India's e-tutors for UK Kids

Call centers charge £50 a month for unlimited individual help to
pupils thousands of miles away

When Kelsey Baird began worrying about the complexity of AS-level biology she
got a tutor from India. It is more than 4,000 miles from her boarding school in
Fife to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, but a new e-tutoring system makes the
distance irrelevant.

Across India, hundreds of teachers have been recruited to feed a growing
demand for online tutors. With maths and science teaching in Britain and the US
in crisis, new Indian education companies are rushing to fill the gaps.

Working late into the night to bridge the time difference, the e-tutors give
individual help. Some work in mini-call centers, fielding appeals for help from
children struggling with trigonometry homework. Others sit by computers at home,
soothingly guiding pupils on the other side of the world through the
technicalities of algebra.

A handful of entrepreneurs has spotted the lucrative possibilities of
converting this expertise into services to the West. Online education is
providing a wave of new business.

Krishnan Ganesh sold his call center company to set up Tutorvista, which
launched cheap online tuition services in the UK last month.

'Education is a major preoccupation . There isn't the money
to pay for enough teachers in schools and it's almost impossible for children
to get personalised attention,' he said. 'Tony Blair might be able to afford
private tuition for his children, but most people can't.'

His company offers students unlimited help for £50 a month. 'If they want
to get into Oxford, get a place at a private school, catch up when they're
behind, or just improve their marks, what they need is individual help,'
Ganesh said.

Classes are conducted via a whiteboard that allows tutor and pupil to watch
each other draw symbols and go through equations together on the net, using a
mouse instead of chalk. 'You form a rapport with the whole family. Quite often
the parents will be sitting by the computer trying to learn elementary algebra
alongside their children,' said Anirudh Phadke, general manager of e-tutoring
at Career Launcher, a company offering tuition for the US curriculum.

India's educational standards vary hugely but there is some fine teaching
of maths and science, with a traditional and rigorous approach. 'The real
advantage is that Indian teachers are cheaper,' said Shantanu Prakash,
managing director of Educomp, which teaches Internet maths to American pupils.

India's new online teachers have not been impressed by the standards
achieved by British children. 'They are not really academically fully
skilled,' said Rita Sampson, a former college principal, now teaching English
language online from her Bangalore home. 'There seems to have been a
deterioration in standards. Retention in Indian students is much better.'

Like their call-center colleagues, the teachers go through intensive training
to neutralise the way they speak English and have lessons in British culture.

'Most of the students don't even know that they are being taught by
someone in India. We don't give ourselves Western names, although we are
trained in US accents. Quite often when we tell students in the US that we are
from India, they think we mean Indiana. Their geography is not strong,' Phadke
said.

A glossary of UK slang has been compiled to help tutors navigate the
peculiarities of teenage vernacular - explaining expressions such as 'bunking
off', 'dodgy' and (perhaps less helpfully) 'blimey'.

The Observer