outsourced news and virtual classrooms
outsourced news and virtual classrooms
Date: Friday, May 11, 2007 10:30 PM
<<<<< JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER No. 1690 -- 5/11/2007 >>>>>
A couple of years ago I reported that news services such as Reuters were
outsourcing some of their routine journalism to places like India. Now,
even local city council news will be offshored.
And if that's not enough, there's more!
Hundreds of American students are using tutors from India. The reason is
simple -- it's cheaper. In the U.S. professional tutors charge up to $120
an hour, and student tutors at UCLA supposedly charge $60 an hour. Many
parents complain that the going rates are way too expensive. By offshoring
their children's education to India parents claim they get a big price
break -- lessons are just $20 an hour.
Ironically those very same tutors get accent reduction tutoring from online
tutors in California. The outsourced and offshored tutoring is going both
directions but something tells me that the business going to India isn't
balancing out with the business coming back.
I was very skeptical about the claim that UCLA tutors get $60 an hour. In
just a few minutes I googled to this site. Uh, I don't know what these
tutors are getting paid, and I hate to stereotype, but I lost my curiousity
when I saw the names on the list.
http://sgsa.stat.ucla.edu/tutors/
OK, so I lied about losing my curiosity. I did one more search to a forum
where student tutors claim they get somewhere between $10 an hour to $25.
Perhaps those parents that are outsourcing their child's education aren't
getting such as big a bargain as they think!
http://ask.metafilter.com/59001/How-much-to-charge-for-tutoring
Articles Below
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2007/05/10/4169470-ap.html
Outsourcing the news
Reporting gigs being shipped to India
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pasadena11may11,1,7515978.story
Local news reporting outsourced to India
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-india18may06,1,7602535.story
L.A. students are hooking up with tutors in South Asia for help with their
homework. Is this global economy cool, or what?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNews/2007/05/10/4169470-ap.html
May 10, 2007
Outsourcing the news
Reporting gigs being shipped to India
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- The job posting was a head-scratcher: "We seek a
newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and
political scene of Pasadena, California, USA."
A reporter half a world away covering local street-light contracts and
sewer repairs? A reporter who has never gotten closer to Pasadena than the
telecast of the Rose Bowl parade?
Outsourcing first claimed manufacturing jobs, then hit services such as
technical support, airline reservations and tax preparation. Now comes the
next frontier: local journalism.
James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the two-year-old Web site
pasadenanow.com, acknowledged it sounds strange to have journalists in
India cover news in this wealthy city just outside Los Angeles.
But he said it can be done from afar now that weekly Pasadena City Council
meetings can be watched over the Internet. And he said the idea makes
business sense because of Indias lower labor costs.
"I think it could be a significant way to increase the quality of
journalism on the local level without the expense that is a major problem
for local publications," said the 51-year-old Pasadena native. "Whether
youre at a desk in Pasadena or a desk in Mumbai, youre still just a
phone call or e-mail away from the interview."
The first articles, some of which will carry bylines, are slated to appear
Friday.
The plan has its doubters.
"Nobody in their right mind would trust the reporting of people who not
only dont know the institutions but arent even there to witness the
events and nuances," said Bryce Nelson, a University of Southern California
journalism professor and Pasadena resident. "This is a truly sad picture of
what American journalism could become."
It is a shaky business proposition as well, said Uday Karmarkar, a UCLA
professor of technology and strategy who outsources copy editing and
graphics work to Indian businesses. If the goal is sophisticated reporting,
he said, Macpherson could end up spending more time editing than the labor
savings are worth.
This is not the first time media jobs have been shipped to India.
The British news agency Reuters runs an operation in the technology capital
of Bangalore that churns out Wall Street stories based on news releases.
Macpherson appears to be the first to outsource community journalism --
work that by definition has been done by reporters who walk the streets
they cover.
Macphersons said his Web site, which he runs out of his house, gets about
45,000 unique readers per month but is not yet profitable. Up until now,
his main help has consisted of his wife and an intern.
