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Building on the work we and our partners have been doing for many years, Amazon is committing up to $100 million in cloud technology and technical resources to help existing specialized education organizations reach more students by creating new and innovative digital learning solutions. part of the AWS Education Equity Initiative.
Work to date
AWS and Amazon have a long-standing commitment to learning and education. Here’s a sample of what we’ve already done:
AWS AI & ML Scholarship Program – This program awarded $28 million in scholarships to approximately 6,000 students.
University of Machine Learning – MLU offers a free program to help community colleges and historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) teach data management, artificial intelligence and machine learning concepts. The program is designed to address opportunity gaps by supporting students who are historically underserved and underrepresented in technology fields.
Future Amazon Engineer – As of 2021, up to $46 million in scholarships have been awarded to 1,150 students through this program. Last year, more than 2.1 million students completed over 17 million hours of STEM education, literacy and career exploration courses through this and other Amazon philanthropy education programs in the United States. I was able to speak at one such session last year and it was an amazing experience:
Free cloud training – At the end of 2020, we set a goal to help 29 million people develop their technical skills with free cloud computing training by 2025. We’ve been working hard and we’ve met this goal a year ahead of schedule!
There’s more to it
Despite all the work and progress, there is still work to be done. The future is certainly not evenly distributed: more than half a billion students today cannot be reached with digital learning.
We believe that generative AI can amplify the good work that socially focused edtech organizations, nonprofits, and governments are already doing. Our goal is to enable them to build new and innovative digital learning systems that can expand their work and enable them to reach a larger audience.
With the launch of the AWS Education Equity Initiative, we want to help pave the way for a new generation of technology pioneers who are building powerful tools, training underlying models at scale, and building AI teacher assistants.
Over the next five years, we will invest up to $100 million in cloud technologies and end-to-end technical consulting. Awardees will have access to AWS’ portfolio of services and technical expertise to build and scale learning management systems, mobile apps, chatbots and other digital learning tools. As part of the application process, applicants will be asked to demonstrate how their proposed solution will benefit students from underserved and underrepresented communities.
As I mentioned, our partners are already doing some great work in this area. For example:
Code.org has already used AWS to customize its free computer science curriculum for millions of students in more than 100 countries. With this initiative, Amazon will expand its use of Bedrock to provide automated grading of student projects, freeing up time for educators to focus on individualized teaching and learning.
Rocket learning focuses on early childhood education in India. They will use Amazon Q in QuickSight to improve learning outcomes for more than three million children.
I am very excited about this initiative and look forward to how it will help create and nurture the next generation of technology pioneers!
— Jeff;
