Outsourcing Tutoring from India

Z

Zoocat

Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
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I saw a news story on a tutoring service based in India that you can contract for your kids. $99/month for unlimited tutoring. They set up a telecommute system with a "whiteboard" on your computer screen and an Internet phone connection. Teaching is something I never thought could be outsourced.

What next? Will a school district hire their teachers from India and pipe the classroom lesson into your neighborhood classroom? It would sure save the district some money and also put those lousy child hating teachers out of their overpaid jobs too (bad, very bad joke).

A big problem might be that Indian or Chinese or whatever accent. One complaint at major Universities is that the foreign teaching assistants in science and math have such thick accents that the American students really do not understand them very well.
 
Whoops! Moderator I think this should be moved to "other topics." Sorry!
 
Oldbabe said:
Whoops! Moderator I think this should be moved to "other topics." Sorry!
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As punishment for your misdeed, you will be "held hostage to a $1500 PITI on a 30 yr $230K mortgage and $133 extra to a worthless HOA." :D
 
REWahoo! said:
As punishment for your misdeed, you will be "held hostage to a $1500 PITI on a 30 yr $230K mortgage and $133 extra to a worthless HOA." :D
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LOL! Not such a bad fate, considering everything in life. :D
 
An HOA is as good as those willing to serve and contribute, IMO. But if we could get this back to the interesting subject which started it ...

I have seen possibly the same service as Old babe mentioned. It is interesting in many ways and could be either very bad or very good.

One of my goals in life is to wake people up to the fact that "distance" learning is a very viable alternative in today's energy-starved world.

To slug the service mentioned here as "Outsourcing" would imply there was such a service already going in the US and it was relocated to India. I think this service is a pure example of entrepreneurism ... someone in India saw a need (tutorials, not classroom teaching), saw a resource, educated, eager to both learn and teach young professionals, and the magic of the Internet to marry them up.

Is it worth $99 a month? Only the parent's involved might be able to tell, but when I see what a lot of people spend on their cable TV, cell phone bills, etc. it doesn't seem like a lot to risk. As an expat living in the Philippines with the same sort of resources at hand (and many with better English skills than India) I have often toyed with this very idea.

To bring the economics into scope ... let's assume such a service would pay perhaps 50% to the "employees". So a tutor with four clients could potentially make $200 a month. That's the kind of salary most office workers get here and even counting prep time and administrivia they wouldn't have to work 60 or more hours a week (a standard work week here) to earn it.

On the customer side, what would they get? Scheduled or "on demand" service on a regular basis (one of the real keys to learning, keeping at it, day after day). No "mom's taxi" costs, safe, in-home environment and a chance for the student to learn more about the whole rest of the world.

Could this service be done strictly US-based? Probably ... the numbers might work out differently but the real issue I see is, nobody is offering it.

The accent/pronunciation issues are there, certainly, but they are far from insurmountable. In the little side-bar comment complaining about the language skills of the TA's and Adjunct's in universities .... wonder why those fellows and gals got selected to _be_ adjuncts and TA's?
 
Cute Fuzzy Bunny said:
Can I take a survey? :LOL:
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Sure, as long as we both agree on what questions we ask them. That way we can eliminate the "are you still beating your wife" and "how bad is your HOA" category. :)

To get back on topic, maybe you could outsource the survey to India and get Bob from Bangalore to do the survey?
 
How about outsourcing the HOA to India? That hasn't been discussed, has it?
 
Interesting ... I should have looked on Craigslist first, shouldn't I? They have literally everything there it sometimes seems.

You are aware, I imagine, that many US school districts are actively recruiting :"live" teachers from both India and the Philippines? One of my nephews, currently working on his masters in education here in Manila recently attended a job fair hosted by (IIRC Noefolk VA.). He was offered a job at what to him was a literally mgnificaent salary but upon further investigation decided to pass and contunue his degree program here ... becuase of the demographics of where they wanted him to work ... he's very allergic to being stabbed on the job.

The number one reason Filpino teachers who went to the US on teaching contracts failed in the past few years is they could not cope with US classroom behavior and parental demands ... in the Philippines no one gives the "guff" to teachers that is nowadays commonplace in the US.

