincoln Learning can provide more comprehensive and consistent coverage of course materials. This addresses the previous inconsistency where individual creators subjectively determined content focus.

Quality and Comprehensiveness

The generated AI content from Amazon Bedrock is considered an upgrade from what was previously built by hand, offering a more consistent and comprehensive solution that avoids individuals anecdotally deciding what to focus on.

Expertise and Technical Leadership

Lincoln Learning leaned on CleanSlate for:

• Solution delivery
• Architecture design
• AWS best practices
• Responsible AI implementation

This resulted in a stable, secure, extensible solution built for long-term success.

Why This Solution Stands Apart

Unlike other consulting firms that often deliver only a proof of concept (POC), CleanSlate built a production-ready, highly scalable, and secure generative AI system designed to grow with Lincoln Learning for years.

CleanSlate delivered:

• A fully scalable architecture, including concurrency management for predictable workloads
• Enterprise-grade authentication and security using Amazon Cognito and cloud resource management best practices
• A platform engineered for long-term operational use, not just experimentation
• A framework for future generative AI expansion, enabling new use cases across learners and educators
• Solutions that deploy directly into production, avoiding throwaway POCs
• Custom-trained AI models built on Lincoln Learning’s accredited curriculum to ensure alignment with quality standards

This long-term durability, paired with the ease of ongoing support and maintenance, sets CleanSlate apart from other partners in the market.

Results and Future Vision with CleanSlate

The project between Lincoln Learning and CleanSlate / AWS was a huge success and the partnership remains very strong. Lincoln Learning appreciated CleanSlate’s ability to quickly immerse themselves in the company’s unique lingo and adapt to the fast ramp-up and onboarding time as well as achieve the results they set out to accomplish. A few of the ways that Lincoln Learning wants to continue to grow the partnership with CleanSlate include exploring:

Personalized Learning

Lincoln Learning understands that AI can be used to enhance its users’ experience by tailoring solutions to specific students’ learning needs. This could be completed through a diagnostic assessment that feeds supplemental questions as well as various other ways.

Increased Productivity Internally

Lincoln Learning has achieved a new level of production and standardization that was difficult to achieve before implementing AI. So now they are asking the question: How can we build on this momentum to continue to use AI to further accelerate the creation of content and courses more quickly? The company plans to explore ways to use services like Amazon Q Developer to improve internal engineering and development through good-quality code.

Re-evaluating Resources

One way that Lincoln Learning plans to continue their partnership with CleanSlate is through understanding how they can continue to use AI to better utilize their existing repository of curriculum and content. They have tens of thousands of learning resources and questions at their disposal, just waiting to be tapped into.

Industry Trailblazers

Since Lincoln Learning has seen the advantages to implementing generative AI, the company is perfectly positioned to be a thought leader in the education space. There is a certain level of resistance that exists and Lincoln Learning is a great example of how using AI can be an “extension of ourselves inside the classroom.”

Publish: 12/22/2025