What is need of this course ?

[Manish Yadav]

we joined data science course , and IITM is making us fool by teaching vowels , consonant , number of alphabet , how to sound english alphabet , how to write alphabet in uppercase and lowercase etc.

By doing this they are killing our prosperous time.

[Manish Yadav]

We have 4 course. Approx 3 hr lecture for each courses. Total hour of lecture per week =4*3=12hr.

normal, physically class run for 45 minute. Out of only 30 minute spent for actual topic.

So our 12hr becomes 24 class per week.

Consider classes run on mon to friday.  

So we have 

1.approx 5 classes per day 

2.assignment.

3.No co-operation and interaction between students

4.No college life, no event for 3 years.

So don't think it as online or distance degree, we are attending normal college on computer.

[Vinayak Kumar]

So don't join this course.Go and Taste the flavour of JEE ADVANCED once and all ur complaints will go off.

[Antony]

Speech recognition and interpretation (based on the meaning of the word and also the tone used ) is a highly researched and sort after use case in data science and machine learning. For that you need you need to start with how language works - both written and spoken. 

Not to mention that it will also be useful in your career. You will have to interact people from all over the world who will have different accent and different way to pronounce the words. You might think its easy, but trust me its not.

[Dipin Manmadhan]

This is as important as any other subject here.

The most important thing is handling the language better. If you can communicate well, articulate your thoughts clearly that'll boost your career a lot. Believe me, I've seen people with great technical knowledge fail to showcase that due to their poor communication skills. When you are working in data science you need to present a lot of presentations, describe so many things to the clients, (majority will be foreign). So if you're bad at language, your career advancements will be so limited and so hard. In addition, you'll lose your confidence over time. As someone from an IT background, I can vouch for this. A technically solid person with great communication skills will do way better than an extraordinary techy with poor communication skills in the long run. So don't consider this a waste of time. 

Just to add, you might be very well versed in the English language, but that may not be the case for so many others doing this course. They have devised this syllabus considering students from various backgrounds. The computational thinking course is pretty easy for me. I can attend all those assignment questions without going through any of those tutorials and still get 10 / 10. Because I've got 5 years of experience in this field. But still, I go through those tutorials meticulously. There might be something new for me to learn or brush upon.  I'm managing this along with 40-50 hours working hours (weekly).

Chill and happy learning.

[Naushad C.K.]

I do not agree with this...  This helps us to improve the communication. 

IIT is having clear Vision and Mission for the course. Very good course.. 

Those who do not like, can look for the better options. (Like some replied... JEE etc..)

Please point out if there is anything to improve or do a value addition comments.. 

This will help IIT and other people in our country... 

There is big requirement lies in future related to big data....

[Vinod]

This is based on 'No student left behind policy'. One thing I can tell you, its all important. We are not taught pronunciation, syllabi, grammar etc in our younger classes, so we carry that in our (Don't know  baggage). Once you go higher up, doing your Masters and Phd., you need all that for writing thesis and term papers. If you have missed all that in our younger days, its good to study at least now. I understand, some of the topics are too basic. You can take it as a refresher.  If you find it too boring, you could skip it and go straight away to the assignment, saving your precious time.

I feel that it takes a long time to unlearn and learn things the right way, rather than learning it right from the beginning.  I didn't know we had 20 vowel sounds and 24 consonant sounds, adding up to a total of 44 sounds. I cannot stress enough how important it is to know how each alphabet sounds in each word. In Week 3, we learned that the weightage of sound is at the beginning for nouns and at the end for verbs. I never knew all these. 

Let me give you a real life incident. When I first went to a restaurant in USA, I asked the waiter to bring menu. He started looking at me like as if I am an alian. I didn't know what was wrong. Then my friend who sat next to me told me that I am sounding  menu the wrong way, and they didn't understand it. I was upset knowing that I couldn't say a simple word right. He corrected me saying it's  men-(ˌ)yü so I repeated it back the right way, and the waiter understood that. Thats how simple it is ...

We are expected to spend 10 hours each per subject per week to get the maximum benefit out of this course. There is a saying, "Teachers can open the door, but you must enter by yourself"- Zen Proverb

There are several Hindi speaking students from rural area who never had an opportunity to learn all these in the right way. So, lets us have some patience and go with the flow. 

[Aman Kumar]

That's Appreciated. It's good that for the very first time I guess, we are working on our basic foundations that we might had ignored if not provided here.