But it's for sure that more and more internationalization is going to happen, just hope it is managed well.
 
RP said:
Interesting ... I should have looked on Craigslist first, shouldn't I? They have literally everything there it sometimes seems.

You are aware, I imagine, that many US school districts are actively recruiting :"live" teachers from both India and the Philippines? One of my nephews, currently working on his masters in education here in Manila recently attended a job fair hosted by (IIRC Noefolk VA.). He was offered a job at what to him was a literally mgnificaent salary but upon further investigation decided to pass and contunue his degree program here ... becuase of the demographics of where they wanted him to work ... he's very allergic to being stabbed on the job.

The number one reason Filpino teachers who went to the US on teaching contracts failed in the past few years is they could not cope with US classroom behavior and parental demands ... in the Philippines no one gives the "guff" to teachers that is nowadays commonplace in the US.

But it's for sure that more and more internationalization is going to happen, just hope it is managed well.
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There was a scam here several years ago; teachers were recruited from the Philippines and when they arrived no one local had heard about them.
 
The ironic thing about my job is that some of our software has automated what used to be a manual process in India. I may have displaced an Indian worker or two.
 
bssc said:
The ironic thing about my job is that some of our software has automated what used to be a manual process in India. I may have displaced an Indian worker or two.
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And do you get customer support from China or Russia to answer the questions for the Indian workers that have to work with that software ::) ::) ::)
 
Khan said:
There was a scam here several years ago; teachers were recruited from the Philippines and when they arrived no one local had heard about them.
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Can you tell me where "here" is, Kahn? And some kind of reference to the incident(s) you mentioned. There have been several scams that I know of in the past few years (mainly phony recruiters extracting a lot of money from Filipino teacher grads for "applications" and processing fees for jobs that don't exist) but also a steady flow of actual teacher OFW leaving (Overseas Foreign Workers, the Philippines leading industry). Majority of overseas teacher jobs though are to countries other than the US because most Filipinos, (the country is about 90+% Catholic) prefer to work in parochial schools and or countries where a teacher won't be sent to jail for saying "God".

I don't see how a scam could proceed to the point of teachers arriving, in the US, though, because the USCIS (INS) requires very specific guarantees and proofs from school authorities in the US before visas can be issued ... and you surely can't get on a US-bound flight in Manila without a visa, let alone get off at the POE. Interesting.
 
bssc said:
The ironic thing about my job is that some of our software has automated what used to be a manual process in India. I may have displaced an Indian worker or two.
Click to expand...
Interesting. It's called globalization, and it works both ways. There's a huge scope in foreign countries for automation now common in the US. An acquaintance of mine in Colorado devised a really clever state of the art electronic system to find and warn of failures of railroad rail ... the number one cause of railroad accidents. he was going broke trying to sell it in the US and in developed countries with hug investments in railroad infrastructure ... France, Germany, Japan are all places he struck out. he now sells exclusively to the government railroads of China ... they took one look at the system and bought his production for the next 8 or 10 years, displacing thousands of low-[aid (very low-paid by US standard) track inspectors but making a big move forward in rail safety. One of the reasons they stated for selecting his product is that he provides "cradle to grave" tech support (via the Internet). each of the devices he sells is under his supervison/control remotely from the US .... business doesn't always follow the same guidelines it used to, that's for sure.
 
RP said:
Can you tell me where "here" is, Kahn? And some kind of reference to the incident(s) you mentioned. There have been several scams that I know of in the past few years (mainly phony recruiters extracting a lot of money from Filipino teacher grads for "applications" and processing fees for jobs that don't exist) but also a steady flow of actual teacher OFW leaving (Overseas Foreign Workers, the Philippines leading industry). Majority of overseas teacher jobs though are to countries other than the US because most Filipinos, (the country is about 90+% Catholic) prefer to work in parochial schools and or countries where a teacher won't be sent to jail for saying "God".

I don't see how a scam could proceed to the point of teachers arriving, in the US, though, because the USCIS (INS) requires very specific guarantees and proofs from school authorities in the US before visas can be issued ... and you surely can't get on a US-bound flight in Manila without a visa, let alone get off at the POE. Interesting.
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I don't really recall the details.

This was Dayton Ohio.

