By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
An Indian company is tapping the lucrative English education market in South Korea with a person-to-person online tutoring service at an Indian price _ known as e-tutoring, or ``education outsourcing.''
Krishnan Ganesh, the founder and the CEO of TutorVista, said the Bangalore-based firm is preparing to open a Korean-language site this month to launch full e-tutoring programs for individual students and for companies.
He also said that some 50 Korean students are already enrolled at its pilot program that offers unlimited, 24-hour-open tutoring at only $100 per month, and about 200 more are in more expensive SAT, TOEFL, GMAT and GRE examination preparation courses taught by Indian teachers in real time.
``We spent six months of research in the Korean and Chinese markets,'' he said in a telephone interview with The Korea Times this week. ``There is a small market on the top of the pyramid for native English-speaking teachers. That comes at $30 or $40 per hour and that is affordable only by the rich.
But we will see the different segment of the market. Like you will have people buy BMWs, you will also have people buy Hyundai cars, which also have good qualities,'' he continued. ``You find there is a huge market for affordable English education with a lot of practice. That is something not affordable with native teachers.''
The e-tutoring course uses broadband Internet, which has already been quite popular in the United States since its launch last year, especially among the students from low-income households. Some have joked that the firm's slogan should be ``outsource your homework to India.''
In its class, the tutor and the student come together in a virtual classroom set up with voice chat and an electronic whiteboard. It is different from existing online classes in Korea such as MegaStudy since it is not a one-way lecture, where the student watches recorded course materials, but private tutoring, where the teacher gives personal attention and care.
The company said it currently has more than 2,000 students in the United States, 200 in Britain, and some 700 teachers in India who work at home. The aim is to secure 10,000 students from all over the world by the end of this year.
The company expects that it can appeal to the mass market in South Korea and China, too, where qualified native-speaking teachers are rare and expensive. The private tutoring market in Korea is evaluated to be around 15 trillion won ($16.3 billion) every year, with 4 trillion won of them spending in English education.
Ganesh admitted that many Koreans would still prefer native-speaking Western teachers than to have Indian tutors, who have distinctive accents in pronunciation. But at the same time, there are benefits in learning from non-native English speakers, he said.
``We are all Asians so we can relate better to non-Americans, non-English students and non-native students wanting to study English,'' he said. ``There is a lot of benefits when you lean English from somebody who is not a native speaker, someone who knows Asian customs and the Asian way of thinking.''
Korea is one of the strategic markets for TutorVista since it is one the most wired nations in the world, as well as for the people's high interest in English as second language.
``We have found that Korean students are some of the most hard-working students and have a very strong desire to learn English,'' said Ankit Chaudhary of TutorVista. ``We have had students as young as 4 years requesting to be part of the trial.''
Ganesh said that he is also introducing a program for Business English to cater to Korean firms, and is currently talking with two firms though he cannot name them.
Hiring more teachers is a problem that he is looking forward to having, Ganesh said, as India has some 400 million English-speaking population, which is even larger than that of the United States.
``We are talking about a huge number of people. Right now we have 700 teachers, and we have applications from 12,000 teachers,'' he said.