September 17, 2006 - 00:00
India's e-tutors give UK children homework help    
Call centres charge £50 a month for unlimited individual help to pupils thousands of miles away

Amelia Gentleman, New Delhi

Sunday September 17, 2006.

The Observer .

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 - India is four and a half hours ahead of the UK - the e-tutors give individual help. Some work in mini-call centres, 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 centre company to set up Tutorvista, which launched cheap online tuition services in the UK last month.

'Education is a major preoccupation [in Britain]. 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-centre 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 Indian co-founders of heymaths.com/net have developed a comprehensive online tuition system designed to make learning maths more enjoyable and offer help to schools.

'Maths teachers are retiring and not enough good teachers are coming into the system,' Nirmala Sankaran, Heymaths co-founder, said. 'This is increasingly a global problem. But Ganesh stresses that this is not an issue of removing jobs from the West.

'We are trying to make UK students more academically qualified, do better, graduate better, so that their jobs are not taken away from them and outsourced to India,' he said.

For Kelsey Baird, this is not just a way of paying someone else to do her homework. 'It's about having extra help with understanding things. I knew I would find it hard in my final year. It was kind of weird to begin with, looking at the screen and talking into the computer, but actually it's been pretty good.'