Friday 11 April, 2008

WiziQ -- saving teachers dignity
















B D Narayankar


Pune: Earning 1,000 rupees in an hour always sounds good. And that is what an Indian teacher is getting to teach NRI children staying abroad. For this, he needn’t migrate to any other western country spending huge money. He, simply, has to log on to the net to teach Indian subjects.

With the spiraling demand to teach variety of Indian languages to NRI children growing under western influence, many websites like ‘wiziq’ have begun linking Indian teachers to students living abroad. “Hindi is being recognised as one of the major foreign languages in US and Canada. But the dearth of Hindi teachers in these countries has created a huge demand abroad. By installing the language fonts, teaching Hindi becomes an easy job,” said Ramesh S, a Hindi teacher.

According to Harman Singh, founder and CEO of wiziq.com, of the 20,000-odd students and teachers enrolled with wiziq today, over 4,000 are teachers.

Singh said the virtual classroom (website) is equipped with two-way audio, text, chat, PowerPoint and PDF document sharing. The session can even be replayed. Raashid Malik, a software engineer with wiziq, says one can find the tutor for any subject in the site's massive tutor directory.

Outsourcing of teachers is a cost-effective exercise for foreign students, while it has been fetching Indian teachers some big bucks. “For teachers based there, students pay Rs 20,000 for an hour of study, while Indian teachers offer them with Rs 1,000 per hour," said Hardeep Singh, a Punjab teacher imparting computer education to students abroad.

The rate at which the method has been gaining popularity in India as well as abroad it will soon replace the way we study, added Hardeep.

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