AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing unit, today announced the Education Equity Initiative, which aims to provide “education organizations with technologies to build digital learning innovations for underrepresented communities.” AWS is committing $100 million in cloud credits to this effort over the next five years.
Tom Berry, who leads the education work within AWS’s Social Impact and Responsibility team, told me that this initiative is a bit of a departure from how the company has traditionally thought about these projects. Typically, these programs have focused on building projects that train teachers and kids directly.
“Now we realize from learning from that work — work that we’ve done with Code.org and others for a while — the people best situated to impact underserved community learners are those organizations building experiences there,” Berry said.
The plan is to support hundreds of non-profit organizations globally over the next five years and help them build the tools to teach their local communities coding and other computer-related skills. If necessary, AWS will also provide hands-on help with building and scaling the applications that these organizations will build.
The team already ran a pilot with 50 organizations from 10 different countries. Rocket Learning, for example, an India-based nonprofit that improves access to quality, early-childhood education for underserved children, which is using Amazon Q in AWS Quicksight to build tools that allow it to evaluate the effectiveness of the content they are building.
Code.org, the well-known nonprofit organization dedicated to providing computer science education to K-12 schools is another early partner (and a long-time Amazon partner in similar education initiatives). Code.org rolled out a new tool for computer science teachers as part of this program that is essentially an AI teaching assistant.
“The pain point and problem in computer science education that we see on the teaching side is that many teachers are new to computer science. They didn’t get computer science education in their college time,” Code.org chief product officer Karim Meghji told me. “They don’t have the confidence. They’re looking at projects in some of our curriculum, which are project-based learning. They’re looking at these projects and we want the student to bring their own kind of identity and expression into the project. But here’s a teacher saying: I got this rubric. I got 20 of these projects. What am I going to do with this?”
The new initiative will run in parallel to Amazon’s existing programs like its Future Engineer program and its AI and ML Scholarship program.