 Good morning and welcome to all of you to this first phase to phase session of this faculty development program. I am also happy to welcome several new remote centers which have joined us. These sessions conducted through AVU permit us to sort of talk to each other as if we are present together in the same physical space. Whereas in fact we are separated in distance by thousands of kilometers sometimes that is the power of technology that we bring to be a in our endeavors these days. And this is in fact the theme of this faculty development program is a foundation course on how to use ICT effectively for enhancing quality and enhancing scale of education at the same time. We had conducted such programs in the past and we have now learned a whole lot of things through the valuable feedback that we have received from people. And therefore these faculty development programs constantly get upgraded in terms of the content and the value add which is done by our team here and which is also done by a large number of participants through their feedback. We had embarked on another mission to create a large number of what we call associate faculty or mentors. These are the people who from amongst you are selected based on their overall performance. In fact the very first FDP that we conducted last year we had more than 250 such people. At that time we had funding from national mission and therefore we could afford to conduct a two day orientation workshop workshop for them. In addition they were all felicitated by none other than the chairman AI city who personally flew down from Delhi to address them. Most of them have contributed to further improvement of this FDP by being associate faculty and by mentoring a group of teachers. We will continue this and we will seek assistance from those of you who actually do very well and show an inclination to contribute further by becoming mentors in the future years to come. Needless to add IIT Bombay has decided that these two FDPs namely the foundation program in use of ICT for effective education and the pedagogy for online and blended teaching learning processes. We believe these two faculty development programs are very critical for all teachers to invite not just the professional college teachers. I would say not just the higher education sector teachers from science arts commerce but in fact teachers of any kind and including teachers who essentially dole out vocational training even those people need to understand how to more effectively use technology. So, it is in this endeavor that we seek the cooperation and collaboration of all teachers across the country. I am very happy that this time again when we have no funding although we have managed to find funds for the IIT Bombay part of the activities and therefore, there is no fees that is being charged participants are still required to pay a sum to the remote centers which facilitate their face to face sessions as such as the one today. In these face to face sessions apart from interacting with the faculty members at IIT Bombay you will have an extremely important opportunity to interact with 30, 40, 50 colleagues of yours coming from different institutions who will assemble at each remote center. As you may be aware we have planned specific activities that need to be undertaken by such groups in the respective remote centers where they have assembled and those activities will contribute significantly not only to your learning but also towards the assessment of how you achieve your final certification. So, please take these activities very very seriously my colleague J. K. who sorry I should say J. Krishnan who is the spirit behind the conduct of the series of these FDPs and in fact the design is personally spending a lot of time in ensuring that maximum benefits will accrue to you but please remember such benefits will accrue only if you yourself work hard working hard is required in two dimensions number one the online activities which are required to complete every week they need to be completed. Please remember that the online activities will demand about 4 to 6 to 8 hours of work per week the advantage of online activities you can choose these 6 8 hours at any point on time as per your convenience. You can do it on Sunday night you can do it in Monday during lunch time you can do it on Friday evening absolutely any time that is convenient to you you can choose and complete those online activities. But remember that every online activity for a week ends with an assessment and when we are all learning something new we are all students and therefore, like good students who are to other to the last days please note that IIT Bombay is stickler for the processes and rules the dates of the submission once announced will generally not change at all and please note that your overall performance towards certification will require counting of the scores of individual assessments that are carried out during the week in addition to submissions that will be required to make. All of these are announced as part of the grading policy and there may be further elaboration and interaction when you interact with president Jayakrishna. So, to conclude the first part of my address I would say welcome to this exciting part and welcome to a fraternity of those few who are now better empowered to use technology more effectively. Having said this now let me address one of the major issues which we had not emphasized to a very large extent earlier. On the face of it is an extremely simple issue the issue is about name what do I mean by name because people say what is there in a name each one of us has a name given by our parents each field of studies has a name chemical engineering electrical engineering computer science commerce accounting what do these names convey to us all these names have a special meaning which is understood because of the standardization and because of an agreement between different people that this is what will be meant by a name. When it comes to technology there are many places where we have to choose a name I will begin with an example of a file name all of you are familiar with computer files