Amazon Inspire crowdsources resources for educators

Amazon’s (AMZN) latest attempt to capture the education market calls on an old playbook. “As more teachers share content on Amazon Inspire, other teachers will find high quality, highly successful classroom materials”. The company indicated that it was inviting educators to shape the evolution of this innovative service to best serve teachers as part of its support of the GoOpen initiative.

In addition to being the dominant player in the USA e-book and e-reader markets, Amazon is a top seller of Chromebooks, which have seen strong traction in the education market.

The site is now in beta stage.

Other organizations contributing to the collection include Newseum, a museum dedicated to news and journalism, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, a renowned collection of resources dedicated to the Bard. But with Apple, Google, and Microsoft all firmly entrenched in public education-Google’s Chromebook is the most popular school option with 5 million units bought by public schools past year alone, while Apple’s public school sales in 2015 reached over $2 billion-Amazon has taken a content-based approach rather than a hardware approach.

Harnessing the power of its enormous software-as-a-service platform, Amazon is building a school in the cloud. It also aims to provide educators access to upload and share free digital teaching resources, which could help develop instruction and student learning outcomes.

Joseph said the company has not decided exactly how it will achieve financial sustainability for Amazon Inspire, but he said it could be in connecting users to books they might want to buy to go with a unit on Shakespeare, for instance, or in using Amazon’s capabilities in self-publishing books.

Some experts worry that teachers who grab individual lessons from the internet won’t provide students with a coherent progression of skills.

Amazon Inspire retains the core functionality of Amazon.com that is to search for and review the products.

“Amazon is launching its own OER platform because of the ecosystem”.

And sign up here to get alerts in your email inbox when stories are published on Curriculum Matters. Amazon is moving into a new class of business with Inspire, a free educational platform for teachers.

“The reason Amazon is getting into this – it’s like what it’s done with everything else”. The platform is created to cut down on the time that teachers spend searching for digital course materials to bring into the classroom. The US Department of Education is also providing resources to Amazon Inspire from College Scorecard, its collection of critical information for making smart choices about which college to attend.