Finally! Major media have discovered Eleutian, 14 years after its founding. I hope this is the start of a blitz of stories about a company that teaches English to Asians via the Internet.
My back story: In 2003, at the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) conference in Japan, I learned that the Japanese government had declared a crisis with with English language because their university students were fluent in written English, but most could not communicate in English. This the era when courts were ruling in favor of parents who sued US universities because their children couldn’t understand the Asians who were teaching classes, particularly science courses.
At the same time, I knew a number of people in Wyoming who would like to work part-time. Most of us in Wyoming speak with a TV news dialect, which is in demand in the outside world. Clearly there was a cottage-industry business there. But I only mused. That’s why I was thrilled, delighted, impressed and enthusiastic when Kent Holliday started Eleutian in Ten Sleep, which is less than 30 miles from my hometown of Worland. That was in 2006. I drove right over to see what was happening.
CNN’s story is attracting a lot of negative comments about how Eleutian’s teachers are training competitors who will take more jobs away from the United States. Perhaps…but to my mind, Eleutian helps ensure that the world can communicate with us and that business is still being conducted in English. I’ve read that all Chinese are supposed to begin English lessons in the first grade. I assume these commenters are not ready to mandate that all US students begin Chinese in the first grade.
And no one — except CNN readers in Wyoming — gets it about the impact of the Eleutian experience on the people in the Big Horn Basin, where Ten Sleep is located. Think of the Basin as a valley shaped like a round washbasin adjoining Yellowstone and surrounded by mountains. The Big Horn Basin was the last place in the continental United States to be settled. Yet hundreds of its residents now are living in a virtual global crossroads. Their experience has moved them from geographic isolation into personal experiences with the world. Talk about people-to-people progress. This is it.
New global outsourcing hub – Wyoming?
By Lara Farrar, for CNN
July 5, 2010 10:08 a.m. EDT
Students in classrooms across Asia can take real-time English lessons from American teacher
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- A Wyoming company is employing hundreds [700] as long-distance English teachers
- Thousands of students in Asia learn real-time English from laid-off U.S. teachers
- The company pipes teachers into 500 classrooms across Korea and Japan
(CNN) — When it comes to call centers filled with English-speaking employees, India likely comes to mind. Not a tiny town in Wyoming called Ten Sleep, population about 300.
What Ten Sleep has is not, exactly, a call center. Instead, the town is home to a teaching center that is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There, American teachers provide real-time video English lessons to thousands of students in classrooms across Asia via high-speed fiber optic networks…. (Full Story)