SCOOT - Speech Communication On-line Training

The ISCA board is planning to set up an on-line portal, SCOOT,  on the ISCA web site to help and encourage students to enter the Speech Communication area. The goal is to provide students with an easy route to high-quality, up-to date learning resources which can be tailored to their individual needs.

The multidisciplinary nature of speech research raises problems for how students are introduced to our field. Students of various backgrounds may become interested in speech: while there are very few, if any, degree programmes centred on speech, speech modules are taught in a wide variety of curricula: in phonetics and linguistics, speech therapy, perceptual psychology, electrical engineering, computer science, communications and mathematics. Students come to these modules from different backgrounds and with different skills, requiring different training resources.

Many institutions do not have established speech research groups but nevertheless offer speech modules, and few speech groups are active across the entire axis from phonetics to speech technology. Consequently, many speech modules are not delivered as well as they might be, and teachers as well as students may need refreshing on new techniques (DNNs for example).

SCOOT will point students to material of all kinds: tutorials, lectures, videos, toolkits, interactive software, databases and so on. The only condition is that the material is freely available on the internet. SCOOT will be organised within a software platform which is designed to help students to learn,

At the moment we are collecting suggestions for items which should be available within SCOOT. You can make a suggestion using the google form on

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd-o6GOiADoJ4Xtik3AvFckonHBdTpcFnSHhpoDz0OhmdroMQ/viewform?usp=sf_link

and you can see the responses so far on

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/13uLM63MqITXOsAlUIa-rC6d6O50zGzEnRxTJbz0X8lE/edit#responses

We hope to launch SCOOT at Interspeech 2018.

Phil Green (p.green@sheffield.ac.uk) for the ISCA Board.