An online academy has been launched by Amazon.com Inc to train students for competitive college entrance tests. The e-commerce giant announced on Wednesday, January 13, 2021 in order to boost virtual learning during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Known as Amazon Academy, it is available as a website and an Android smartphone app. It will offer online learning material, live lectures and assessments to help students prepare for the all-India engineering exam – Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).

As per a statement by Amazon India, content on the platform is currently available free and will remain free for “the next few months”.

For undergraduate engineering courses, most aspirants take additional classes with private tutors but many of those tuition centers have either moved online or shut down during the pandemic.

According to RedSeer consultancy, India’s online education market for grades 1 to 12 should expand six-fold to $1.7 billion by 2022, while the market for students beyond grade 12 is set to nearly quadruple to $1.8 billion.

Indian ed-tech startups including Unacademy, Vedantu and BYJU’s raised $2.22 billion in 2020, which is about four times the amount raised a year earlier, as per Indian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association and PGA Labs.

BYJU’s, backed by US investment firm Tiger Global, and SoftBank-backed Unacademy raised the most capital last year, at $1.35 billion and $264 million, respectively.

Source: Reuters

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