 Good afternoon. I am going to talk about some research issues that we face in a massive IT literacy campaign project that we started a few years ago. My name is Karnan Mughalya. I am from IIT Bombay. The outline of the talk is very simple. The objective of this work is IT literacy training for employment. It is an interesting research problem. I am going to discuss some of the issues in this. What are the problems that we questions that we came up with? First of all, is it possible to come up with a massive IT training methodology? Is it possible to do this with most learners being weak in English? Is it possible to do this with poor internet infrastructure? Is it possible to make it effective? That is massive, simultaneously effective. Is it possible to offer this training with only a handful of experts? And finally, is it possible to do this at a low cost? So, I am going to explain to you the way we solve these questions. And hopefully, that will give an idea of some of the research issues. Of course, this problem is quite different from some of the problems that you may come across in engineering or science. Possibly, this is more of management and education technology. But, I believe this is something very important. And it is a very important problem that we are trying to solve, because if you find solutions to this problem, our children will get better jobs. So, let us get on with it. We proposed to, we came up with this method of Spurken tutorial to address this issue, address the research problems mentioned in the previous slide. I will quickly go through this. I plan to give a lot of demonstrations to answer the questions. Spurken tutorials are suitable for skills training. These are 10 minute audio-video tutorial. It is created for self-learning. And hence, through novice check of the script, audio alone is dubbed into 20 languages. One can self-learn. And the website is Spurken-tutorial.org. As we go along, I will give you demonstrations. So, let me first start off with the research questions. Is our methodology effective? For example, the questions to be answered are, is it possible to make our methodology effective? Let us say Spurken-tutorial. The second one, is it possible to offer this training at different places in the country with only a handful of experts? So, we will see how we went about doing it. So, let me go to the next one. The answer to this, the questions, the two questions in the previous slide are through a facility called novice check. So, how do we do this? So, let us go to our website. This is our website, Spurken-tutorial.org. And then, if you click this arrow, it goes to a search page. So, let me take, you can see a lot of topics. Remember, we are working on IT training and improving the employment for our students, for our children. So, let me start with, let me see if I can choose any of these. Let me choose Linux. And let me choose, in Linux, we have all these different languages. So, I wanted to choose Malayalam. Let me see if I can play one of these. So, let me pass it here. What I also want to show you is, let me choose English. And now, this is in English. Let me play this English. Welcome to this Spurken-tutorial on how to use Synaptic Package Manager. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install applications in Ubuntu using Synaptic Package Manager. I am using Ubuntu 10.04 with genome environment desktop to explain this tutorial. You can see that he is actually reading the script. You need to have the administrative right to use Synaptic Package Manager. The internet connection should be working fine. So, let me pass it. So, what we do is, remember we are talking about providing effective training. We want to provide this even with a small number of experts, very few teachers. So, what we thought we could do was to come up with a script. This is the script. And ask a beginner to go through this script and ensure that they can reproduce every step that is being explained here. So, that is what is being done. So, we do the novice check. Supposing a novice says, look, I do not understand this particular step, then we do not accept this script for recording. So, in other words, a novice has to clear a script. Once the script is accepted, only then it is recorded. So, the recording was done after this. So, this is how we, of course, we do pilot workshops. We conduct a lot of reviews by experts, by beginners and so on, and finally, come up with this video. So, typically on an average, I would say each video would have been made at least 5 times on an average. Initially, we had, we made tutorials many times, but now we do not take many takes. In 2 or 3 takes at most, we are able to create the videos. So, let me come back to, so this is the novice check that I talked about, and that is what is required to make it effective. The next question is, given that this is available, is it possible to come up with a massive IT training methodology? How do we do this? So, let us go to the next one. We do this through self-learning organized workshops, which are called self-workshops. These are 2 hour workshops. These can be organized by a volunteer, an expert is not required. The reason is, these are already created for self-learning. One volunteer can run different workshops. The method is the same. For example, the same volunteer can run a workshop on C, as well as on LibreOffice and also Linux. These can be offered through educational institutions through their computer center, for example. As a result, the students can benefit by these, even if they do not have individual computers. And from the administration's