It was on the local news (WHIO).
 
Well thanks for the response ... sounds to me though like the TV station got the story skewed ... another "urban legend" in the making, perhaps, because work-visa based immigration just can't happen that way.

unscrupulous companies can recruit ... it's a big problem in the Philippines and other Asian countries ... but only the actual employee/sponsor can make the visa happen ... and it's not easy, proof that there are not satisfactory US candidates for the jobs have to be furnished and binds have to be posted to insure potential workers don't arrive with no place to go.

Best regards
 
Tutoring in India. Got a problem with that, blame Nehru. Remember him... the guy with the jacket? First thing he did was set up a string of universities all over India, even in the boonies. To get in was competitive. As a result there were lots and lots of really smart grads with little opportunity in India. So India lost lots of brainpower. The USA got a bunch of it. That was before the internet. That changed everything. Still millions and millions of very smart people now doing everything from reading your x-rays to scheduling your Las Vegas dinner reservation. I think I read their economy will or has taken 3rd place surpassing Japan's... that right?
 
So flesh out what you said there, Bum ... it was a blameworthy thing or a praiseworthy thing to spread education in a poor country?

(Incidentally I think you'll find most universities in India trace their roots back to the British, long before Nehru) ... but that is neither here nor there I'm just trying to confirm what it is you mean to say by your post.

When the US "acquired" the Philippines from Spain, even before all the smoke in the "War of Philippine Insurrection" had cleared was to import large quantities of teachers and establish little white school houses in even the most remote corners of the country ... the Spanish had operated on the "keep 'em ignorant", Taft, in particular was the US president most to "blame" for Philippine schools.

I'm pretty uneducated myself but somehow I always thought leaders that made for education rather than war or crooked business were to be admired rather than blamed ... but hey, that's just me.

With respect to India taking the lead from Japan ... has to happen ... if for no other reason than Japan's population is shrinking ... but China will blow them both out of the water.
 
Sorry if my post was vague RP. How can education be blameworthy? Hmmmm. Lets see. How about, "I could have ER'd sooner if I hadn't sent my kid to college ;)
 
RP said:
Well thanks for the response ... sounds to me though like the TV station got the story skewed ... another "urban legend" in the making, perhaps, because work-visa based immigration just can't happen that way.

unscrupulous companies can recruit ... it's a big problem in the Philippines and other Asian countries ... but only the actual employee/sponsor can make the visa happen ... and it's not easy, proof that there are not satisfactory US candidates for the jobs have to be furnished and binds have to be posted to insure potential workers don't arrive with no place to go.
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This subject )Filipino teachers showing up unannounced) intrigued me enough to dig further. What I found was what I really already knew but (as usual) ignored. Where there's a way to game the system, the system will be gamed.

Here's a news story that shows how one group of professional educators were duped by a recruiting company into signing documentation that they would hire teachers. They did not hire the number they might have, but the recruitment company used to documentation to make it look as if there was a job to match up with the precious H-1 visas which were duly issued and indeed did cause hapless Filipino teachers to arrive in the US sans jobs.

So Kahn certainly did have the facts straight as did the TV station he saw the report ion ... and I did have my facts straight that there's a strict process to assure that there's a job documented for each applicant before they can get a visa to even leave their home country ... but false documentation can trump any one's ace.

http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS200703110416.htm

What I like about this place is I learn so much.
 
RP said:
This subject )Filipino teachers showing up unannounced) intrigued me enough to dig further. What I found was what I really already knew but (as usual) ignored. Where there's a way to game the system, the system will be gamed.

Here's a news story that shows how one group of professional educators were duped by a recruiting company into signing documentation that they would hire teachers. They did not hire the number they might have, but the recruitment company used to documentation to make it look as if there was a job to match up with the precious H-1 visas which were duly issued and indeed did cause hapless Filipino teachers to arrive in the US sans jobs.

So Kahn certainly did have the facts straight as did the TV station he saw the report ion ... and I did have my facts straight that there's a strict process to assure that there's a job documented for each applicant before they can get a visa to even leave their home country ... but false documentation can trump any one's ace.

http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS200703110416.htm

What I like about this place is I learn so much.
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I also learn much here.

Thank you for looking that up.
 
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