The free online Spoken Tutorials (www.spoken-tutorial.org) of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, is set to take another leap, with the institute offering a spoken guide for advanced computer courses soon.
The online IT literacy project, which was launched in January 2010 with funding from National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology of the HRD ministry, will now provide a spoken guide for advanced courses, such as Linux, C and Bash.
Professor Kannan Moudgalya, a faculty member in the chemical engineering department of IIT-B and in-charge of the Spoken Tutorial project, said, "The tutorial is an ever-evolving open source platform through which students in far-flung areas can learn to develop a wide range of software, secure good marks and, eventually, bag jobs in prestigious companies on the strength of training. We are in the process of launching advanced courses."
The Spoken Tutorial currently has courses in C, C++, Java, Python, MySQL, PHP, Linux and Netbeans. It also has courses in LibreOffice (for office work), SciLab for scientific calculations, GIMP (for graphical design) and Oscad (for electronic circuit design). Over 3.87 students from across India have benefitted from it in the past four years.
The audio-video tutorial aims to bring a revolution in education through technology by teaching programming languages, office tools, graphic and circuit design tools in a simple and interesting manner.
The audio content is available in most Indian languages — Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and even Sanskrit — for which students and teachers from across Mumbai have lent their voices. Soon, all courses will be available in 23 Indian languages.
With the help of the online tool, students can code, compile, execute and test programmes, simultaneously, thus providing a practical complement to theoretical training. The content can be downloaded from the website for free and one can learn on his/her own. Students are allowed to ask questions, which will be answered by experts.
IIT-B's free spoken tutorial takes another leap