point of view, no policy decision is required to use. They do not have to pay anything, no financial implication. It is a major issue. Even if a college has to spend 1 rupee, they have to go through a formal procedure, advertisement and all kinds of things. Whereas, in this, we say that there is absolutely no payment required. So, these are done through self-learning organized workshops called self-workshops that we offer in a big way. Let me come back to this. I want to give some numbers. I said that through this, we are able to offer massive workshops. Let me just come to this website. I have already opened it here. I think it is here. You can see in this web page I have already opened. You can see over here. See this. It says through our methodology, we have trained a total of about 4.5 lakh students. And you can see some of the workshops that are happening today, 19 September in Tamil Nadu. You can see in Junagadh, in Coimbatore, Vellore and so on. Some of the cities are still not written out. So, that is the reason why this is coming as uncategorized. Sometimes we found mistakes in some of the city names. So, that is the reason. But you can see that quite a few names are coming. But the important thing is to note that we have trained a total of 4.5 lakh students through these workshops. So, these are the self-learning organized workshops conducted in their colleges through one of their own volunteers. The next question, what if the student is weak in English? All our children want jobs, IT jobs. They want to work in good companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and so on. But they may be weak in English. Of course, we know that IT is not rocket science. It just requires logical thinking and many of our children can do that. Most of our children can do that. So, we thought why do not we provide this training without losing employment opportunities? As a result, we kept the video in English, the screen in English, so that the children can use normal computers, normal keyboards, so they can get the job. Only thing is at the beginning, when they start their job, they may think in their mother tongue. We saw this in Malayalam. But let me just show you the method that we follow to achieve this. I showed you Synaptic Package Manager. This was in English. I told you that we create the script first, subject it to novice check. Once it is acceptable, we freeze the script and make the video. Once we make the video, what we do is we have another thing called timed script. So, let me click this. This is the script we made before creating the tutorial. But this is the script to be used after the video is made. Note that there is no visual cue here. There is a visual cue here because this says how the video has to be made. When this narration is to be made, what is to be seen on the screen? But once the video is made, you no longer need this visual cue. You only need what is spoken at what time. So, at time 0, we have to say welcome to this spoken tutorial at 6 seconds. We need to say in this tutorial and so on. Now, let me go to this is Malayalam. Let us say it is Malayalam, but let us see whether we can the script. You can see the script in Malayalam. So, this is what we do. We have the thing in English. It says at what time, what is to be spoken and then we replace those English sentences in with the target language and then we are in. A person comes, whoever has to create the video, who has to do the dubbing, they just have to speak all the sentences one after another without worrying about the time and then once the recording is finished, they can cut and slide each sentence to the appropriate time. They save it, export it and attach it with the original video. So, this can be done in every language. In fact, we dub this in all 22 languages. Let me see if I can. So, this is in English. Let me see if I can play Hindi. So, Hindi has come. So, let me say, Synaptic Package Manager. Let me play Hindi. So, you can see that once again, now we have the script in Hindi. So, we do this in all our languages. The objective is that we will do this in all 22 languages. In some languages, we have made lot of progress. At this point, we have a total of close to 600 tutorials in English and these are dubbed into various languages. In some languages, we have made lot of progress. For example, in Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Punjabi, even Nepali, Marathi, Gujarati, we have dubbed a lot of them. Slightly lesser number in Punjabi, Malayalam, Telugu, Canada and so on. Urdu, we have made dubbing also in Sanskrit. For example, we have made about 45. We have dubbed 45 tutorials into Sanskrit. There are some languages in English which we have not been so successful, especially languages from northeast. Assamese, we are reasonably successful. I think we have dubbed more than 100 tutorials, but some of the other northeastern languages, we are doing quite badly. We are looking for people who will do the dubbing and if you can get, of course, we pay a honorarium to all of them. Then, if you find good people, we would be glad to extend this in all those languages. Remember, we want to make this available for all 22 languages. Let me minimize this. The question is, is it possible to do this with most learners being weak in English? I think the answer is yes. Because of this, we are actually now in a position to go to polytechnic colleges. We are in a position to go to municipal schools where the mother tongue is not English. Most of course, you all know that not more than about 10 percent of the people in India are fluent in English. Let our children think