Amazon eyes lucrative testing biz, launches academy for JEE aspirants

The online preparation offering will equip students with in-depth knowledge and practice routines required for the JEE, through curated learning material, live lectures and comprehensive assessments in Math, Physics and Chemistry, it said in a statement. 

The beta version of Amazon Academy will be available free of cost on the web and the Google Play store, it said. “Amazon Academy will offer students a range of JEE preparatory resources at launch, including specially crafted mock tests by industry experts, over 15,000 hand-picked questions with hints and detailed step by step solutions for practice”, the statement said. 

All learning material and exam content has been developed by expert faculty from across the country, it said. In addition to the JEE, those preparing for BITSAT, VITEEE, SRMJEEE, and MET exams will also benefit from the quality content resources available. The content is currently available for free and will continue to be for the next few months, the statement added. 

Each year, close to two million aspirants to coveted undergraduate engineering courses take the JEE, for which some take additional classes with private tutors. Many of those tuition centres have either moved online or shut during the pandemic. 

India has seen a boom in online education, or ed-tech, a market which has only expanded as the pandemic forced schools to close. 

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, consultancy RedSeer estimates. 

Domestic ed-tech startups including Unacademy, Vedantu and market leader BYJU’s 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 US investment firm Tiger Global, and SoftBank-backed Unacademy raised the most capital last year, at $1.35 billion and $264 million, respectively.