Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with Amazon India chief 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 deepening its 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 Admission Exam, which is an assessment taken for admission to certain engineering colleges in India.
Amazon said the Amazon Academy will include curated teaching material, live lectures and assessments in mathematics, physics and chemistry. The platform will also feature live simulated tests designed to mimic the JEE exam experience.
“Amazon Academy aims to bring high quality education at affordable prices for everyone, starting with those preparing for the 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 enabling educators and content partners to reach millions of students. Our primary focus has been on content quality, deep learning analysis and student experience. This release will help aspiring engineers to prepare better and achieve the win advantage in JEE. “
Amazon said the content is currently available for free and “will continue for the next few months”, suggesting that it will eventually start charging students.
Amazon has a number of other education 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 educational content creators to Amazon customers and helps them sell things like lesson plans and classroom games like digital downloads.
US tech giants, Google and Apple, have their own education offerings. Google for Education, for example, provides customizable versions of several Google products, while Apple offers discounts for students and teachers on its 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 fledgling e-commerce market compared to its neighboring China and Western countries.
Reports suggest that Amazon now employs more than 65,000 people in the country, although Amazon declined to comment when CNBC tried to confirm the number. Last May, Amazon said it needed to hire another 50,000 temporary workers in India to meet Covid’s demand.
The Seattle-based technology giant opened a vast new office with space for more than 15,000 workers in Hyderabad in December 2019, which is reportedly the company’s largest building in the world.
Amazon’s online career portal shows that the company is looking for software development engineers and front-end engineers in India to work on Amazon Pay, which is an online payment processing service owned by Amazon.
“We are looking for Senior Engineers to build a payment platform that will offer new payment mechanisms to our millions of customers and enable ‘money to digital’ savings,” 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 online and offline transactions. To fulfill this vision, Amazon India is systematically investing in product innovation. locations in areas of payment experience, payment processing, innovative payment instruments and business solutions. “