IIT-K to provide virtual classes

LUCKNOW: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) on Saturday announced to provide free online Python courses to universities which have suspended their regular classes amidst fear of Covid-19 (coronovirus) spread. The virus has been declared a pandemic by WHO recently after its cases were reported in over two dozen countries.

“These free online classes can be accessed on ‘Prutor’--- the free online programming tutor. Prutor.ai offers many online courses. Prutor is a proprietary technology developed at IIT-K over the last six years utilising thousands of hours of teachers and students,” said Amey Karkare, who developed the technology. “As classes have been suspended in many states in the country, online tutoring is a solution to catch up with teaching hours lost due to closure,” he said.

Until recently, this advanced tools and associated video lectures were available only to IITs like IIT Bombay, IIT Madras and IIT Goa, who used Prutor to teach programming to thousands of students. With a lot of students will have free time due to the virus, Amey and Mahendra K Verma are making these courses and tools available for free so that universities and colleges can extend benefit to their students.

“Most colleges have cancelled classes to prevent the virus from spreading. IITs, IISc and NITs other institutions, which are just cancelling the classes,” said Karkare. 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.