Visevesvaraya Technological University’s Spoken Tutorial project, an initiative to promote various ICT courses in its colleges in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, may get a push in the new academic year.
The collaboration between the two institutions started in 2014, and courses are conducted on free and open source software with the aid of spoken tutorials developed by IIT Bombay. There are 75 colleges under the VTU which have taken up this training. However, like VTU’s in-charge vice chancellor V Sridhar said, the project “has not reached every college” as yet.
The plan is, therefore, to extend this project to as many as the 200-odd colleges under the VTU by the next academic year.
Sources privy to the project told Deccan Herald that although the course was meant as an add-on to a student’s skill set to help him professionally and academically, not many students showed interest in the first two years. To sit for a course under the tutorials meant sitting for an exam at the end of it. Students would receive a certificate at the end of the course. While a number of teachers are using the course material and tutorials as a teaching supplement, many students are not taking the course to its conclusion by getting the certificates. A suggestion, therefore, has also be made to include tutorials in the main course, to make students take them up more seriously.
The courses offered through the tutorials are in programming languages such as Java, C+, C++, Python, Linux for engineering students, Scilab (similar to the programming language Matlab) for mathematics and statistics students and various other courses for MBA, MCA and PhD students. These courses are provided through the massive open online courses or MOOC format.