in whatever language they are comfortable in. After all, as I mentioned earlier, IT training, IT is not rocket science. It is mainly logical and we can do the logic in our mother tongue and then come up with outstanding programs. All our children know a little bit of English. They all play jack and jill when they are in nursery, first standard and so on. They know enough English. They can pick it up and it is possible for us to train all our children to be suitable for our IT companies even though they may be weak in English. But of course, I always say that they can listen to the English version of the spoken tutorial afterwards after they become comfortable in the, let us say they are learning labor office. Once they are comfortable by learning through their mother tongue, they can always listen to the English version that will improve their English also. So, let me go on to the next topic. So, this you have already seen. I am going to skip this. The next one is, is it possible for us to offer this given that our children do not have access to good internet? So, this is something we took up very seriously and we found a solution. I am going to show you. So, let me come back somewhere here. If you see here at the top of this page, we have something called software training. Let me click this. So, here you have something called create your own disk image. So, let me click this. By the way before that, let me stay here. It is possible to right click this. It will come and say, save video as, if I say video as, it is probably, it will come and ask where do I save it and so on. You can save it. It is possible to save any of the videos. It is quite unlike YouTube. It is little difficult to download and save from YouTube. It is not impossible, but you have to do some extra work. Here it is straight forward. You just have to click the right key, right mouse. But we do more than that. It is possible for example, a college or a school to download all the videos required for a particular workshop. For example, if you see here, if I go back, remember, this is the page that I got. Here you see all the videos in the sequence that they have to follow. The first one, Ubuntu desktop, then synoptic package manager, then basic commands and so on. We already have this in a particular order. So, what if somebody says, why do not I get all of them in one go? I also want it in three languages. For example, I want it in Tamil. I want it in Telugu. I want it in Kannada and Malayalam. And of course, English for a workshop that is going to happen in Chennai. Then I can just say, I am going to give an example. Let me take, say, labour office writer and the select level, let us say, basic. And then all these languages are available. Let me say, I want Bengali and let me say, what does it say? For selecting multiple, click, control click. So, let me do control click. That is the next one, say, next one Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, let us say Malayalam. I click all of this, I had selected. It says that all these languages are going to come and the total size is going to be 308 MB. Then I can say, hey, I have a CD. I can go up to 700 MB. Let me download something else. So, let me go to, let us say, C language and I say all levels. I want English. I want, let us say, Tamil. Only these two. I just want to illustrate that it is possible to mix and match and the total comes to 645. Then I just have to say, create zip file. What it might do is, of course, it is going to create a web page. It is going to create a zip file and it will say, should I save it? If I want to save it, it will take some time and then it will download. We can open it and we can see. By now, the zip file that we were trying to download should have come. Let us go and see. So, it is already here. So, let me double click. I have double clicked and I see the extracted files here. Let me go there. Let me click this. I go to this directory. It has a file called index.html. Let me right click and let me right click. Let me open it with Firefox. You can see that in the FOSS categories, there are only two. Remember, initially, we started with the LibreOffice writer and you look at the languages. These are only the languages that we selected. So, you could select one of these and inserting pictures. Let me play this. So, let me go back. Now, if you see the other one, c and c plus plus, remember, we called only two languages. So, those are there. Let me play this. Interestingly, notice this. This has come from file. It does not require internet. The moment you download it, the look and feel of this is identical to what you see on the website. So, you see that once you download the zip file, you no longer need internet. If you unzip it, it opens in browser. You could open it in Firefox, for example. And the look and feel is identical to what you get on our website if you had had internet. This gives many benefits. For example, we do not have to maintain a separate version, one for offline use and another one for online use. Whenever you have two versions, there is a lot of problem in maintaining the versions. People may end up using the wrong versions, bold versions and so on. Here what happens is the same version is used. So, that makes it easy from our side. From the end user point of view, they do not have to depend on this. They just need one internet connection. They can create the image file and download whatever they want. And then they can use it repeatedly. So, we are answering this question. Is it possible to do this with poor internet infrastructure? The answer is yes. And many colleges are now