Primary teaching outsourced

Here's an interesting educational development. A primary school in England is outsourcing it's maths teaching to India! The Times Educational Supplement reported that Year 6 pupils' understanding of maths has improved significantly since starting the online tutoring.

It's interesting that this is more cost-effective for the school at GBP12 per hour per student than having a teacher in the classroom. Not cheaper mind, but more cost-effective - meaning better results for lower input. The class teacher still supervises the sessions but each child gets a one-on-one with the same tutor in India who have been trained in the English maths curriculum.

I predict we will see more cross-border basic education services being offered online - especially from countries like India where UK outsourcing of customer service centres is well established and there is a mass of highly educated people who earn less than the averable UK school teacher.

It's happening in Africa too - at tertiary level. The Botswana College of Distance and Open Learning has just launched the Pan African e-Network tele-education project which will enable African students to study with Indian universities through video-conferencing (sounds a bit like the original plans of the African Virtual University).

Commonwealth of Learning is holding the Sixth Pan Commonwealth Forum in India in November - maybe I'll get the chance to explore this more when I go to India.

The Secret Powers of Time

As a kick-off for this new blog, I want to share a presentation made by Philip Zimbardo, Professor of Psychology from Stanford University.  In The Secret Powers of Time he gives a framework for how people perceive time and proposes that this impacts on their approach to the world. He claims that religion and geography impact on individuals' time perspectives.

Prof Zimbardo also makes a case for why we need digital classrooms - he claims that the brains of American youth are being 'digitally rewired' because of the huge amount of time they spend on computers, playing games and watching videos. His observations are based on American youth but I wonder how long it will be before African youth are considered to be 'digital natives' and what the implications are for teaching and learning - especially in skills development?

I also like this animation method and think it is an interesting teaching method - much better than just watching the presenter. What do you think?