Oh boy! Outsourcing education! I hope these tutors are easier to understand than the Indians manning tech help lines...
The link to that you provided me yesterday did not work, so I googled and found a couple of articles: here and here.
It looks as if most of these tutors charge $20 an hour or more, and since costs of living are much less in India, the tutors are making a relative fortune.
The article notes that there is an oversupply of people with math and science degrees in India, and a shortage of qualified math and science teachers in the U.S. (probably because we can make much more money in industry) so maybe it's a good match.
Tom Friedman states that accent reduction classes are common and often mandatory for those working on call lines. I expect that the accent problem will fade in time. These jobs are **highly** competitive and the motivation is there to reduce the typical Indian accent.
Tom Friedman reports that the tutors working for tutoring businesses make about $200 to $600 a month.
This is a brand new field. The independent Indian tutor may be charging $20 and hour or more because that is the going rate now in the U.S. I expect that the prices will drop considerably as this industry matures and more Indians catch on to the idea and more education companies are established.
One more comment.
It took my son about 3 months to finish the entire first grade Calvert homeschool correspondence course.
So....Why not extend on-line learning to elementary and middle schoolers? Many elementary students could zoom ahead in selected subjects on the weekend, summers, and vacations. Math would be especially adaptable to this format. Other subjects well suited might be social studies or foreign languages.
By the way, EducationNews.Org has an interesting interview concerning on-line education on today's blog. I will start a thread on it. Unfortunately, again, the on-line learning is confined to high school.