downloading this image. After they do it, they get a zip file. They unzip it. You have a file called index.html. You double click that index.html and what you have is the things that you downloaded. Now, I want to see the effect of this. Here is a set of statistics that I collected sometime ago. And you can see that we had trained about, I told you about foreign tax. And this statistics were collected about, may be about 6 months ago when the total number of students trained was close to 4 lakh. You can see out of 4 lakh. In C and C plus alone, C plus plus alone, we 85000 students took the workshop. They do that because they get jobs. Most IT, choose me, most IT companies when they come for, choose me, campus training, they seem to conduct a test in C and C plus plus. So, very large number of students went through C C plus plus training. This is an interesting piece of statistics. I want you to remember this when we go to the next slide. 85000 students trained on C. But interestingly, there are only 4500 views on our web page. What this says is, many of the students accessed C C plus plus videos in their college through the zip file that we created, which I showed you just a little while ago. The volunteer or the workshop organizer in every college downloads, creates a zip file, downloads it and copies the zip file into every machine. And the student unzips open set and the file opens video place from the local machine. So, internet is not at all required. So, that is the reason why I am saying that there is at least a multiplication factor of about 10. So, you have to remember this when we go to our web page, which I am going to show shortly. Let me now show you some statistics that we actually make available on our web page. Let us just go down. See the link for this. Click here to view statistics. It takes a little bit of time to load. And then you have, for example, daily statistics. Today, for example, 32000 page views have already happened and weekly, monthly, quarterly. It is interesting that in this quarter that is months of July, August, September. In fact, the quarter is not even over. There are already 1 million page views on our website. If you look at this, you see that we started in 2010, when there were 100000 page views, 1 lakh. Then it became 2.5, 5 lakh. Last year it was 11 lakh. This year already, September is not even over. We are already 20 lakh, 2 million. So, I believe that we will probably do about 3 million page views in this year. So, this shows the increasing number of usage of our web site by people around the world. Let me go to the next page. Image creation facility I already showed you. The next one, is it possible to come up with a massive IT training methodology? Is it possible to do this at a low cost? These are the other questions, remaining questions I will take up. I have already shown you that we have, we train a large number of people. So, here I showed you that we have trained 452,000 people or 4.52. If I now select C and C plus plus alone, and you will see that it is at this point, it is more than 1 lakh. Previously, I showed 85000 that was some time ago. I can also say that, let me choose this from 1st of January to today, and let me choose C plus plus alone. All of them, if I filter this, you see that in this year alone, we have trained 2.38 lakh students all over the country, and in all families. Of course, if I select only C C plus plus, if I filter, you see that we have trained 65000 students in C C plus plus alone all over the country. Next, I want to show you, is it possible to do this at a low cost? I want to do some cost estimates. It is actually a difficult problem. Most people find it difficult, but we thought that, you know, let us see if we can come up with some statistics. Students train now till now 4.52 lakh, I showed you in the previous, in the web page. So, question is, can we train the students at less than 1000 rupees per student? Supposing, you have to organize a workshop, you have to create this material, conduct it, and then ask the students, if they have not studied, if they have not learnt all of them, copy, download all the videos, take them home, learn on their own. Is it possible for us, supposing I do a workshop for 30 people, can I do it at a cost of less than 30000 rupees? Even if you… So, I believe it is a realistic number. Even if you say that, look, 1000 seems to be too high. If it is 1000, the cost works out to 45.2 crore. So, supposing you say that, look, it is not 1000, let me, you know, maybe I can do it at 100 rupees. For 30 people, I can do it in 3000. Even then, it comes to 4.52 crore. But interestingly, the method is already available. All the videos are available. We can easily make it available to 10 times the number of students, 45.2 lakh students. For example, it can also be trained with no additional cost. In addition, even at 100 rupees per person, you can see that it is enormous benefit. The online test and certificate also, we have done for 1 student. Of course, for this, we need internet. That is one of the reasons why not every student has gone through this test, online test. But just look at the value of this. Look at the cost of organizing this. Even if you charge, let us say, 200 rupees or 500 rupees, this will become very expensive. Value of spoken tutorials, we have 600 original tutorials at a cost of 100 rupees per tutorial. It comes to 60 lakh and then, 2400 dub tutorials. I have taken about 2000 rupees per dub tutorial. It comes to 50 lakh. So, the value of spoken tutorials on the website alone is about 1.1 crore. More importantly, what about the training that