08 Jun 05 Dial India for tutors
UPDATE: Was reading Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” (amazon, singapore nlb) and came across this tutor outsourcing happening in Singapore
Raghuram Rajan, the director of research for the International Monetary Fund, sits on the board of a company that puts Indian students to work tutoring students in Singapore. The students, from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, go online to help students in Singapore, from grade six to twelve, on their math homework. They also help teachers in Singapore develop lesson plans and prepare Powerpoint presentations or jazzy ways to teach math. The company, called Heymath.com is paid for by the schools in Singapore. Cambridge University in England is also part of this equation, providing the overall quality controls and certifying the lesson plans and teaching methods.
csmonitor.com has a story on long distance tutoring (via Weblogg-ed)
Somit Basak’s tutoring style is hardly unusual. The engineering graduate spices up lessons with games, offers rewards for excellent performance, and tries to keep his students’ interest by linking the math formulas they struggle with to real-life examples they can relate to.
Unlike most tutors, however, Mr. Basak lives thousands of miles away from his students - he is a New Delhi resident who goes to work at 6 a.m. so that he can chat with American students doing their homework around dinnertime.
This looks like an interesting trend. Kids are anyway more comfortable online. It may be easier for them to adapt to tutors from distant lands.
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this was uber cool. Outsourcing e-learning.
yes, i had heard about it happening in the US, but no idea that it happened in singapore too.