HYDERABAD: The Telangana government has tied up with the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay to provide free online computer courses to more than 80,000 students in 130 degree colleges across the state.
The department of collegiate education and IIT-Bombay on Wednesday, signed an MoU to implement the ‘Spoken Tutorial’ project, which enables students to access various skill-based software tutorials free of cost.
Developed by IIT-Bombay, the ‘Spoken Tutorial’ website (spoken-tutorial.org) is a hub of audio-video recorded lessons that explain programming of various softwares, animation, graphics and other programming languages. Visuals show the step-by-step process of lessons, while the recorded audio explains the process to students.
These lessons are prepared using a simple vocabulary so that students can easily understand them.
The lessons cover more than 30 IT courses, which benefit students from both the engineering and non-engineering backgrounds. Lessons on various coding languages such as C, C++, Java, PHP, Linux, LaTeX and MySQL will also be available as part of the project which was started by IIT-Bombay with an aim to enhance computer literacy across the country, especially in the rural areas.
So far more than 4.50 lakh students have benefited from the project, according to IIT-Bombay.
Before signing the MoU with the Telangana government, the IIT-Bombay provided this service to two universities. Currently it is available at Uttar Pradesh Technical University (UPTU), Lucknow and the Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, (BAMU), Aurangabad.
Deputy chief minister and education minister Kadiyam Srihari said the project was being implemented under the Union HRD ministry’s ‘Talk to a Teacher’ scheme, which provides free coaching for ICET.
“This project is going to be very helpful to students here,” he said.
After signing the MoU, collegiate education commissioner Vani Prasad said, “These tutorials are available in 15 regional languages and students can easily learn coding languages like C, C++.”
Shyama Iyer, national coordinator (training) of the Tutorial Project of IIT-B, was also present at the event.