Macpherson posted the help-wanted ad Monday on the Indian edition of
craigslist.com. Within days, he said, he had hired two Indian reporters,
one a graduate of the journalism school at the University of California at
Berkeley.
He wants them to broaden pasadenanow.coms content from news releases and
event listings to analyses of issues before the council, and perhaps
eventually to investigative reports.
Projected annual cost: $20,800 for the pair. Not bad wages for an Indian
journalist and cheap by U.S. standards, especially if each one produces the
expected 15 weekly articles.
Pasadena city spokeswoman Ann Erdman said coverage from afar shouldnt
pose problems if the articles are well-edited. In any case, she said,
"Local government is certainly not in the practice of dictating to local
business who they can hire and where those employees should live."
Associated Press Writer Matthew Rosenberg in New Delhi, India, contributed
to this report.
On the Net:
The news site: http://www.pasadenanow.com
The ad: http://bangalore.craigslist.org/wri/325542906.html
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pasadena11may11,1,7515978.story
Local news reporting outsourced to India
A news site hires two to cover Pasadena from afar. That helps a shoestring
budget go further.
By Alex Pham
Times Staff Writer
May 11, 2007
When is local journalism not really local? When it's about Pasadena and
written by someone in India.
James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired
two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in
Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore
for $7,200.
The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles
away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories
while their boss sleeps -- India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard
Time.
"A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in
another time zone at much lower wages," said Macpherson, 51, who used to
run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.
So, on the Indian version of Craigslist, he posted an ad that said in part,
"We do not believe that geographic distance between California and India
will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you
will result in your development of a keen working knowledge of this city's
affairs."
Dozens replied. One of the two chosen had attended the UC Berkeley Graduate
School of Journalism. Rob Gunnison, the director of school affairs there,
is dismayed. "It just seems so fundamental to journalism to be there,"
Gunnison said. "I still can't quite believe it's not a hoax."
It's not. Macpherson plans to run his first batch of outsourced stories
Tuesday. The Pasadena native runs the website, which he said gets 45,000
visitors a month, on a shoestring budget from his condo with help from his
wife, a data entry worker and two interns.
Macpherson plans to hire half a dozen more Indian reporters. He'll add some
local flavor by doing interviews, then e-mailing the recordings to India.
"When you instant-message someone in Mumbai, it's like looking over her
shoulder," he said.
Larry Wilson, editor of the 30,000-circulation Pasadena Star-News
newspaper, scoffed.
"To pretend you can get the feel and the culture of a town as complicated
and interesting as Pasadena by e-mailing and doing things over the Internet
is nutty," he said.
Ann Erdman, spokeswoman for the city of Pasadena, thinks the approach is a
little odd. But "as long as they get their facts correct, I'm a happy
camper," she said.
alex.pham@latimes.com
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-india18may06,1,7602535.story
L.A. students are hooking up with tutors in South Asia for help with their
homework. Is this global economy cool, or what?
By Scott Kraft
Scott Kraft is national editor of The Times.
May 6, 2007
The scene in the Broder family's Beverly Hills home is, in most respects, a
classic glimpse into the life of your typical Southern California teenager.
Noah, a high school sophomore wearing blue-and-orange tennis shoes, is
working out a quadratic equation under the watchful eye of his math tutor,
Shani, a petite young woman in brown leather sandals who has a copy of his
textbook open in front of her.
"Exactly, Noah," Shani says, flashing a thumbs-up sign.
"Cool," Noah replies.
Across town in Inglewood, a sophomore named Mariana Ibrahin is going over a
biology assignment with her tutor, Roshan. They both hear the occasional
roar of a jet on final approach to LAX over Mariana's house, but neither is
distracted from the work at hand. Their twice-a-week sessions have helped
lift Mariana's grade to a solid B, and Roshan adores her student. In fact,
Roshan says later, "I'd love to meet my Mariana one day."