we have imported to our staff members, many of whom can start their own project. They can spawn many multiple numbers of these projects all over the country. We also have developed well oiled processes. These are also available and extendability to skill training. So, if you look at all of this, the value that this project has given already to our country is many crores. What is the amount spent on our project? It is about 6 crore. Mainly on salaries and 100 rupees. We have a total of about 60 people who are working on our project now and mainly salaries and 100 rupees. So, I would say that, going back to the question of, has it been effective? Has it been low cost? I would certainly say at any place that by all metric, any metric one can use, I would say that we have produced really effective mechanism. And of course, we also took feedback from students. I have the feedback of 25000 participants. Let me present some of them. These are the 25000 students who attended our online test gave feedback. So, that means about a fourth of the people who underwent online test gave feedback. So, here is a question on quality of instructional material. If you have towers on the right hand side, that means they are like it. You can see that most of them like, say it is good or very good. And then quality of infrastructure at their colleges. If you see, quite a few students also say it is only fair. Large numbers say good and very good, but substantial numbers of students also say it is only fair. Remember, these are the computer systems at their colleges. Whereas, quality of college organizer, they say they are good or very good. Remember, the organizer does not have to do much. They do not have to teach anything. They just have to create the ecosystem, enforce discipline, make sure all the infrastructure is in place and the students learn on their own using the videos, self-learning videos. Quality of IIT Bombay Mentor, once again it is good or very good. Overall quality, it is good or very good. Usefulness, you see that once again quite a few students think that it is only somewhat useful. Why do they say that? So, it is not really clear to the students whether what they studied is really useful to them. Look, IIT Bombay is offering these workshops free of cost. They are also going to give certificates. Possibly it is useful to get a job. So, let us try it. So, there are quite a few students who seem to have done this. Of course, quite a few people say that it is very useful, quite a bit, a lot and so on. Will they recommend this to others? They all say likely, quite likely and definitely. So, now I want to move on to the next topic. I want to tell you how this methodology can lend itself to lot of other methods as well. So, efficacy of this method is established for IIT skills and hence, we believe that it is applicable to all demonstration-based subjects. I have a research scholar Kiran Irunki who is doing Ph.D. in education technology in this area. For example, he compared the effectiveness of self-workshop with classroom training for Java. He had about 200 students who went through the self-workshop and then about another 200 students who learnt Java through typical classroom in Hyderabad and then he conducted questionnaire. He got the, he got the, he got the perception of the students before the workshop. After the workshop was done, he even conducted a post-workshop test and he found it to be comparable. The students, the average score in the, in fact, we, he found the self-workshop students to have found slightly better than the classroom students. And by the way, these students randomly were selected. In fact, it was given to the students, the students selected on their own. And then, we also found that the self-learning skills of the workshop students actually improved the students who conduct, who attended the self-workshops, their, their perception on self-learning was noted at the beginning of the workshop. And then, we saw it afterwards and then the performance, we found that the, the self, the self-learning skills actually improved as a result. We believe that this is a very big benefit and we also understood that the women were more interested in self-learning. So, he studied gender performance, gender comparison. He founded the effectiveness. He also founded what makes people suitable, what makes it suitable for self-learning. What characteristics make them suitable for self-learning? Alright. Now, I told you general skills training. I believe that this method is suitable for corpantry, plumbing, circuit layout, etcetera. It is possible to teach things like etiquette skills. How many of you, when you stand in the queue, leave a gap between the person in front of you? How many of you go and touch that person? Why do not we leave a gap? You cannot make it any faster in the queue if you go and rub against the person standing in front of you. How to climb the stairs? How to open a door? How to enter when a door is opened? How to use the washroom in an airplane? We all complain, especially if you see people who are going to Middle East first time, the bathrooms in the airplane are terrible. We all complain. But have we ever asked, did anybody teach these children how to use this washrooms? So, whose responsibility is it? Isn't it our responsibility? So, if we want to develop, if we want to become a developed country, unless we take these children with us, we will never become a developed country. Jobs, teaching children what career options are available. What is meant by a pilot? What is meant by an architect? What is meant by an engineer? Do they like it? What