(1888PressRelease)
April 10, 2007 - “It was almost 4 a.m. in the morning”, recalled George Forte, “and I was cramming like hell. I gulped down cans of red bull and took coffee breaks every 15 minutes. But soon I realized that if I don’t call on my tutor now I would definitely fail miserably in my statistics exam the next day”. But wasn’t it 4 am in the morning? Isn’t that something to wonder about? Not much, if your tutor is 9 hours ahead of you and is sitting at some location 8,500 miles away from you in India.
In a session that stretched to about two hours and cost him just $18 an hour, the Indian tutor helped George through such obscure concepts as alpha divisions and confidence intervals. He got an A on the final exam. "He helped me work out everything in my mind," the elated 20-year-old said.
Many American students such as George are increasingly relying on out of the country tutors to boost their grades at school and their SAT scores. These tutors communicate with their students over the Internet, are available around the clock and most important of all are inexpensive. This is making education the most recent industry to be outsourced. We call it online tutoring outsourcing.
Tutoring companies have very simple answer to prospective and surprised customers, “If workers in India and China can sew your clothes, answer your computer questions, and process your medical bills at reduced costs, why on the earth can they not teach your children?”
Educational outsourcing has nonetheless also started a fierce retort from teachers who argue that some online educational outsourcing companies may be using unqualified overseas tutors to teach your children. "We don't think that education should become an outsourced business" said Rob Weil, deputy director (educational issues) at the American Federation of Teachers. "People have apprehension about overseas people teaching their children, it just doesn't seem to be very right to me."
To 15-year-old Kimberly George, online tutoring on the Internet makes good sense. She is used to getting lessons by a lady based at Delhi, India and calls herself Seema. For $20 an hour this lady Seema helps Kimberly with her homework in geometry in which Kimberly is particularly weak. The classes are held twice a week, each session of one hour. Using a whiteboard and a copy of Kimberly’s textbook, Seema guides her through the nuances of triangle similarity, proofs and theorems of complex geometry very easily and interestingly.
Kimberly is one of the students enrolled with Transtutors (www.transtutors.com), a Delhi based company whose tutors, most of them with master's and post graduate degrees, work in this new world of online tutoring. Although her mother was worried at first that Kimberly might not be able to comprehend the tutor's accent, she advised her daughter to give the service a try, which was much cheaper compared to the $75 an hour private tuitions her older son once used.
It's the latest form of outsourcing with teachers sitting in India tutoring American children over the Internet. The company Transtutors is one of the most successful examples of this education model. It contracts with U.S. companies in online tutoring business to offer them outsourcing services to reduce their costs. The market has expanded in size since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2002. The law requires schools identified as failing to provide mandatory private tutoring to students.
Tutoring is already a $4 billion business, and rising. Millions of students in both private and public schools are using individual tutors as well as auxiliary education centers like Princeton Review, Kaplan, and Kumon.
Online tutoring is bound to be the future of the education industry and the outsourcing phenomenon has added fuel to the fire. Some people may have their apprehension but some one who has used and gained benefits out of it will not in any case be complaining!
