IIT-Bombay's Spoken Tutorial teaches programming languages for free

As as part of the Digital India Week launch on July 1, IIT Bombay showcased relevant projects in an event held on their campus. One of the projects showcased during the event was Spoken Tutorial.

Funded by National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) of Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, the Spoken Tutorial Project aims to teach programming languages, office tools, graphic and circuit design tools through audio video tutorials.

Spoken Tutorial project has courses in C, C++, Java, Python, MySQL, PHP, Linux, Netbeans. It has courses in LibreOffice (for office work), SciLab for scientific calculations, GIMP (for graphical design) and Oscad (for electronic circuit design) etc.

The target group is the community at large, including school children, college students, working professionals, retired professionals, teachers, trainers, research scholars, software users and developers.

The audio content is available in most Indian languages such as Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and even Sanskrit.

“Usually it takes 30-40 hours of instructions to cover curriculum in C; Spoken Tutorial does it through 20 audio video tutorials of 10 minutes duration each,” Professor Kannan Moudgalya, a faculty member in the Chemical Engineering Department of IIT Bombay said.

While spoken tutorial content can be downloaded from the website and one can learn on his own; the project team also facilitate self workshops at colleges all over India.

Around 8 lakh students have been trained so far under the Spoken Tutorial Project. Spoken Tutorial also allows students to take online examinations and get certificates.

Due to the funding, courses are available to students free of cost, currently.

The institute also intends to take its project international in a big way.