Spoken Tutorials: A Summary

Kannan Moudgalya

2 March 2015

The Spoken Tutorial project recently received a Google MOOC Focused Research Award to dothe work, Extending the Offline Capability of Spoken Tutorial Methodology. This award comes witha $50,000 as an unrestricted gift. The appendix in the last page has the awards email.

Salient features of the Spoken Tutorial project are given below:

• Spoken Tutorial is a 10 minute audio-video tutorial on IT topics.

• The objective of the Spoken Tutorial project is to improve the employment potential of ourstudents by teaching them IT skills.

• The Spoken Tutorial project is funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT,MHRD.

• There are about 630 original spoken tutorials, created in English.

• Spoken Tutorials cover many useful IT topics, such as Basic IT Literacy, Tux Typing, KTurtle,C, C++, Java, PHP, Linux, Scilab, Python, OpenFOAM, PERL, Ruby, LibreOffice, Blender,GeoGebra, Jmol, GChemPaint and Inkscape.

• These videos are dubbed into all 22 Indian languages. In each of the following languages,we have more than 100 tutorials: Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam,Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and urdu. Including the dubbed tutorials,there is a total of 4200 videos.

• Spoken Tutorials can be downloaded free of cost from our website, http://spoken-tutorial.org.

• Spoken Tutorials are created for self learning - achieved through novice check of the script.

• We conduct training programmes in about 5,000 colleges using Spoken Tutorials. These aretaking place in engineering, science, arts, commerce and polytechnic colleges and ITIs. At alllocations, learning happens through the same videos, maintaining the quality uniform.

• The usage of language dubbed Spoken Tutorials is increasing, with the large scale acceptanceof this method by ITIs, who entered our fold about six months ago. We have already trainedmore than 40,0000 ITI students through this methodology. The local language use is expectedto increase further when the Government Schools start using this methodology.

• Whenever Internet is available, we connect with the participants through Skype and providemoral support. A typical instance of this is given below, wherein one of our managers istalking to the participants of a workshop in Kerala:

1

• The learners follow the side-by-side method, as shown in the figure below. They listen to theSpoken Tutorial (video) on the left hand side of the computer screen and try it out in theopen source software on the right hand side of the screen, one command at a time. Thus, theapproach used in the Spoken Tutorial methodology is 100% active learning.

2

• We have trained a total of 750,000 students in the past four years. We trained close to 150,000students in the first two months of 2015 alone. A lot of data on our training programmeis available online at http://spoken-tutorial.org/statistics/training-onlinetest/

training/. An annual breakup of the number of students and teachers we have trained isgiven in the following figure:

• The above mentioned large scale deployment is due to the self learning nature of spoken tuto-rials and the ability to create an image of tutorials for offline use in places that have reducedInternet access, accessible through http://spoken-tutorial.org/cdcontent/. See also thefigure below:

3

• Nevertheless, we receive a large traffic to our website http://spoken-tutorial.org also. Ascreenshot of the visitors to our web page in the current week is given below. This informationis available to all visitors of our web page.

• The quality of these visits is excellent, as given by high visit time ('15 min) and small bouncerate ('20%). See the stats on a typical working day (28 Feb. 2015) below:

• The visits to our website is more than doubling every year, as can be seen in the followingfigure. The number of Page views is already close to a million in the current year.

• Spoken Tutorials are now getting extended to other skills training.

4

MOOC Focused Research Award Announcement by Google

Subject: Congratulations, you have been selected to receive a Google MOOC Focused Research AwardFrom: Aimin Zhu <amzhu@google.com>Date: 26/02/15 4:01 pmTo: Kannan Moudgalya <kannan@iitb.ac.in>CC: Aparna Kadakia <akadakia@google.com>, Ashwani Sharma <ashws@google.com>

Dear Professor Kannan Moudgalya, We would like to thank you for submitting your proposal, "Extending the Offline Capability of Spoken Tutorial Methodology" to apply for Google MOOC Focused Research Awards program. We appreciate your patience, as weconduct a very thorough review of all the submissions that we receive, involving a few Google engineers andresearchers. After expert reviews and committee discussions, we now have reached the final decision. It's our great pleasure to inform you that your proposal has been selected to receive a Google MOOC FocusedResearch Award. Congratulations!

Ms. Aparna Kadakia, from Google Course Builder team, and Mr. Ashwani Shamar, from Google UniversityRelations team, will be your Project co-Sponsors. Mr. Ashwani Shamar will also take the local point of contact role.They will support your research project through interactions during the following one-year execution (Mar. 2015to Feb. 2016). We will send out follow up email to clarify the Google Sponsor role. We look forward to the resultscoming out from your excellent research work.

We are very excited about your work and are thrilled to support this project. This award, as unrestricted gift, isUS$50,000. You will be receiving a separate email in the next few days with instructions for providing paymentinformation. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding this award.

Congratulations again and best wishes,

-- Maggie Johnson, Pavel Simakov, Aparna Kadakia, Ashwani Shamar, Michel Benard, Sally-Ann Williams and AiminZhu

Congratulations, you have been selected to receive a Google MOOC Focused Researc...

1 of 1 02/03/15 11:57 pm

5