Amazon Working On Education Platform To Offer Free Learning Materials (techcrunch.com) 20
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.
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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.
A is for Amazon (Score:3)
B is for Buy
C is for on Credit
GET ON THE MARKETING CHOAD TARGET LIST (Score:2)
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!
Terrible precedent (Score:2)
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(Yawn) Wake me when... (Score:2)
...it can teach me how to get a "single-click" patent.
It's about time! (Score:2)
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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.
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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 e
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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.
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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
Sadly, Biased Based Education Is A Lie (Score:2)
Theft (Score:2)