As Covid-19 Closes American Classrooms, Families Turn to India for Homework Help. The coronavirus pandemic is boosting India’s education-technology industry; ‘We get that one-on-one attention they need and it’s affordable’

NEW DELHI—Sheri Akerele has been struggling to keep her sons in third and seventh grade focused on online classes as coronavirus fears shut down in-person classes in their school in Atlanta for months.

Like many parents, she found her children weren’t absorbing their lessons completely, but she could spend only so much of her busy day walking them through their lessons.

Luckily, she has online backup: an experienced teacher who lives in a small town in central India.

“We get that one-on-one attention they need and it’s affordable,” she said. “It’s so hard learning from home.”

Demand for online study support is fueling business for Indian teachers, who are tutoring American children on everything from calculus to computer programming. They are helping U.S. high-school students get through their homework and college students better understand their economics and engineering reading.

India’s economy has been hard hit by the virus, contracting almost 24% in the quarter that ended in June. But its booming education technology industry is hiring a record number of new employees, with many Indians doing more learning online as well.

Online student-services company Chegg, based in Santa Clara, Calif., saw the number of its student subscribers surge 69% year over year to 3.7 million in the quarter through September.

One of the company’s more popular services—helping students work through difficult homework questions—depends on thousands of freelancers, largely from India, to do the answering. It added thousands more of them in recent months to respond to the surge in demand.

“One of the massive benefits of the Indian economy is the education system,” said Erik Manuevo, vice president of content and operations at Chegg. “In subjects that are often challenging, the Indian education system is better equipped to train individuals to become experts.”

Full article. Education money should follow the student. If unionized government school teachers refuse to teach in person, we can get virtual instruction for a LOT less.

The Akereles, profiled in the article, are black. It's disproportionately black students in shut down urban public school districts that are not getting any in-person teaching.

Would these Indian teachers be any relation to the Dereks and MaryAnns answering customer service calls so helpfully?

VIDEO: 7m: 29 Oct: Sky News Australia: Andrews’ mask mandate is another ‘dreamt up draconian measure’
Anaesthetist Dr Babak Amin says the Andrews governments’ mask mandate is another “dreamt up” draconian measure because it does not refer exclusively to surgical masks but rather masks with no universal standard of manufacture.
“We’re talking about cloth masks, non-medical masks with no universal standards for their manufacture,” Dr Amin told Sky News host Alan Jones.
“We’re talking about masks that – when you look through the medical literature – play no role in stopping the spread of respiratory illnesses.
“There is a significant body of evidence from years gone by, looking at the role of these cloth masks in community settings with previous pandemics.

“There is a raft of high-quality data, what we call meta-analyses, studies that compile multiple other studies together, and these studies have found that non-medical masks in community settings play no role in protecting the wearer from infection.”

Mr Jones pointed to a study from Dr James Meehan of Global Research which argues bacterial pneumonias are currently on the rise because “untrained members of the public are wearing medical masks repeatedly … in a non-sterile fashion”.
“We are dealing with the administration who dreamt up… three draconian unforgivable measures with no basis in scientific evidence whatsoever,” Dr Amin said.
“And now they’re trying to do it again with this mask mandate.”
https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6205476904001

Would these Indian teachers be any relation to the Dereks and MaryAnns answering customer service calls so helpfully?

I actually started to have a real conversation with ‘Derick’. He denied being in India and then told me he was a a call center in the Philippines. Accent sounded kind of similar. Lots of Filipinos speak English and they seem to have a better grasp of America than most Indians.

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