Amazon has created a free educational platform to rival Apple and Google, Amazon Inspire.
Months of speculation had people suggesting that Amazon was going to create an educational platform that could rival competitors Apple and Google. Today, the online shopping site has announced that they have started a new educational platform called Amazon Inspire.
The idea of the site is to allow teachers from all over the United States to upload and search for different teaching modules and books to use in their profession. Teachers from K-12 will be able to use the free service as long as they have an access code. If they do not, they can apply for one of the site.
Amazon general manager of K-12 Education, Rohit Agarwal told Tech Crunch that, “if we could enable every teacher to contribute resources or help discover them, we could collectively raise access for the 3 million-plus teachers out there.”
Agarwal mentioned that there are more than 13,000 school districts in the U.S and when Amazon talked to them, they mentioned that some have created resources to be used to other teachers or have found those resources to help them.
Inspire will also have partnerships with educational third parties like Folger Shakespeare Library and even the site Amazon purchased in 2013, TenMarks (online math curriculum).
Having those third-party companies inputting their work could make it easier for Inspire to flourish, considering teachers don’t upload that much, but Agarwal mentioned that isn’t the case early on. “Our early partnerships indicate that educators are more than happy to contribute content.” via Tech Crunch.
“Entire districts and states are contributing to Inspire, whether they are creating or curating materials.”
The companies main goal is to help teachers spend less time finding new lessons and to give them an easy to use library that has thousands of educational resources to make their job easier.
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