Online company connects students with international tutors

By: Caitlin Dewey

Posted: 3/19/08

Thanks to uProdigy, students have an alternative to the standard tutoring services offered on campus - they can now learn from Ph.D.s living more than 7,000 miles away.

The new service, the brainchild of Harvard grad student Syed Adil Hussain, provides 24-hour access to online tutors in South Asia and claims to be an affordable, convenient alternative to in-person tutoring.

"Usually when you want a tutor, you'll go to the math department and look for fliers on the walls," Hussain said. "You don't really know the tutor's qualifications or availability, and if you have a math test the next week, you're screwed. With uProdigy, all of the tutors have Ph.D.s or master's degrees, and they're available all the time."

Students can register on uProdigy's Web site and pay $15 an hour for live online tutoring, paper editing and homework help. Their questions are outsourced to India and Southeast Asia, where tutors must pass a series of standardized tests and interviews before working for the site.

Some faculty, however, remain a little wary.

"I see one big problem," said David Robinson, a professor of geology with a research interest in the Internet. "To what extent do these people know the course content? I don't think the actual medium is a problem, but I wonder about the knowledge base."

Jason Luther, Writing Center coordinator, also has concerns. He said editing services like uProdigy's Online Writing Lab can be valuable, but the learning process is more important.

"Our mission is not just getting an A on a paper," Luther said. "We work with the writer, not the writing. This service sounds like a once-over - what you lose is that one-to-one dialog."

Freshman Raymond Lapena and sophomore Caleb Sheldon echoed these concerns.

"I need to be physically one-on-one with [a tutor]," said Lapena, a public communications major. "There's a limited amount of information you can transfer on something like AIM - you can't just whip out a textbook."

Sheldon is an economics tutor but doubts uProdigy can help math students.

"It's so hard to explain an equation over the Internet," he said. "Plus $15 is really expensive."

Outsourcing has also become a controversial issue as more and more white-collar jobs move overseas. According to Robinson, tutoring services like uProdigy should consider hiring retired American professors who are more attuned to American curriculums.

Hussain disagrees, claiming that uProdigy has already proven itself a viable alternative to conventional tutoring.

"At enormous schools like Syracuse, tutors aren't always available. You have to make an appointment a week in advance, and then wait around for it," Hussain said. "If you're in upper-level classes, the work you need help with may be too advanced for your tutor. You also can never really be sure who you're getting. Those aren't things you have to worry about with uProdigy."

Currently uProdigy only offers tutoring in math, business and the hard sciences, but Hussain has plans to expand in the future. He was recognized by the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and the service has skyrocketed since its launch in October

Some students said they would be interested in uProdigy's services.

Nergish Sunavala, a junior broadcast journalism major, transferred to SU from India this year. She has attended two Indian universities - St. Xavier's and Jai Hind College - and said the uProdigy math and science tutors are probably of better quality than the ones at SU.

"If I needed math or science tutoring and I got an American tutor, I would run in the other direction," she said. "These [uProdigy] tutors probably know more than most tutors here. Math and science are just very big in Indian education."

At SU, the Writing Center will launch an online component in time for Summer Session 1 and will offer between 10 and 20 hours of writing help per week during the fall semester. While Luther said the Writing Center is not competing with services like uProdigy, he acknowledged the need to adapt to the Internet age.

"I'm sure we're going to hear more about this in the future," Robinson said. "We already have services like Turnitin and Google Books - why not put minds online?"

cedewey@syr.edu