files are given different name for example a file which contains instructions for you to do different activities might be given a name instructions dot pdf all of you are familiar with the dot convention. So, you write a name then you write a dot and then you write what is called an extension a pdf is a format which is almost a standard worldwide standard in which documents are said you would be familiar with several standard extensions which are typically used in the terminology of technology it is very important to understand the significance because when you are required to upload a content or when you are trying to view any content the software that you will use will have to correspond to the file type and that type is almost always determined by what we call the extension many of you will be familiar with standard extensions for example dot doc is the extension for a file containing text in what is known as the Microsoft word format are you sure you know all possible standardized extensions perhaps not even I do not do we know where to find the list of standard extensions those of you who have not tried that may try this simple answer is yes Wikipedia is a source of immense amount of information and to become knowledgeable in these aspects you have to constantly search and read the relevant articles from Wikipedia. So, please go and search on standardized extensions or just file extensions you may choose any terminology for searching, but you will eventually get on to an article which describes more than 600 standard extension not all of them are required and we are most certainly not expected to remember all of them, but the major file formats which are typically used for educational purposes must be understood by us like dot htm for an html file dot jpj for an image file dot pdf as I already mentioned dot doc as I already mentioned some of these formats and some of the nomenclature for the extension determining the format of data in that file must be easily remembered by most of us whenever we are trying to use ICT for effective education I spoke about the extension, but there is a name of a file which we have to choose and give whenever we create a file. We send files as attachment these could be text files or dot txt extension as is the standard nomenclature or these could be image files, these could be photograph files, these could be video file. We remember the video file extension those of you have played videos will know that typically the videos will end with dot mp4 which is one of the standard formats for video file, but anyway I digress I come back to the first part of the name which is the actual name that is given to the file do we choose an arbitrary name it is not uncommon to find names like 1 2 3 4 dot doc what does that name convey to us absolutely nothing would we like our own names to be like that Z Z Z Z FATAC what would it mean to you Deepak FATAC is a better name because Deepak the word Deepak has a meaning in Indian Hindi lag or Marathi lag similarly whenever we decide to choose a file name we should apply our mind to say that the file name that we choose reflects at least some information or some indication of what that file contains unfortunately this is not done this appears to be a very simple thing and that is because most of us do not create many files in general and those of us who do create files occasionally often use tools which automatically give some default name to the file and we forget that this name will not convey anything to people who actually are going to use this file. I will give you a simple example you are all familiar with scanning of documents. So, what you do you scan documents using a scanner there is usually a scanning utility which comes along with every scanner these days printers the laser printers often work as scanners as well and it is common to scan a hundred and pages or signed pages or signed documents or any document and create a scanned file. What happens invariably and many of you who have actually done some scanning will know that these scanning utilities will automatically give a default name to the file source scan. They will surely ask you in what format you want to save the information typical information saving can be done either in bitmap files or in JPJ files or in one of the standard other formats JPJ or JPEG is a very well known standard for storing scanned images just as it is a well known standard for storing digital photographs. Now, I come back to scanning whenever you scan a document the utility will automatically ask you whether you want to save that file of course you want to save that file. So, it will save where do you want to save it you will save it in something called a folder or a directory on the computer. I will come back to the folders and directories later, but generally there is a default directory or a default folder which is associated with the utility that you use. What is more important is when you want to save it the scanning utility will automatically give a default name to the file. So, for example, if you say save my file as JPEG file. So, it will create a name called scan 001 dot JPJ is good enough please note that no computer can save a file without a name and extension and therefore, the name and extension has to be given by us, but if we do not give utilities will create their own default name. We are often in a hurry we want to scan that page attach that file to a message to an email and send it to someone because somebody in Delhi or Calcutta or somewhere is waiting for that document. So, we will just save that as scan 001 dot JPJ attach it to email and send it across unfortunately the receiver in Calcutta will be receiving many such messages imagine that that receiver has asked about 500 people to scan a specific kind of document giving information about themselves let us say there are 500 candidates and all these candidates are uploading their signed the bio data by scanning it. You are the one sitting in Calcutta how would you like if you get 500 emails each one containing a file called scan 001 dot JPJ it would not make any sense at all and your life would become miserable. What