Nothing is quite as it seems here in the global village, where Noah and
Mariana get their after-school help in a virtual classroom, separated from
their tutors by 12 1/2 time zones. Tutors Shani Jose and Roshan Salim work
beneath humming ceiling fans in a muggy port city in India, where,
fittingly, today is tomorrow. They are connected to their pupils by a
voice-over-Internet phone and an interactive computer "whiteboard" where
teacher and pupil write using a stylus and pad and on which, when
appropriate, the tutors can add a universally understood electronic symbol
for a job well done: Thumbs-up.
The spread of outsourcing, especially to India, has touched millions of
Americans in ways both frustrating and satisfying. Customer service agents
answer our complaints from Bangalore. Law firms get their legal transcripts
typed in Mumbai. Blue chip companies farm out high-tech work to engineers
in Hyderabad.
In the last few years, a small group of companies, most started by Indian
entrepreneurs, has tried a new twist on the theme. They've tapped India's
pool of highly educated and, by American standards, low-paid men and women
to shore up the math, science and even English skills of a new generation
of Americans, catering to parents desperate to get their children into the
best possible colleges. In Los Angeles, this flip side of the outsourcing
debate unfolds in microcosm each weekday afternoon, in quiet moments
between pupils and tutors.
Southern California's after-school landscape already is dotted with
tutoring academies and SAT preparation classes. What these new businesses
offer are lower prices, greater convenience and a window on the wider world
-- though sometimes with the same irritants that have made outsourcing so
exasperating for so many Americans.
The tutors for both Noah and Mariana work for Growing Stars, a firm
launched three years ago by Biju Mathew, a Silicon Valley software
engineer. Mathew, a 42-year-old father of three, came up with the idea
while hunting for a math tutor for his second-grade son. As a new arrival
to the United States, he was shocked to find American tutors charging $40
to $100 an hour -- prices that were "way beyond" his financial reach.
"I kept thinking: If I could just connect [students] with their teachers
back in India it would be so much cheaper," Mathew says. "And then I
realized there could be thousands of parents like me."
So, working from home at night, and enlisting friends in his hometown of
Cochin, India, he set out to develop a computer program that would
replicate the experience of one-on-one tutoring. He tested it on his
children, developed a business plan, brought in an Indian American investor
and leased a tiny office in one of the high-tech office parks on the 101
Freeway near San Jose.
Today, Growing Stars has 400 students, most in the United States, and its
work force in India has grown to 61, including 49 tutors, four academic
directors, and a sales and technical support staff. Growing Stars is the
only U.S.-based firm whose teachers work together in a single academy in
India. A competitor, Bangalore-based TutorVista, which has 2,000 students,
has tutors who work mostly from their homes in India.
Mathew, his company's only full-time employee in the United States, is
still waiting for his big payday. A slight, soft-spoken man, he rents his
Fremont house and drives an old Toyota Camry with a missing hubcap. But he
has high hopes. "If you have a great idea, you can make it happen in
America," he says. "The [Silicon] Valley nurtures entrepreneurship, unlike
in India. I don't want to remain small. I want to take it to the next
level."
With a teacher shortage in the United States and a swelling demand for
tutors, more companies with foreign-based tutors are diving into the
market. "We're seeing a globalization of education," says Don Knezek, chief
executive of the Washington D.C.- and Eugene, Ore.-based International
Society for Technology in Education. "For years, tutoring was an elitist
activity for the elite. Now, the offshore operations are making it
available to the middle class. It really fills a need in the nation right
now."
Growing Stars fields an average of 75 inquiries a month from parents in the
United States, and Mathew says his biggest challenge "is to convince people
that online tutoring is really effective."
Noah Broder's parents approached this novel tutoring arrangement with a
fair degree of skepticism.
