In the week in the wee hours of the morning six days a week the Saswati Patnaik logs into her home computer. The homemaker and tutor for a Bangalore company called Tutor Visa that is rises early to help American high school students write English term papers. The outsourcing started as a way for American companies to a lower costs by shifting work to cheaper locations. After the two decades that practices has become so mainstream that hundreds of the US business from Wall Street banks to law firms, architects and other routinely outsource to India. In the footsteps of businesses, a growing number of individual Americans are following. The American customers of tutorvista get unlimited coaching in English, Math or Science from Patnaik or one of her 1,500 fellow tutors.
The company’s customer are over whelmingly from the US but Canadians, Koreans, British and Australians also sign up for lessons. To meet this growing demand, TutorVista is adding another 1,500 teachers across India companies offer the service, operating like call centers with tutors sitting in a common office. The companies like tutorvista are now extending the trend directly from the homes of Indian tutors to those of American students. The technology has already made communication seamless from anywhere-India to anywhere-united states. Patnaik is working with students from Atlanta and New Jersey, the logs into the TutorVista portal, using webchat to greet her student. The two discuss the novel and its characters.
The Indian tutors working for TutorVista are fresh graduates looking for an opening in a slack job market, stay-at-home mothers and women with young children retired professionals and even those confined to their homes by illness or other circumstances. In a small Indian towns such as Kasargod in the south and Faridkot in the north where career choices are limited, the outsourcing jobs have become an important new source of income. The slight communication barrier is an occasional technological problem and the quality of tutors present a challenge for the students. Some of the students are outstanding but many do not focus enough, the American kids so not face the kind of academic pressure that Indian kids have to cope with both at school and at home.
There are other wrinkles as well, for example tutorvista has to steer its tutors away from India’s rote learning system to the more open, interactive American way. It is still not modified some critics, who have raised concerns about the quality of instruction and the lack of the uniform standards and testing. The tutorvista says that bridging cultural gaps presents its own share of challenges like the conversing with the American teens. The Indian tutors will learn to use awesome as praise and illustrates a math problem using donuts instead of mangoes.
REFERENCE:
http://www.watoday.com.au/world/outsourcing-homework-to-india-20100409-ryh3.html
http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2010/04/05/outsourcing-homework-to-india/
