Sunday, 25 September , 2005, 13:08
Sydney: After America, Britain and some other industrialised countries, it's the turn of Australian students to get tuition from Indian tutors over the Internet.
Today in Sify Finance
An online Indian coaching agency, Growing Star, would be offering their private tuition services to the Australian secondary students in the coming few weeks.
Growing Stars, which already has 350 students or subscribers in America, would be reportedly the first such Indian coaching company to open its shop here.
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Australia has witnessed stiff resistance by trade unions and other special interest group against outsourcing of call centres and other services to India.
It is expected that online tutoring by India-based tutors would face difficulties to run in Australia.
Gautam Chattopadhyay, the person running Growing Star's business in Australia and New Zealand, is expecting some opposition in Australia.
''My philosophy is if you come up with a product that delivers value, the backlash will eventually die,'' he told Sydney Morning Herald. ''Electronic learning is going to be the next big thing,'' Chattopadhyay, a chemical engineer and manager of laboratory at the University of NSW here, added.
Australian Tutoring buttociation, a body representing private tuition companies here has already aired its opposition to the idea of imparting tuition to Australian students.
''This takes the outsourcing to a new level,'' ATA's public officer Mohan Dhall has been quoted as saying by Sydney Morning Herald. ''Education is not something that can be effectively delivered by people trained in different systems and living offshore, providing advice from remote locations,'' he added.
The Indian online coaching company is also aware about the issues revolving around the local resistance to outsourcing to India. The recruits, usually postgraduates with teaching degrees, are reportedly given speech training to overcome pronounced sub-continental accents.
Teaching techniques and culture are the two other fields which are taken into consideration while training the online tutors in India.
Growing Stars, a brainchild of an Indian software engineer and venture capitalist Biju Mathew, would offer online tuition in science and mathematics with the buttistance of a band of qualified teachers in Cochin.
The students would be reportedly charged 33 Australian dollars per hour for one-to-one online coaching.
