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Amazon Working On Education Platform To Offer Free Learning Materials (techcrunch.com)

Posted by msmash on from the fixing-the-education-system dept.

An anonymous reader writes: E-commerce giant Amazon is planning to launch a new education platform which would enable educators to upload, manage, share, and discover open education resources. Earlier this month, the company quietly opened an Amazon Education Wait List to allow educators to be alerted about the availability of the platform. The website currently reads, "The future of education is open. Someday soon, educators everywhere will have free and unlimited access to first-class course materials from a revolutionary platform. Get on the wait list to be notified when the platform is available for all schools and classrooms!" The webpage, do note, could be related to some other project. This isn't the first time Amazon has shown interest in the education sector. In 2013, it acquired TenMarks, a company that offers mathematics learning materials. Amazon, which lets you purchase or rent books for Kindle, is also a major name in the publishing world. Over the years, Apple, Google, and Microsoft have also become increasingly interested in seeing their hardware and software in classrooms.

20 comments

  1. Lesson the first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Always buy from Amazon.

    1. Re:Lesson the first by WarJolt · · Score: 1

      Buy your robot from Amazon.com which will run on aws. It will put millions of service workers out of work and that will further reducing the size of the middle class which only hurts Amazon. Amazon needs to grow the middle class to grow themselves and some of their tech may cannibalize their ecomerce business by shrinking the middle class.

      Just in: Amazon retrains thousands of truck drivers to be drone mechanics.

  2. GET ON THE MARKETING CHOAD TARGET LIST by iggymanz · · Score: 1

    we have a free thing coming out someday! give us your contact information so our tens of thousands of partners, affiliates, vendors, scammers can spam you!

  3. Terrible precedent by 110010001000 · · Score: 1

    This is bad news. If kids get edumucated, they are going to take our jerbs. Keep them dumb and don't let them go to collage!

    1. Re:Terrible precedent by Locke2005 · · Score: 1

      In India, the TOP priority of every parent is to make sure their kids all get college degrees... and those are the people that are taking our "jerbs".

      --
      I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    2. Re:Terrible precedent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, collage is a very dangerous art form. You need to go to college for so many reasons it's unbelievable. I really hope you're a kid and not some 40 year old.

  4. (Yawn) Wake me when... by taiwanjohn · · Score: 1

    ...it can teach me how to get a "single-click" patent.

    --
    XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
  5. It's about time! by Locke2005 · · Score: 1

    Education is the only place where open source makes even more sense then in software. Seriously, educators should have started sharing all their materials decades ago. Won't somebody think of the kids! Also, $70 textbooks are just crazy when most good teachers could write their own. Good education shouldn't cost a fortune, and it won't when everybody shares.

    --
    I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
    1. Re:It's about time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Very true. Also that's why it's so important to keep Wikipedia alive.

    2. Re:It's about time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People have been sharing for quite some time, such as MERLOT and the Open Education Consortium. It just doesn't get the publicity that is afforded by having the marketing budget of Amazon or Google.

    3. Re:It's about time! by i.r.id10t · · Score: 1

      Not open source, but Freely licensed - Creative Commons, etc.

      Most OERs I've seen are free as in beer, not as in speech, and most you can't host yourself. So students end up having accounts on 5 or 6 different providers and depending on their class load they may have 3 or 4 different places to "go to school" online.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
    4. Re:It's about time! by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

      Also, $70 textbooks are just crazy when most good teachers could write their own.

      Wow that's cheap - the ones the publishers try to sell for first year university physics are typically $150-$200. However writing your own textbook is not a small task. I did this for a course I've taught where the text books available skipped too much maths but it took me three years and a lot of time to grow the material to the point where it can replace a textbook.

      While the cost savings for the students are enormous (which is also partly why I did it) it is unlikely I would have gone to such a huge effort had the the standard text books been a lot better because faculty don't really get any credit for writing a non-peer reviewed book.

    5. Re:It's about time! by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

      But one's it's done in some settings the only updates each year or more often are just changing the test questions / moving stuff around.

    6. Re:It's about time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There's the Open Stax College project that is doing just that.

    7. Re:It's about time! by serviscope_minor · · Score: 1

      Also, $70 textbooks are just crazy when most good teachers could write their own

      Depends on the textbook. I recently bought the latest editions of Horowitz & Hill and Numerical Recipies. Both are fantastic textbooks. I've already got great use from AoE. Less so from NR, but I already had the previous edition, so there's less new, though there's still a lot of useful new material.

      But yeah, there is a huge problem in the US where the lecturers seem to require somehow very expensive textbooks that they get a cut of profit from. That's not generally a thing in the UK. Every course had a list of books (often overlapping) which were meant to be useful. There was no expectation on buying any or all of them. Hell some of them had been out of print for 20 years and there were only two copies in the library.

      The only book we had to buy was an engineering tables databook (lots of stuff, everything from tables of laplace transforms to bending moments for common I beam sections, emperical formulae for heat loss from a plate and things like height versus volume for flow over a V notch). Being out of print, they were printed and bound (with agreement from the non publisher) in the departmental printroom and sold for cost. It cost something like a tenner.

      --
      SJW n. One who posts facts.
    8. Re:It's about time! by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1

      True but it is getting it done the first time that is the problem.

  6. wtf is going on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    all this corporate sponsorship of 'free' education curriculums, materials, programs, initiatives, whatever.. smells kinda icky to me. ulterior motives for sure, but what and to what end? surely amazon doesn't want to further u.s. education, because then they'd have less excuse to h1b all their workers.

  7. Sadly, Biased Based Education Is A Lie by zenlessyank · · Score: 1

    Teach them what YOU want them to learn. Control them from the get go. Serve the hive. PS.. Payback is a bitch.

  8. A is for Amazon by goombah99 · · Score: 2

    B is for Buy
    C is for on Credit

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  9. Theft by Peter+(Professor)+Fo · · Score: 1

    How much of the content will be stolen contrary to copyright laws? Wikipedia and CC is already there so what does Amazon bring to the party? Lesson plans they paid for? New material they paid for? Overview of material (you know how much bollocks is spread around as 'resources'. (Hi Jesus!) ) Editing to make sure material is suitable for a wide range of audiences... S-F-Amazon of course