Spoken Tutorial Workshop in MDM College Latur, Maharashtra

A team of 6 members - 4 from IIT Bombay and 2 from Fosser's Valley visited MDM College, Aurad, Latur to conduct a 2-day workshop on "How to create Spoken Tutorials".   The 30-odd participants comprised of students and faculty members. Our target was to train this group to create at least 10 spoken tutorials at the end of the workshop.   The domain for the proposed spoken tutorials were Python, GNUKatha and Devnagari document using Latex.

During the 2-day workshop, the students and faculty members were taught how to write a script for their own spoken tutorial, the importance of a script and the do's and don'ts of script writing and narration.   They were taught the importance of pedagogy in the script.  We demonstrated how to use two different screen casting softwares - Camstudio for a Windows based machine and recordMyDesktop for an Ubuntu Linux based machine.

After providing all the necessary information, we asked the group of participants to form smaller teams of 2-3 individuals. These small teams were asked to choose a topic on which they would eventually make the spoken tutorial. We limited their choice of topics to Python, GNUKatha and Devnagari documents using Latex as we had domain experts in these areas with us during the workshop.

The teams were asked to write the script for the chosen topic in a language of their choice.  The 6-member team reviewed the script for accuracy of content, correctness of syntax, pedagogy and grammar.   Then the groups were asked to practice narrating their scripts and to do test recordings.   This helped them to judge the audio-video quality of their spoken tutorials and make the necessary corrections and improvements.  On the afternoon of the second day, all teams were ready with their final scripts and we started with the final recording for all the teams. 5 teams recorded their spoken tutorials parallelly in different rooms.  An interesting set of tutorials was recorded by each team.  By the end of the second day, we had helped the teams to record 10 spoken tutorials.

The students and faculty members of the MDM College at Aurad, Latur, Maharashtra were very eager and very enthusiastic to learn this technology.  We were truly amazed with their response!

And Spoken Tutorials indeed proved itself to be "THE" technology to bridge the digital divide!