Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished editing the fifth edition of one of my books on education leadership and technology. When I published the first edition in 1994, the editing was done by full-time staff employed by the publisher. For the third edition, the editing was contracted out to an individual consultant/editor. For the fourth edition in 2002, the editing was outsourced to a company in Iowa. For my latest edition, the editing and production work was outsourced to a company in India. In our smaller world, this all makes good business sense.

Yesterday a colleague of mine, Jack Hammond at Hunter College, posted a comment on the faculty listserve referring to an article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education describing how a faculty member teaching a large section in a business program at the University of Houston has been outsourcing the correction of her papers to an Asian Company, EduMetry, Inc. I find this quite provocative and am not sure what to make of it. While I had absolutely no problem with the editing service provided for my book, I am struggling to understand and maybe accept the outsourcing of correcting papers to an Asian company. It might be that I do not appreciate the task of grading papers in a large lecture class but still this does raise some interesting issues. Below is the URL for the article.

Tony

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http://chronicle.com/article/Outsourced-Grading-With/64954/