| Spoken Tutorial - 10/08/2009 |
| Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) |
| Technical Community and Civil Society | Asia & Pacific | India |
| The Spoken Tutorial (ST) project is an ongoing project which began in the year 2009 funded by the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT), launched by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development, Government of India. The pandemic has changed significantly the method of teaching as well. As an immediate response, educational institutes and schools have adopted new strategies from chalk-talk to open learning and virtual platforms to ensure the engagement between students and teachers as close as real in classroom-type experience, as possible. Government organisations for e.g Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) have been exploring novel ways to reach out to users in the last mile and empower them with skills and relevant information that can help them in employability and income generation. Initiatives like Swayam (https://swayam.gov.in/), online courses for teachers, e-PG Pathshala (https://epgp.inflibnet.ac.in/), an initiative of the MHRD under its National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT) being executed by the UGC, Vidwan (https://vidwan.inflibnet.ac.in/), a database of experts who provide information to peers and prospective collaborators, NEAT (http://www.aicte-india.org/bureaus/neat), an initiative by AICTE are some of the initiatives launched by MHRD. Open source is one of the key aspects that are common in these educational platforms. However, quite understandably, the focus of these initiatives is limited to users who have better quality internet connectivity. Pedagogy in digital education is an important link between course content, educationists, technology, and course-takers. There are still half a billion people in rural India who are yet to go online. The democratization of technology is now an important aspect comprising internet connectivity, telecom infrastructure, affordability of online systems, availability of laptop/desktop software and online assessments. Moreover, it is also important to understand whether we are able to provide skill-based learning which helps the learner to learn at its own pace without disrupting the engagement between educationists and learners. The Spoken Tutorial project at IIT Bombay, initiated by the National Mission on Education through ICT, and funded by Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India in January 2010.The project aims to create and disseminate knowledge of technology and Free Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) in the form of a 10-minute long audio-video tutorial created using the screencast methodology. The project aims to bridge the current digital gap which is often due to i) lack of information, ii) lack of proper guidance, iii) lack of infrastructure facilities available and iv) difficulty in understanding English. The project's main objective is to promote IT literacy for education and improve the employment potential of youth in India. Since 2018, the project has expanded to address the information accessibility gap amongst health workers in rural villages through the health and nutrition project. It thus empowers communities to create, access and govern locally relevant content within the communities in their own languages could be a potential solution to solve the challenges of access gap of information.Designed in the self-learning method for skill-based courses, these tutorials are made available on the spoken tutorial website (www.spoken-tutorial.org) and are accessed by millions of people in India and abroad, who lack opportunities and/or access to learn any software. Side by side screen pedagogy is used by Spoken Tutorial. The project enables students to use the course in limited connectivity environments, and allows students to download a zip file, and use it for future learning. In the past 6 years, 5 million students have been trained through the Spoken Tutorials. The project has also partnered with NASSCOM (https://futureskills.nasscom.in/). Spoken Tutorial features as a Partner Tile on NASSCOM's FutureSkills platform alongside NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning), Khan Academy, edX, Pearson etc. When employability is a huge concern amongst students, 30 students with 59 offers were selected during the NASSCOM job fair conducted in January 2020.Since the lockdown in India, usage of the Spoken Tutorial has gone up astronomically. The tutorials seem to be the right fit, and custom designed for the current situation unleashed by Covid, such as schools being closed, students not being fluent in English, unavailability of good internet access, expensive commercial software packages, and inability to pay for accessing learning content. In the current lockdown scenario in India, about 8000 colleges are officially using Spoken Tutorials. After the lockdown, the number of unique users has increased from 18000 to 25000, having a spike of 107,000 on the day when the lockdown was announced. The daily pageviews of the Spoken Tutorial portal has gone up from about 50,000 per day to about 250,000 per day, in the short span of about a month. The global rank of the portal, taken from https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/spoken-tutorial.org shows that the rank has substantially improved due to the dramatic use of the portal during the Covid-19 crisis. Spoken Tutorial project's rank used to be 225,000 about 3 months ago. The India rank of Spoken Tutorial portal is now 2500. The time spent by a visitor in a day is 12 minutes per person per day. The Spoken Tutorial courses were also included in the Indian government’s SWAYAM portal about a month ago, with an AICTE tag. Using Spoken Tutorials for IT training is only the tip of the iceberg. It has extended to the field of health and nutrition. The project is creating a set of tutorials on the first 1,000 days of babies, with an initial focus on breastfeeding. The health tutorials have trained about 20,000 health workers, with an excellent impact on the well being of babies, and their mothers. |
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Source Link Keywords: Spoken tutorial, self learning, scalable, sustainable, health, nutrition, health workers |