October 26, 2006
Even Online Tutors Need to be Screened, Says Dept. of Ed.
City public schools allow students at high-poverty schools to take advantage of online tutoring, which the Department of Education contracts out to a number of firms. But now it turns out that one of the firms may be off the list of tutoring firms because it used tutors in India.
The NYC DOE requires that all tutors have background checks if they have communications with students; Social Security numbers are required for the checks so the tutors in India never passed yet they still went ahead with tutoring. Socratic Learning's Rajan Sobhani said the tutors had been fingered printed by the FBI and had advanced degrees. Plus, he did not believe the requirement should apply to his tutors because they do not have 'physical contact with students.'"
Well, being half way around the world is pretty far, but if your client has very specific guidelines, can't you just find tutors who can pass the checks? The DOE has suspended Socratic's contract and will consider removing them from their contractor list. And interestingly enough, federal guidelines approve online tutoring without background checks.
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This is what I think:
http://nyctechteacher.blogspot.com/
Good for you, but you are reading this wrong. To me, the article says: No Child Left Behind has gone global. Socratic is an innovator. Don't you see...this is good news...
We are a group of like-minded individuals with around 10+ years of IT and Business consulting experience in India and North America. We are seriously exploring opportunities to venture into online education business. These days almost every educational institute in North America, and Europe offer online courses. Even corporations today deliver product training and demonstrations online.
Few years ago Educational BPO or Education Process Outsourcing (EPO) meant outsourcing non-teaching educational processes. Now with increasing net bandwidth available to home users, we see even the teaching education process getting outsourced. There are already businesses providing tutoring services from India and other countries over the web to students in USA and Europe. This is very exciting. We see online tutoring as a very rewarding business model.
Some facts that excited us in this idea-
In 2002, the Bush administration, alarmed at the increasing failure rate of American students, passed a law called No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Its goal is to improve teaching standards and results. The problem is large: about 40 per cent of seventh class students in America fail in Mathematics and English language examinations. The 1,200-page NCLB Act enshrines the most far-reaching education reform in the US in 40 years. Under the NCLB Act, the schools have until 2014 to meet the 100 per cent proficiency goal.
The US government gives about $12 billion annually in aid to schools.
The Education Market Research of US estimates the K-12 market size at $2 billion annually. This includes tutoring, assessment, teaching, books, tests, learning systems and so on.
Every year, America needs nearly 120,000 teachers, but the availability is restricted to only 5%-8% of that number. At the same time, it is not easy for a foreign teachers to get a job in U.S. schools because of stringent qualification tests and eveimmigration laws.
Supplemental Educational Service (SES) providers charge students up to $40 an hour to take classes.
We have been studying some of these trends and doing research on what will make our service and product offering different and better than our competition. Here are a few things we have been thinking about.
Scheduling and calendar tool that would enable students and teachers to find who is available in a given time slot.
Focus only on K-12 students from 3rd grade to 12th grade.
Offer Ready to use reference materials and recorded sessions.
Invest in preparing our own teaching materials and aids that will become the cornerstone of how we teach a lesson regardless of which tutor teaches it. Objective here is to assure and maintain consistent student progress.
Invest in defining our own teaching and learning methodology that can chart out the entire teaching and learning process, track, measure, and report those results. It is way to measure and track success through out the process.
What subjects are ideal to teach online for K-12 students?
Process to recruit and certify teachers to ensure we have the best tutors.
What kind of partnerships and alliances will help us reach out to our market?
This is where your opinions, views, suggestions, ideas, and feedback will be of great help. Tell us what key things we should be focusing on to make a difference. If you had tried something like this before tell us what worked and what did not work?
Prospective tutors, students, and parents we would like to hear from very much. We will keep you updated on our progress.
We are also looking for people/partners who understand the school system especially here in USA, and UK. For other non-English speaking countries in the beginning we plan to offer only language and music classes.
The system is really messay anyhow -- I just want to say that I was fingerprinted by the DOE this week -- and NO ONE EVER CHECKED MY ID. I could have been anybody, and they wouldn't have cared.
Also, they are miserable, unfriendly people.
The system is really messy anyhow -- I was fingerprinted by the DOE this week -- and NO ONE EVER CHECKED MY ID. I could have been anybody, and they wouldn't have cared.
presuming the tutors aren't totally off the mark, why is this a bad thing?
NCLB is, of course, nonsensical bullshit. but i see no real issue with outsourcing.
can't people find americans to do the job? is there really a need to outsource this?
well, apparently.
but let's presume for a moment that the tutors are equally matched - let's make it a science or math issue where language might be less of a barrier. the article above from the chronicle of higher education seems to be a pretty high tech method, and one would have to assume it gets results or people would not bother with through the screen, voip tutoring and go face to face.
if the objection is essentially "buy american" then there's not much you can say to that.