Indian private tutor via internet

K Ganesh, the serial entrepreneur who after exiting BPO firm Customer.Asset lent a helping hand to business analytics startup Marketics, is on to another venture. He seeks to bring the ubiquitous Indian private tutor to Western children and their parents, via the internet.

TutorVista.com, of which Ganesh is founder chairman, is literally in swaddling clothes, barely two weeks old, with 20 people and quite ecstatic over having signed up its first "paid" customer.

He calls the business an "internet product and services play in education". It uses Indian resources to deliver assisted learning overseas and has as its target the entire range of students, from kindergarten to PhD. The initial pitch is for "K-12 students? in math, physics, chemistry, biology and English? (offering) help with homework, regular schoolwork and competitive exams SAT, ACT, AP and state assessment exams."

Three elements make up the offering. One, focussed content is used to make learning possible. The content is partially developed inhouse and partially licensed.

The latter is usually the animation that makes an online lesson come alive. Two, all the pedagogic tools, those that make up the practice of teaching, are used, and three, it is all delivered through a full internet portal.

A student logs in, buys hours of tutoring, takes a diagnostic test to determine his level, with counselling arrives at a plan that meets his requirement, the counsellor devises a session plan, and then delivers the assistance with the help of content.

"So the process can capture a student's status, calibrate his progress and deliver his achievement, encompassing the quintessence of pedagogy," explains Ganesh.

The novelty of the enterprise, according to Ganesh, is it has been a pioneer in offering service from India through the B2C business model via the internet. If you are answering calls or offering tech support to customers of a client or to its own employees, there is the intermediation of the client firm. Here the business is reaching directly across to individual customers.

The service was launched in the US and will be extended to the UK from December.

The student will not see the tutor but speak to him and hear him through a headset, and they will also use a "wideboard", a computer screen in which half will be used and written upon by the student and the other half by the teacher.

The 20 who are on the staff now are all teachers here who were trained in US and UK curricula.

The most fascinating case is that of a teacher who teaches out of Hong Kong, via the internet and through the TutorVista portal.

So a teacher can work out of home, though right now Tutor. Vista.com facility is based on the IIITB campus in Electronics City. "That gives us academic-cum-technology environment," says Ganesh.

A former McAfee.com techie has developed the technology, the business has a US investor and some local partners. Students are being charged $20 an hour and the business is being marketed locally.

The cost advantage is that similar services offered out of the US typically charge $50-60 per hour. Since the costliest Indian tutors charge under Rs 300 an hour, tutoring Indian children is some distance away, though the technology is entirely scalable.

But there is no dearth of skills to permit scalability as good teachers, who can reorient themselves to tutoring on US-UK curricula quite easily, often earn no more than Rs 10,000 a month.