Amazon grows its education footprint with Amazon Inspire, a free platform for learning materials | TechCrunch
Back in March, we reported how Amazon was poised to up its stakes in the educational publishing market with the launch of a free platform called Inspire for teachers and others to post and share education resources online. Today, the company has confirmed it is doing just that. It has announced Amazon Inspire, an online education resources (OER) platform for teachers to source free learning materials for students from kindergarten to twelfth grade, starting first as a beta in the U.S.
Designed to look and operate much like Amazon’s well-known flagship site — but without the e-commerce back-end — Inspire lets users sort content by relevance, user ratings and popularity, along with several criteria pertaining specifically to the materials at hand (level, skill, etc.).
This should be an interesting addition to education. Some are already seeing it as a free competitor to Teachers Pay Teachers, and the debate has already started. Should teachers share freely or should teachers expect to get paid from their hard work?
