#10 Will Teachers be Outsourced/Offshored?

Recently, a colleague and I were discussing what seemed to us like infinite educational possibilities would be available if the school divisions and higher education facilities in our region gained access to a very large, very fast, very reliable fiber network. (For normal people the equivalent feeling would be something like having all the members of your family winning a $500 million taxes paid lottery. )

Our conversation was ironic and eye-opening to US; we thought we already knew the biggest possibilities! But, amidst five minutes of breathless laughter (you'd have to know us to understand why), we realized how short-sigtned we had been. The balance of our conversation lead us to three major realizations:

1. First, virtually everything we plan or do on the Internet related to education assumes our network connections to the outside world are slow and unreliable.
   
   
2. Second, access to a very large, very fast, very reliable fiber network would probably enable school divisions to find affordable, remote teachers for very complex subjects without "moving" them here (rural Virginia).
   
   
3. Finally, if the location of the remote teacher was in India, wouldn't that be outsourcing/offshoring teachers.
   

That's the point where we quit laughing and began asking ourselves serious questions. What would it cost to have a teacher in India teach C++, Mandarin, or nanotechnology in our division?

Would an Indian teacher cost 50% less than an American onsite teacher? If it were that cheap for an Indian C++ teacher, what other courses might an Indian or Chinese teacher offer--from India or China?

Would a Flat World education provide rural American students a competitive advantage? Would that provide rural economic developers a new drawing card? Would metropolitan professionals move their children here if we offered more complex courses taught by highly qualified teachers from around the world--at half the "local" price.

Is it ethical to deny rural students access to high level courses taught by highly qualified, affordable, outsourced/offshored teachers because the teachers are not local employees? Would parents choose: paying higher taxes for local "High Tech" teachers or affordable teachers from around the globe or not respond to either option.

If public schools chose not to outsource/offshore , what could be done to get those courses to our students? What would home schools and private schools choose? What impact might their decisions have on public schools?

Questions like these are history lessons to Technology professionals, Tobacco farmers, and Textile workers; the answers for those career fields are clear. However, until last week, I had never seriously considered the possibility that a"fourth T," TEACHERS could be outsourced/offshored from OUR region.

From a technology perspective this can be done. From a rural economic perspective, it can be done cheaply. The question I now ask myself each morning is, "Why won't my job be outsourced/offshored today?" That's plenty of motivation for the day--even on a bad day.

#08 What's A Wiki? Blog? Podcasting?

Discover what a Wiki is by clicking here!

Obviously, there's more to come for Halifax County School Division on the "w" word, the "b" word and the "p" word...

To begin, start learning a few of the differences between them.

1. YOU have the one and only password to YOUR blog; it's your personal journal to the world. Others can add comments about your blog but they can't change what YOU write.
   
2. Lots of people can work on the same "wiki" without sharing a password. As a matter of fact, wiki's are designed to be created and written to by many people. Each one adds a little.
   
3. Podcasting. Podcasting refers to a "store and forward" technology that allows you to manually or automaticcally download content from a server. Its name comes from the IPOD world. The IPOD was originally designed to allow downloading of music in mp3 format; the content downloaded to an IPOD now is limited only to imagination. Recently the IPOD has been expaned to include video content.
   

Here's a free place to start a blog!

Just remember, that when it comes to the Internet, especially the wiki world," Nobody knows you're a dog.