Noah, an affable, self-assured 16-year-old, goes to the private Wildwood
School in West Los Angeles, which touts a strong academic program in a
noncompetitive environment. His father, Michael, runs a consulting company
and is an associate clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at
UCLA. His mother, Donna, works in children's publishing. Although Noah's
parents like Wildwood, they are concerned that the math program is too
theoretical. And Noah feels he needs more practice problems to understand
the material.
"I'm a kinesthetic as well as a visual learner," he says.
They decided Noah needed a tutor, but private tutors are expensive and the
couple, with 11-year-old Maya and 8-year-old Jake at home, didn't have time
to ferry Noah to lessons. They heard about Growing Stars from a neighbor,
who had two children in the program. But Michael's experience with
outsourcing at work hadn't exactly been a success. His company had tried to
save money by outsourcing searches of medical literature to India, but
dropped the experiment after missed connections and poor quality work.
Still, the Broders decided to give it a try. They paid a $50 initial fee
for the program, invested less than $100 in a headset, stylus and pad and
signed up for two sessions a week at the rate of $160 a month. Noah took
quickly to the arrangement, in which he confers with Shani from 7:45 p.m.
to 8:45 p.m. every Monday and Tuesday. His first tutor was hard to
understand, and he had to adjust to the slight delay in the phone line. But
there are positives. "One of the good things is that they are less of a
'teacher,'" he says. "There's less pressure. You can ask a question that
you think they might have already covered."
His parents have had some trouble communicating with the academic directors
who call to discuss Noah's progress. "They're really hard to understand,"
Michael says. "But Noah's of a different generation. I expect it just
doesn't get under his skin the way it does with me."
No one in the family argues with the results. "It's really amazing. Amazing
that it works," Michael says. "For sure, his grades have improved."
"The truth is," Noah's mother says, "if convenience wasn't important for
us, we might not have done it. But it's definitely succeeded."
Mariana didn't need any lessons in cultural diversity. Her mother, Ana, is
from Brazil, where Mariana was born. Her stepfather, Keith Laidley, a
financial analyst at Northrup Grumman, is a Los Angeles native.
Mariana spoke only Portuguese when she moved to the United States five
years ago to join her mother. Now a tall 16-year-old with dark, cascading
curls, she speaks English and is enrolled at Alexander Hamilton High
School, a magnet school where her specialty is modern dance. Mariana's
family, which includes her Brazilian grandmother and her two siblings,
4-year-old Giancarlo and 7-year-old Isabella, live in a modest bungalow in
Inglewood.
When she entered high school a year ago, Mariana was struggling with her
grades. Keith enrolled her in a computer-based tutoring center, but, he
says, they eventually decided "we needed something more aggressive." He
looked into professional tutors, but they charged $120 an hour. Even a
student tutor at UCLA, at $60 an hour, was too expensive. That's when a
friend of the family suggested Growing Stars, where lessons are just $20 an
hour.
"We were nervous at first," Keith admits, "but we had the luxury of saying,
'Let's see if this pays off.'" In November, Keith signed up Mariana for
four hourlong lessons a week -- Monday and Thursday in math and Tuesday and
Wednesday in biology.
Mariana adjusted easily to the virtual classroom, connected to India
through the laptop in her room. "She's already into the computer," her
step-father says. "Even when she's not studying, she's into that space."
When she mentions that her biology grade has risen to a B, the news takes
her stepfather by surprise. "We didn't know that!" he says, smiling
broadly.
The only hitches have been technological and logistical. Sometimes the
computer link goes down, though it usually is quickly restored. And classes
have had to be rescheduled twice because of transportation strikes in
India. Also, Keith found it difficult at first "to get clear exactly what
day it is there and here," he says. "There are some things lost in
translation. But when we have trouble, we communicate with them by e-mail."
The day begins early -- very early -- for Growing Stars tutors in the city
of Cochin, which rests on fingers of land reaching into the Arabian Sea.
Cochin is the largest city in the state of Kerala, where 32 million people
live in an area smaller than West Virginia. And this stretch of the Malabar
Coast, 1,600 miles south of Delhi, is the world's center of ayurvedic
medicine, a holistic treatment of massage and oils that is said to
rejuvenate body and mind.
