Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with Amazon India Chief Amit Agarwal at 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 going deeper into education with a new learning platform designed to help students in India access prestigious engineering colleges.
The so-called Amazon Academy, announced Wednesday, will be available via 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 technical colleges in India.
Amazon said Amazon Academy will feature curated learning materials, live lectures, and assessments in math, physics, and chemistry. The platform will also feature live mock tests designed to mimic the JEE exam experience.
“Amazon Academy aims to provide affordable, high-quality education to everyone, 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 outcomes while empowering educators and content partners to reach millions of students. Our primary focus has been on content quality, deep learning analytics and student experience. technical aspirants to better prepare and edge in JEE. “
Amazon said the content is currently available for free and will “stay that way for the next few months,” suggesting it will eventually start charging students.
Amazon has a number of other educational platforms and initiatives, including AWS Educate, which is designed to help people get to grips with 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.
American fellow technology giants Google and Apple have their own educational offerings. For example, Google for Education offers customizable versions of various Google products, while Apple offers discounts to students and teachers on the hardware.
Amazon in India
With more than 1.3 billion people, India is a huge market. Amazon has expanded its operations in recent years in the country, which still has a relatively burgeoning e-commerce market compared to neighboring China and countries in the West.
Reports suggest Amazon now has 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 needed to hire an additional 50,000 temporary workers in India to meet Covid’s demand.
The Seattle-based tech giant opened a massive new office in December 2019 with space for more than 15,000 employees in Hyderabad, said to be the company’s largest building in the world.
Amazon’s online career portal reveals that the company is looking for software development and front-end engineers in India to work on Amazon Pay, an online payment processing service owned by Amazon.
“We are looking for Sr. Engineers to build a payment platform that will provide new payment mechanisms to our millions of customers and enable the ‘cash to digital’ economy,” read a vacancy notice.
It continues, “Amazon India Payments has a bold vision to become the most trusted, widely accepted payment solution on Amazon and beyond, for both online and offline transactions. To execute this vision, Amazon India is systematically investing in local product innovation in areas. of payment experience, payment processing, innovative payment tools and merchant solutions. “