Bhubaneswar, Oct. 31: The Odisha government has decided to tie-up with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, to provide free online computer courses for students and teachers in degree colleges across the state.

IIT-Bombay in collaboration with the Union ministry of human resources and development runs the online project Spoken Tutorial, which is part of the National Mission on Education Through Information and Communication Technology.

As part of the plan, the state government has directed the universities to send their representatives for an orientation programme to make them familiar with Spoken Tutorials.

The programme will be organised in Bhubaneswar in the first week of November.

After the orientation programme, the respective colleges will create their own groups based on the online courses that the students and teachers opt for.

The courses would be conducted through the mode of distance learning with the help of the website spoken-tutorial.org, which is a hub of more than 30 IT courses.

The programme will have audio-visual tutorials on programming, languages, animation and graphics.

In case the participants need any course-related support, they can interact with experts from IIT-Bombay over Skype.

"The courses are designed to enable teachers and students to access various skill-based software tutorials free of cost. The programme covers more than 30 IT courses on coding languages," said higher education secretary G.V.V. Sharma.

The tutorials under the course have been prepared in simple language so that students have an easy grip of the concepts.

"Only a computer lab having sufficient number of machines with proper technical support for audio visuals is needed for the programme. There is no lower or upper limit on the number of participants," said Sharma.

Students will be trained in different coding languages such as C, C++, Java, PHP, Linux, LaTeX and MySQ

"Trained students will have an edge in the job market. They can also become entrepreneurs and use their knowledge in business. The best part is that the training will be conducted free of cost," said programming expert Piyush Jena.

Students or teachers will be given certificates based on their performance in assessment tests.