As part of its effort to bridge the digital divide, the Rs. 300 crore project, Spoken Tutorial Project (STP), launched by the Indian Institute of Technology, and funded by the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), was inaugurated at the Lady Doak College on Thursday.

Logging on to Skype, senior project manager Shyama Iyer of IIT, Mumbai, inaugurated the resource centre from Mumbai. She interacted with the principal and faculty members of the LDC, which was chosen as the official resource centre of the Spoken Tutorial Project Resource Centre for south Tamil Nadu.

Mohamed Kasim, project assistant, STP, IIT Mumbai, said the project focused on providing social skill competence, and non verbal communication and general academic skill competence.

The target group were students of high school and college, working professionals, software users, developers and trainers, research scholars and the community at large, he added. The advantage of being a resource centre included having the authority to communicate with any institute in the region to promote, teach and learn about open source software.

LDC principal Mercy Pushpalatha, said that the college was going in for open source software as it would enable it not to be dependant on proprietary software where the software and hardware technology generally go hand-in-hand.

Hence, when the company upgrades the hardware, users are forced to upgrade their software and vice versa.

The ‘spoken tutorials’ appeared to be an effective tool to bridge the digital divide, increase internet literacy and was also an easy way to learn. With more spoken tutorials available in all the regional languages it was more open to the public, said Christina Singh, professor of Economics, LDC who was instrumental in bringing the project to LDC.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> National> Tamil Nadu / by Staff Reporter / Madurai – June 29th, 2013