Catch Them Young

A New Delhi firm tutors around 1,500 American students in Maths. Around

20,000 American students are being tutored by remote Indians.

Under President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, the tutoring industry in

the US is expected to be around $2 bn. Of US-based Smarthinking's 500 tutors,

about 20% are based in India, Philippines, Chile, South Africa and Israel.

Random newsbytes that indicate there is increasing cross border education.

Tutoring has always been a deep-rooted phenomenon in India. Indian parents spend

as much as they can in putting their children on the road to academic success.

This erstwhile cottage industry has big names today that spend billions of

rupees annually on advertising and brand building. And now it is looking at

international markets.

 But can they do a fair job and deliver quality services?

Defining and enforcing standards in an unorganized, uncontrolled and evolving

sector like this appears next to impossible. The 'suppliers' are both

individuals and organizations. Organizations can have self-imposed standards in

selection of tutors, monitoring their delivery or putting in a mechanism of

gathering and implementing regular feedback. They should of course have the

propensity to do so. The individuals  have more-or-less a free reign. The

only control on them can come from the students themselves. If a teacher's

students do well in exams, he gets the benefits of word of mouth. And vice

versa.

In other forms of outsourcing clients are well protected by SLAs and defined

business practices. You cannot have effective SLAs for education. In this type

of service where quality standards can't be enforced, the responsibility of

maintaining standards will fall upon individuals providing the service.

What does the industry size look like? No surveys so far have been done. But

back of the envelope numbers are illuminating. Let us assume about 100,000

students across the world avail e-tutoring in a year for 35 weeks and 5 hours

per week. At $10 an hour, this translates to about $175 mn or Rs 800 crore. That

is not even a scale four tremor for the organized IT industry. But for the

education business and for the individuals it is a scale 8 quake. Going by the

same approximations, a company teaching about 500 students every month can make

about $100,000. And an individual handling 5 students with 5 hours a week study

time for each student can make $ 1,000 a month.  

No doubt, it's an interesting business model. Does that mean many Indian

teachers will see this as a quick money earning opportunity and take to the Net,

and hence to technology, more easily than it was happening earlier? Questions

remain:

• Will this service be primarily dominated by young teachers who have been
  
  brought up on the staple diet of the Internet, or will older and more
  
  traditional teachers too embrace it happily?
• Is it possible to build good quality with limited face-to-face
  
  interaction?
• Will this inspire the less gifted teachers or even the crooks to climb
  
  aboard?
• Are Indian teachers fully conversant with the needs of the American
  
  students?
• Will this activity be limited to NRIs?
• Do the children really find this service helpful?
• In case of a dispute and absence of an SLA, which country's laws will
  
  come into play?

Answers? At the moment most would be guesses. What is clear is that there is

a new market opportunity opening up. We must make the best use of it. That also

includes handling the business in a manner that gives long-term growth.

Maintenance of standards will make or break this business line.

The author is editor-in-chief of CyberMedia, the publisher of Dataquest. He

can be reached at shyamm@cybermedia.co.in