Coronavirus outbreak: IIT Kanpur launches globally free online tutorials

The Institute seeks CSR funding to expand the reach of its free offer

Amid the global lockdown of cities and academic institutions following the coronavirus outbreak, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) has announced to provide free online tutorials in Python to universities worldwide.

Popular globally, Python is an interpreted high-level general-purpose programming language. The free online support would be provided through Prutor.ai, a proprietary suite developed at IIT-K. Prutor, which offers many specialised online courses, has already been adopted by IIT Mumbai, IIT Goa, IIT Madras and other leading institutions to teach coding.

According to an IIT-K communiqué, most colleges had to cancel their physical classes to prevent the coronavirus from spreading. In this regard, the Institute has made the online content and access to Prutor free to any university and college in the world, which cannot take physical classes anymore due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In fact, the Institute has also called upon companies to contribute their corporate social responsibility (CSR) funds to further expand the reach of the free tutorial offer.

“Prutor.ai is a technology that is not available anywhere else, and IIT Kanpur would be happy to provide it to any university and college willing to adopt it. We want to teach coding to as many students as possible. If any company can share some CSR funds then we can help accelerate this,” Dr Amey, who developed Prutor, noted.

The interested educational institutions can sign up through an online portal (https://prutor.ai/) and will have free access through July 31, 2020 for any number of students. Until recently, this advanced tool and associated video lectures were available only to select IITs.

According to Amey, only the top Indian universities are equipped for such online learning modules, while the majority of others still lack the necessary infrastructure to run such specialised courses on their own.

He said Prutor was a proprietary technology developed at IIT Kanpur over the last six years utilising thousands of hours of teachers and students. “Any student above the 8th standard can learn programming using Prutor.”

Meanwhile, the Institute has offered to make available lectures in both Hindi and English to any college or university on request.