You know the tale. A butterfly flaps its wings in China and it affects political events in the USA. We are definitely part of a global economy. Events there affect us here. In the article “Internet outage in Mideast, Asia felt in NJ” by Kelly Heyboer inThe Star-Ledger (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/01/internet_outage_in_mideast_asi.html) it describes how a ship’s anchor dragging across the sea floor damaged two underwater cables carrying vital internet traffic to parts of Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain.
The Internet disruption affected the Dubai stock exchange and posed a challenge for companies in India that rely on internet connectivity. At TutorVista we noticed it right away. On any given day, a particular tutor’s internet, power or computer can be down. You know how it is when you have a power failure or your cable TV connection is down because of a storm. These things can happen.
If we don’t see a tutor in place and ready to go shortly before they are scheduled to do a tutoring session, we automatically activate an alternate tutor so the session goes off without a hitch. It’s part of the redundancies we build into our business. What else do we do? Our tutors come from 23 major cities across India and a half dozen other countries so a storm or other problem affecting one city or a group doesn’t affect all our tutors. We can easily transfer traffic from tutors in Mumbai, for example, to ones in the Philippines.
We’re definitely part of a connected, global supply chain. Things that happen in one part of the world do affect people in another. But this isn’t a new concept. We know that freezing weather in Florida can affect orange juice prices and availability across the US. I remember years ago when there was a peanut butter shortage for some reason.
We are one week into this internet disruption from the anchor. We continue to reassign tutoring sessions to tutors with good connectivity out of our vast workforce. But that’s consistent really with the power and design of the internet in the first place. There’s a zillion paths an internet packet or message can take. Disruptions and roadblocks along the way are a fact of life and the beauty of the internet is it’s designed to deal with that.
Today it’s a boat anchor. Tomorrow it might be a storm, a strike…who knows. But just like the mailman’s creed, “Neither rain, nor snow, nor dark of night shall keep me from my appointed rounds” the tutoring will happen!
Dr. John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com
Thursday, February 7, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Doing Something Different
In her article “The Call for Epochal Leadership” in Business Week, Shoshana Zuboff, retired professor of the Harvard Business School, describes how it takes new, industry-shifting leaders to enlighten and inspire us to adopt new beliefs and ways of looking at and doing things. Those new ways open up incredible possibilities. She mentioned that education is an area where consumers want to experience – need to experience – a new kind of renaissance or redefinition of how things are done, what they should cost, and where you get them.
To set the stage for this kind of transformation, Zuboff cites the example of the iPod and iTunes and the impact they had on the mass consumption of music….how they redefined a new model that completely shifts the relationship each of us has with music as a result.
In education, we at TutorVista.com have embarked on a journey to redefine where and how education services are delivered, and how much they should cost. Just like the Model T challenged notions of how vehicles should be made and that in turn led to a radical fractioning of the price resulting in affordable transportation for the masses, TutorVista believes that if you use technology to connect experienced, passionate tutors from around the world with students who need them, we can deliver better quality education, personalized service and convenience at a mass market price. Students talk naturally to a tutor a half-a-world away and write, draw and work on a shared virtual whiteboard – a kind of electronic piece of paper student and tutor share. We can provide unlimited tutoring, homework help, remediation and quiz preparation for a low, fixed price. This fundamentally changes education. It’s now more personal, available, accessible, convenient, affordable and timely.
But it isn’t enough that the light has been shined on a powerfully enabling global system of new possibilities. There are old, entrenched systems in place that are out to assert the status quo at every turn and undermine innovation and a more efficient new order. Look at supplemental education services. Instead of encouraging new models that will bring more and better help to students where and when they need it most, rules designed to ensure the same people are the only ones in the game doing the same things they always have serve to stifle innovation and lash us to the mast of the past, long after that ship has sunk.
It’s essential we break the molds that doom us to the ways of the past. Repeating that past isn’t going to do us any good. We need to do something different!
Dr. John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com
To set the stage for this kind of transformation, Zuboff cites the example of the iPod and iTunes and the impact they had on the mass consumption of music….how they redefined a new model that completely shifts the relationship each of us has with music as a result.
In education, we at TutorVista.com have embarked on a journey to redefine where and how education services are delivered, and how much they should cost. Just like the Model T challenged notions of how vehicles should be made and that in turn led to a radical fractioning of the price resulting in affordable transportation for the masses, TutorVista believes that if you use technology to connect experienced, passionate tutors from around the world with students who need them, we can deliver better quality education, personalized service and convenience at a mass market price. Students talk naturally to a tutor a half-a-world away and write, draw and work on a shared virtual whiteboard – a kind of electronic piece of paper student and tutor share. We can provide unlimited tutoring, homework help, remediation and quiz preparation for a low, fixed price. This fundamentally changes education. It’s now more personal, available, accessible, convenient, affordable and timely.
But it isn’t enough that the light has been shined on a powerfully enabling global system of new possibilities. There are old, entrenched systems in place that are out to assert the status quo at every turn and undermine innovation and a more efficient new order. Look at supplemental education services. Instead of encouraging new models that will bring more and better help to students where and when they need it most, rules designed to ensure the same people are the only ones in the game doing the same things they always have serve to stifle innovation and lash us to the mast of the past, long after that ship has sunk.
It’s essential we break the molds that doom us to the ways of the past. Repeating that past isn’t going to do us any good. We need to do something different!
Dr. John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com
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