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BENGALURU (Reuters) – Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ 🙂 has launched an online academy to train students for one of India’s most competitive university entrance exams, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday. Capitalizes on a boom in e-learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Available as a website and application for Android smartphones, “Amazon Academy” will offer learning materials, live lectures and assessments to help students prepare for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), which allows entry to best engineering schools in all of India. The content on the platform is currently available for free and will remain free for “the next few months,” Amazon India said in a statement. Each year, about two million aspiring undergraduate engineering courses take the government-run JEE, for which some take additional classes with private tutors. Many of those registration centers have moved online or closed during the pandemic. India has seen a boom in online education, or ed-tech, a market that only expanded when the pandemic forced schools to close. The country’s online education market for grades 1-12 should expand sixfold to $ 1.7 billion by 2022, while the market for students beyond grade 12 will quadruple to $ 1.8 billion, estimates consultancy RedSeer. Indian educational technology startups, including Unacademy, Vedantu, and market leader BYJU, raised $ 2.22 billion in 2020, roughly four times the amount raised a year earlier, according to the Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association and PGA Labs. BYJU, backed by US investment firm Tiger Global, and Unacademy, backed by SoftBank, raised the most capital last year, with $ 1.35 billion and $ 264 million, respectively.