Drivers collect the early-shift tutors from their homes shortly after
midnight and deliver them to a two-story office building, where work begins
at 1:30 a.m. -- just after school lets out on America's East Coast. Noah's
and Mariana's tutors, like others catering to West Coast students, are on
the "late shift," which starts at 4:30 a.m. Soon after the late shift
arrives, the sun begins to rise on a lush Indian neighborhood of houses and
apartments, palm and banana trees. The temperature is already 88 degrees,
and rising.
Inside, the tutors sit in high-backed desk chairs in plywood cubicles that
stretch across a gleaming white tile floor. Math tutors are on one side,
science on the other. A few English tutors and administrators sit in
between. Bookshelves against the unadorned walls are filled with American
textbooks. It's library quiet, save for the air conditioners and fans
mounted on the ceiling and walls. Tutors spend about half their day
preparing lessons and the rest speaking into headsets to students half a
world away.
Most of the tutors are young, in their 20s, with risumis that include
teaching stints as well as master's degrees or other postgraduate work in
India. As everywhere in India, the women are dressed in saris of dazzling
color, while most of the men wear jeans. The early hours are tough, but the
salary helps make up for it. Tutors here earn from $250 to $400 a month,
compared to less than $200 a month for public school teachers.
The center is run by Bina George, a former banker, whose most difficult
task is finding tutors. "You can find good English speakers, and there are
plenty of people with master's degrees," she explains. "But it's hard to
find people with master's degrees in science or math who also speak good
English."
The primary language in Kerala is Malayalam, and although English is taught
at school, very few people speak it at home. Even fewer have contact with
native English speakers. When Shani Jose came to work here two years ago,
she says "I had never even spoken to an American before." Overhearing her
remark, George adds: "Actually, none of us had."
Poor English is the biggest complaint from parents, so new tutors attend a
daily "accent reduction" class taught by 24-year-old Greeshma Salim, one of
a handful of English tutors at Growing Stars. She received her own offshore
tutoring in accent reduction -- on the telephone from a language specialist
in California. She admits that having a nonnative English speaker tutoring
American students in English "might seem ironic." But, she says, "when you
learn English as your mother tongue, a lot of colloquialisms come in. I can
treat it like any other language."
The Indian tutors often are amused and sometimes baffled by the expressions
of some students. Greeshma was tripped up by "leaping lizards."
"Now I know it just means something you say when you're surprised," she
says. When another tutor's student made an error on a problem and declared,
"I'm thick," the tutor shared it with the group.
All new tutors are warned about the informality of the Americans. "It was a
shock, initially, to hear them call me by my first name," says Leelabai
Nair, one of the academic directors. "But now we're used to it."
It's tempting to see this virtual bridge that links the California and
Malabar coasts as a healthy cross-cultural experience created by the
combination of entrepreneurship and technology. But that's only part of the
story.
Noah jokes that he imagines Shani and the other tutors being whipped by
evil taskmasters as they toil away in small cubicles. He doesn't know,
though, that Shani lives in a small home with her parents and brother, who
gives her a ride to work each morning at 3:30. Or that her father, who
works at a naval base, didn't go to college but was determined that his
daughter would.
Mariana knows that her math tutor, 24-year-old Vineetha Vijayan, spends her
weekends studying for a national exam to teach in college. She doesn't
know, though, that the hardest part of her biology tutor Roshan's day is
when the alarm goes off at 2:30 a.m. and she rises to make steamed dal and
chapatis for her two children to take to school.
In fact, these new relationships are built on a simple economic principle
-- giving American pupils homework help at a low price by paying Indian
tutors more than their country's classroom teachers. And growing numbers of
American parents are learning that the cheapest way to sharpen the skills
their youngsters will need to survive in the competitive global economy is
to move, posthaste, into that global village.
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