Amazon launches free, crowdsourced, online education service for teachers
Amazon has expanded its online education footprint this week with the official launch of Inspire, an online marketplace portal where teachers and other educators can freely share resources for digital learning. Inspire offers teachers the ability to upload, categorise and share resources such as lesson plans and worksheets, peer-review the content, and create collections of those files to streamline and improve their own lesson planning. The programme is currently in beta stage, is available to all American teachers, and will grow in the coming months. Amazon has been slowly forging its way into education since 2013, when it bought TenMarks, an education app focused on mathematics, then, in April this year, Amazon won a deal worth $30m to deliver e-books to New York City public schools.

Just ahead of the back-to-school season, Amazon plans to make a major foray into the education technology market for primary and secondary schools, a territory that Apple, Google and Microsoft have heavily staked out.

Monday morning, Amazon said that it would introduce an online marketplace with tens of thousands of free lesson plans, worksheets and other instructional materials for teachers in late August or early September.

Called Amazon Inspire, the education site has features that may seem familiar to frequent Amazon shoppers. Search bar at the top of the page? Check. User reviews? Check. Star ratings for each product? Check.

By starting out with a free resources service for teachers, Amazon is establishing a foothold that could expand into a one-stop shopping marketplace — not just for paid learning materials, but for schools’ wider academic and institutional software needs, said Tory Patterson, co-founder of Owl Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in ed tech start-ups.