Assessing the Efficacy of a Large Hands-on Silent LATEX Workshop

This work studies the effectiveness of providing training in LATEX to about 200 people through the self learning approach of Spoken Tutorials. In this silent workshop, no lectures were delivered and doubts were cleared through a timed online QnA forum. Through performance and perception studies conducted during the workshop and eight months after, we conclude that the participants have learnt to use LATEX and that they employ it in their daily life. The training method is universal, as demographic factors, such as gender and age, have no effect on learning. Doubt clearing through the QnA forum has been found to be as good as the conventional method. The Spoken Tutorial based workshop methodology is scalable and generalizable.