is meant by an animation? Can they make a movie? And so on and so forth. How to locate job openings through internet? How to participate in an interview? Our students are very smart. Only thing is they need a little bit of help. It is possible to make available all of these through super country. How to buy train tickets through IRCTC? How to locate low cost agricultural loans? Why do not we make available this technology to our housewives also, to our mothers also? Let them also buy TVs at the lowest price. It is also possible, it is possible to make available all of these through spoken tutorial. More importantly, health related skills. Boiling water. Why should we boil water? What to do when a dog bites? What to do in the case of a hot attack? First aid for fracture. This is very interesting. A professor of Indian Institute of Primary Health Care in Hyderabad told me this. Children from villages, especially boys, they climb up the stairs, climb up trees, climb down, fall down. Sometimes they fracture their hand and then sometimes they may have to be taken to the nearby town and wait for 2 hours, 3 hours because you have to wait for the doctor. If they are not well informed, they may actually, for example, if they leave their hand hanging loose, there will be a problem. There could be permanent damage. This doctor said all that they have to do is, for example, open the shirt button and keep it here and create a spoken tutorial dubbed it to all Indian languages, make it available to every primary health care center in the country and no child will ever permanently damage his hand. Then, how to prevent cancer? It is interesting. During childbirth, every woman spends about 1 or 2 months at home. They have enough time to learn. They can actually make available all these videos in their mother tongue and we will have a developed country. Another specific example, we have a project that is happening at IIT Bombay, cervical cancer screening through pap smear. If a technician can screen this, by the way, cervical cancer is a serious problem. It is the second largest killer of women in India. It is a cancer caused by virus with a long gestation period. As a matter of fact, as a result, it is a curable cancer. Only thing is, we need to be able to do this. Some of the issues in screening. If a technician screens, the cost works out to 60 rupees. I have said US dollar 1 or 360 rupees. Whereas, if the technician can resolve it at their level, the cost is only 60 rupees. Whereas, if it has to be escalated to a doctor, it costs 300 rupees, 5 times. It is important that we need to train the technician well. But the problem is the training of these technicians is the biggest bottleneck because the moment they are trained, they come, they join. There are a lot of people who want jobs. Maybe people who have done BSE, biology, botany, whatever. Some of them, they might have just done 12th and then they might have done some diploma one year, diploma in analyzing these samples. But they need training. They join. They get about two or three months training and then the moment they are trained, they could leave for better job. Then you go on training and with a very large turnover. But what you could do is, if you have sparking tutorials on this, you make this available to all of them and say, you come trained. I am going to conduct a test. Only if you pass the test, I am going to select you. I do not mind giving a higher salary, but then you will start doing the screening from day one. Now, if you get picked up by somebody else, I have no problem. I have 100 other people waiting for this job. So, we are attempting a supercontritorial methodology for this. This is just to give a flavor of how our methodology is now extended to a lot of other things as well. We have got many research publications mainly in the education technology. And I believe it is a very open field. You can try various things. What is the pedagogy for pap smear based screening? The same methodology that work for Java may not work. Similarly, for skills training, it may be something else. For I told you, internet search may be something else. For telecom sector, it may be something else. For rural area, it may be one. For what may work in Tamil Nadu, may not work in Jammu, Kashmir, something else may work. So, for Burudu, it may be different because you may have to read from right to left. There are many issues. There are many research issues. And interestingly, all this will help our children become better citizens. So, with this, I would like to conclude my talk. I have been asked to talk for about 45 minutes. The real life problems are challenging. They give rise to challenging research problems, but benefits are enormous. So, with this, I would like to conclude my talk. I will be glad to answer questions if there are any. Puneema University, Jaipur. Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon. So, my question is all the tools which are available in spoken tutorial, especially for BTEC students. So, is there any tool for MTG and PhD statistical analysis? Good question. Statistical analysis, I made, let me just open it and show you. So, what we have is R. Unfortunately, I have made only two tutorials. And I am looking for R experts to create these. As a matter of fact, only these two are, in fact, good enough for most people. If only you go through these, then with the help facility, you will be able to do, you know, you can learn R yourself. Of course, we are looking for experts in R to create more tutorials. We will be delighted to work with them. So, thank you very much. Goodbye and Jai Hind.