Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos joins Amit Agarwal, CEO of Amazon India, 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 pushes deeper into education with a new learning platform designed to help students in India get into prestigious engineering colleges.
The so-called Amazon Academy, which was announced on Wednesday, will be available via a new Android app and a website. It is designed to help students prepare for the Joint Admission Exam, which is an assessment that is allowed for admission to certain engineering colleges in India.
Amazon said Amazon Academy will include composite learning materials, live lectures and assessments in math, physics and chemistry. The platform also features live virtual tests designed to mimic the JEE exam experience.
“Amazon Academy aims to provide affordable, high-quality education to all, starting with those preparing for entrance exams for engineering,” said Amol Gurwara, director of education at Amazon India, in a statement.
“Our mission is to help students achieve their outcomes, while also empowering educators and content partners to reach millions of students. Our primary focus has been on content quality, deep learning analysis and student experience. This launch will empower aspirants of engineering helps to better prepare and gain the lead in JEE. “
Amazon said the content is currently available for free and that it will be in the next few months, indicating that it is finally starting to charge students.
Amazon has a number of other educational platforms and initiatives, including AWS Educate, designed to help people tackle 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.
Fellow US technology giants Google and Apple have their own training offerings. For example, Google for Education offers customizable versions of various Google products, while Apple offers discounts to students and teachers on their hardware.
Amazon in India
Home to more than 1.3 billion people, India is a huge market. Amazon has expanded its operations in the country over the past few years, which still has a relatively emerging e-commerce market compared to its neighbor China and countries in the West.
Reports indicate that Amazon now 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 would have to hire another 50,000 temporary workers in India to meet Covid’s demand.
The technology giant, headquartered in Seattle, opened a large new office in December 2019 with space for more than 15,000 employees in Hyderabad, which is said to be the largest building in the world.
Amazon’s online career portal shows that the company is looking for software development engineers and leading 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 provides new payment mechanisms for our millions of customers and enables the ‘cash to digital’ economy,” reads one job advertisement.
It goes on to say: “Amazon India Payments has a bold vision to become the most trusted, widely accepted payment solution on and off Amazon, for online as well as offline transactions. To carry out this vision, Amazon India is systematically investing in local product innovation in areas of payment experience, payment processing, innovative payment instruments and merchant solutions. ‘