Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with the head of Amazon India, Amit Agarwal, during Amazon’s annual Smbhav event at Jawahar Lal Nehru Stadium on January 16, 2020 in New Delhi, India.
Pradeep Gaur / Mint via Getty Images
Amazon is delving deeper into education with a new learning platform designed to help students in India enter prestigious engineering colleges.
The so-called Amazon Academy, announced Wednesday, will be available through a new Android app and website. It is designed to help students prepare for the joint entrance exam, which is an assessment conducted for admission to certain engineering colleges of India.
Amazon said Amazon Academy will include curated learning materials, live lectures and assessments in math, physics and chemistry. The platform will also feature live simulated tests designed to mimic the JEE exam experience.
“Amazon Academy aims to provide everyone with an affordable, high-quality education, starting with those preparing for engineering entrance exams,” said Amol Gurwara, director of education at Amazon India, in a statement.
“Our mission is to help students achieve their results, while training educators and content partners to reach millions of students. Our main goal has been content quality, in-depth learning analysis and ‘Student experience. This release will help engineering aspirants better prepare and get the winners close to JEE. “
Amazon said the content is currently available for free and “will continue to be available for the next few months,” suggesting it will eventually start charging students.
Amazon has several other educational platforms and initiatives, including AWS Educate, designed to help people learn about Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services. There’s also Amazon Ignite, which connects educational content creators with Amazon customers and helps them sell things like lesson plans and classroom games as digital downloads.
Google and Apple, U.S. tech giants, have their own educational offering. Google for Education, for example, provides customizable versions of various Google products, while Apple offers discounts to students and teachers on its hardware.
Amazon in India
In addition to 1.3 billion people, India is a huge market. Amazon has been expanding its operations in recent years in the country, which still has a relatively budding e-commerce market compared to its neighboring China and Western countries.
Reports suggest that Amazon employs more than 65,000 people in the country, although Amazon declined to comment when CNBC tried to confirm the figure. Last May, Amazon said it had to hire 50,000 more temporary workers in India to meet Covid’s demand.
In December 2019, the Seattle-based technology giant opened a new office with space for more than 15,000 workers in Hyderabad, which is the largest building in the world.
Amazon’s online racing portal shows that the company is looking for software development engineers and front-line engineers in India to work at Amazon Pay, which is an online payment processing service owned by Amazon.
“We are looking for Messrs. Engineers to build a payment platform that offers new payment mechanisms for our millions of customers and enables the‘ cash to digital ’economy,” says a job advertisement.
He continues: “Amazon India Payments has a bold vision to become the most trusted and widely accepted payment solution inside and outside Amazon, for both online and offline transactions. To execute this vision, Amazon India invests systematically in local product innovation in the areas of payment experience, payment processing, innovative payment instruments and solutions for merchants. “