Amazon to shut down its online learning platform in India

Amazon Academy, an online learning platform it launched in India for high school students, will be shutting down.

The retailer says it will end the edtech service in the country in a phased way. The refunds will be given to those who signed up for the current academic batches.

Early last year, Amazon officially launched Academy, but had been testing the platform since the middle of 2019. The academy wanted to help students prepare for college.

To help students prepare for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), a government-backed engineering entrance assessment conducted in India for admission to various engineering colleges, the service offered live lectures, mock tests, and comprehensive assessments.

The comprehensive offering from the firm had prompted some to believe that Amazon might be making a major incursion into the education market and may pose threat to upstarts such as Byju's.

The home page of the website. The images are from Amazon.

More than 260 million children go to school in India and many of them see education as a key to economic progress. Unacademy is a Bangalore based startup that offers online learning classes. More than 1 million teachers in India will be trained by the Central Board of Secondary Education, as well as a range of free tools such as G Suite for Education, as a result of a partnership between the board and the tech giant.

Amazon invests in new ideas to delight customers. We constantly evaluate the progress and potential of our products and services to deliver customer value and we make adjustments based on those assessments.

We decided to stop running Amazon Academy. Current customers will be taken care of in a phased manner.

The company did not say why it was winding down Academy, but it did say that it was part of its cost-cutting measures.

According to media reports, Amazon has begun eliminating roles in some divisions and is planning to cut about 10,000 jobs. Business Insider reported that Amazon stopped teams from making online courses.

There will be more layoffs next year according to a memo written by Andy Jassy.