Amazon is launching a free machine-learning program for community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and minority-serving institutions (MSIs).
Starting this month, the “educator enablement” program will support these institutions in teaching databases, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) concepts, according to a blog post by the retail giant.
The program has been created to reduce opportunity gaps by helping historically underrepresented and underserved students in the technical fields, vice president of Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Swami Sivasubramanian, said.
“Our goal in launching this program is to make database, AI, and ML education widely accessible to all community colleges and universities across the US — not just elite institutions,” he stated.
The educator enablement course materials — including lecture slides, practical coding exercises, tests, and instructor handbooks — were created with input from several school systems and are intended to satisfy standards for college-level, credit-bearing courses.
“The educator enablement program is designed to make it easier for any educational institution to start teaching advanced technologies by removing the barriers of cost and educator training,” Sivasubramanian added.
Amazon aims to make the course materials free on Github, YouTube, and AWS Academy for college students who can’t participate in the program.