Amazon Academy announced for India as part of education promotion

Amazon is taking education a step further with a new learning platform designed to help students in India enter prestigious engineering schools.

The so-called Amazon Academy, announced on 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 done for admission to some engineering schools in India.

Amazon said Amazon Academy will include curated learning materials, live lectures, and assessments in math, physics and chemistry. The platform will also offer live mock tests designed to mimic the JEE exam experience.

“Amazon Academy aims to provide high quality and affordable education for all, starting with those preparing for the engineering entrance exams,” Amol Gurwara, director of education at Amazon India, said in a statement.

“Our mission is to help students achieve their goals while enabling teachers and content partners to reach millions of students. Our main focus has been on quality of content, analysis of learning in depth and experience of the students. This launch will help aspiring engineering to better prepare and win the edge award in JEE. “

Amazon said the content is currently available for free and “will continue to be so for the next several months,” suggesting that it will eventually start charging students.

Amazon offers a number of other educational platforms and initiatives, including AWS Educate, which is designed to help people become familiar with Amazon’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services. There’s also Amazon Ignite, which connects creators of educational content with Amazon customers and helps them sell things like lesson plans and classroom games as digital downloads.

US tech giants Google and Apple have their own education offerings. Google for Education, for example, offers customizable versions of several Google products, while Apple offers student and teacher discounts on its materials.

With over 1.3 billion people, India is a huge market. Amazon has stepped up operations in recent years in the country, which still has a relatively nascent e-commerce market compared to neighboring China and Western countries.

Reports suggest Amazon now employs more than 65,000 people nationwide, 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 in order to meet Covid demand.

The Seattle-headquartered tech giant opened a sprawling new office that can accommodate more than 15,000 workers in Hyderabad in December 2019, which is said to be the largest company building in the world.

Amazon’s online career portal shows the company is looking for software development engineers and front-end engineers in India to work on Amazon Pay, an Amazon-owned online payment processing service.

“We are looking for senior engineers to create a payment platform that will offer new payment mechanisms to our millions of customers and allow a“ cash to digital ”economy,” reads a job posting.

He continues, “Amazon India Payments has a bold vision to become the most trusted and widely accepted payment solution on and off Amazon, for both online and offline transactions. To achieve this vision, Amazon India is investing systematically in local product innovation in the areas of payment experience, payment processing, innovative payment instruments and merchant solutions. “