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Private tutoring through the internet: globalization and offshoring

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Abstract

The private tutoring industry has come forward as the third great sector of education. The common sense representation about private tutoring is changing. The growing search for supplementary educational support services and the technological innovation have created a new paradigm. This paper focuses on one of the most interesting faces of this new phenomenon: the rise of private tutoring through the internet. The very promising market is considered by some analysts as a true explosion on the offer and demand levels. Many families are feeling increasingly unable to provide their children the “extra help” they need to meet the requirements of further steps in the education system. So, for several reasons, they are outsourcing and even offshoring this so important and competitive task. The field is full of learning and market opportunities. This is the new globalized world of the less shadow and progressively growing private tutoring in the XXI century.

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Notes

  1. According to Friedman (2005: 10) “while the dynamic force in Globalization 1.0 was countries globalizing and the dynamic force in Globalization 2.0 was companies globalizing, the dynamic force in Globalization 3.0—the thing that gives it its unique character—is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally.”

  2. Bhagwati et al. (2004: 93) mention the example of digitalized x-ray exams of American patients sent via the internet in order to be read by radiologists in Mumbay, India. These specialists write the report and send it by email to America.

  3. See more information further in this paper.

  4. http://www.studyloft.com.

  5. The No Child Left Behind Act, published in 2002, states that the school districts where there are students from low income families and with repetitive low academic achievement have to grant free supplementary academic support. In reality, the NCLB Act demands that the Title 1 schools (those that via the NCLB Act get the federal founding to educate disadvantaged children) that have not shown an adequate progress in what concerns the improvement of the academic success of their students for three or more years offer supplementary educational services to the students from disadvantaged families. The goal is to get these students to achieve at least the minimal standards of performance in the standardized tests applied in each State. Therefore this federal program gives astronomic founding to the States. These use their structures to comply with the legal imposition or outsource to private companies that have bloomed. Many of them, both in presence and through the internet, appear precisely because they saw in the federal program a seductive business opportunity in these remedial tutoring programs.

  6. http://www.especificas.uevora.pt.

  7. http://www.ebs.co.kr.

  8. http://www.megastduy.net, http://www.edunet4u.net, http://www.ybmsisa.com, http://www.edubox.co.kr.

  9. http://www.tutor.com.

  10. http://www.homeworkkansas.org.

  11. http://www.homeworkalabama.org.

  12. At http://www.scriblink.com you can grasp how this software works.

  13. SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test or Scholastic Assessment Test, is a set of standardized tests, introduced in 1901 in the United States of America, in order to filter the access to higher education promoted by The College Board, a non-profit American organization. The SAT is comprised by the SAT Reasoning Test, thus designated from 2005 on, and the SAT Subject Tests. The SAT Reasoning Test is prepared to measure the critical reading, the written expression and the mathematical competences needed to have academic success in higher education. The SAT Subject Tests are designed to measure the knowledge and competences in specific scientific areas. Most of the questions are multiple choice questions, but the candidates also have to write an essay in 25 min. The set of these tests lasts for a marathon of 4 h (ETS 2008).

    According to Monson (2007), in 2007, there was national total of 1.495.000 American secondary school students that were submitted to the SAT and 1.300.000 that opted for the other test, the ACT. This test began to be done by ACT, an independent non-profit organization, in 1959 and includes, nowadays, 215 questions on English, Mathematics, Reading, Sciences and Writing (ACT 2008) and has the same objectives of the SAT.

    More information on these exams can be found, for instance, in the website of The College Board (2008), in the website of the Educational Testing Service, or in the Wikipedia (2008b).

  14. http://www.acadomia.fr.

  15. http://www.explicatudo.pt.

  16. http://www.click2tutor.com/special-needs.html.

  17. It is the case of Tutor.com (http://www.tutor.com) that on their homepage offers 25 min of online private tutoring.

  18. http://tutoring.sylvanlearning.com.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Education, University of Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, Aveiro, 3810-193, Portugal

    Alexandre Ventura

  2. College of Education, Seoul National University, Shilim-Dong 56-1, Gwan Ak-Gu, Seoul, 151-748, South Korea

    Sunhwa Jang

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  1. Alexandre Ventura
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  2. Sunhwa Jang
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Correspondence to Sunhwa Jang.

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Ventura, A., Jang, S. Private tutoring through the internet: globalization and offshoring . Asia Pacific Educ. Rev. 11, 59–68 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12564-009-9065-5

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