Amazon launches online coaching to crack JEE

Amazon.com Inc has launched an online academy to train students for cracking the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for IITs and leading engineering colleges in the country, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday.

“Amazon Academy”, available as a website and an Android smartphone app, will offer learning material, live lectures and assessments to help students prepare for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).

Content on the platform is currently available free and will remain free for “the next few months”, Amazon India said in a statement.

India has seen a boom in online education, or ed-tech, a market which has only expanded as the pandemic forced schools to close. Each year, close to 20 lakh students compete for the coveted engineering courses through the JEE, for which some take additional classes with private tutors. Many of those tuition centers have either moved online or shut during the pandemic.

The country’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, according to consultancy firm RedSeer.

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

BYJU’s, backed by U.S. investment firm Tiger Global, and Japan’s SoftBank-backed Unacademy had raised $1.35 billion and $264 million, respectively last year..