is the solution? The solution is for example, if I am scanning my signed bio data and trying to send that file to someone I should at least name that file as dbphatak underscore bio data dot JPJ does not this name convey far more to any reader. This is why I say what is there in a name has the right answer everything is there in a name. The name has to be chosen very carefully for every file that you store whether you will remember such odd combination of names like scan 001 and what do they represent is a different thing but others with whom you share that information with whom you share that file will not be able to understand automatically. It is not always that you can put every relevant information about the content of a file in a single name. As I said if I am scanning my bio data I can say dbphatak underscore bio data. Now that convey some information but does it convey this bio data refers to which date in time. For example, if I submit a bio data today 10 years later again I have to submit my bio data and that file is again named dbphatak underscore bio data dot JPG or dot PDF or whatever. Would people who have both these files be able to distinguish between which is an earlier file which is a later file perhaps we could put a date or a year. For example, dbphatak underscore bio data underscore March 2018 will probably convey that the file was created in March 2018 so most likely the bio data that the file contains in turn is up to date up to that day. Unfortunately, there are too many pieces of information which have to be associated with any content whether it is a document whether it is a picture whether it is a movie clip or whatever. And whatever you do you can never write or think of a name which contains all relevant information about a file we have therefore a serious problem. What do we do to ensure that the relevant information about the content which are there inside that file is available in some form preferably in a standardized form. Unfortunately, there is no mechanism there is no standardization for the names that you use for the file although the extensions may be standardized. We need to evolve therefore some standardization of names that we use at least in our local environment. So, if I am going to ask my students to submit some assignment online then I must invariably give a nomenclature pattern to be used by all students so that not only the file name conveys that this is assignment 2 to be submitted in April 2018, but it also tells me about the roll number or name of that student if that student belongs to a particular laboratory batch then the batch number etcetera etcetera. You will find that in most of the submissions that you have to make in this course such nomenclature standardization will be given to you. We will tell you please prepare a file a PDF file or whatever file and ensure that the name of that file is like this this this it should contain this it should contain this it should contain this you will now understand why we insist on such a thing because we have more than 3000 participants in this course and if all 3000 participants upload a file called assignment 1 dot pdf you can see the problems that our teaching assistant would have and you can see the problem that you will have if you get exactly such submissions from your students later. So, please not only spend some time in understanding how such nomenclatures can be given, but ensure that in all your assignments where you ask your students in future to submit anything online such instructions are clearly given. I was telling you about the fact that independent of how cleverly we decide on the name of a file it is impossible to reflect every relevant information about the content of that file in that name. Let me give you an example. Last year we were creating a site for eminent personalities this was part of a project under the national virtual library of India mission that we are engaged in jointly with SIDAC and IGNOON. We are creating a very very large cloud in which all the digital assets representing the knowledge and cultural heritage information about the country will be accumulated over the coming years. We have created a cloud with a storage capacity usable storage capacity of greater than 3 petabytes. Petabyte is another name I do not know how many of you are familiar with the terminology used to describe the storage. You probably all know that the files have a size associated with that and typically wherever you look at a directory you will see the file names, you will see other information like when the file was created whatever, but you will also see the size of the file. Typically it is given in kilobytes or megabytes. For example, a digital photograph is typically 2 to 4 megabytes large in content a high quality high resolution photograph. Of course, when you want to send such photographs as attachment to your files you would like to have a slightly reduced payload. So, you would like to have the size of your image file in kilobytes there are tools which will do that. The point is that the size of a file determines what is the payload that gets attached for image and what is the amount of storage that you will require. So, let us imagine that you have a 4 megabyte a typical size of an image file. Now, if you want to store such 1000 images in your desk you will require how much 4000 megabytes a 1000 megabytes is known as a gigabyte 1000 gigabytes is known as a terabyte. These terms are important because typically the disk size that is available with normal desktops today is one terabyte plus. When I started working with the hard disk for the first time with a mainframe computer in 1974 we had a russian machine called EC 1030. We had a very large desk it was a removable desk we could take the desk out and put another desk. The cost of the disk drive was 5 lakh rupees the cost of the hard disk was 50000 rupees and do you know the capacity of that hard disk it was 7.25 megabytes. Imagine 7.25 megabytes that disk could not contain even two digital photographs of today when clicked from your mobile or any camera. We have travelled so much in the technology advancement and in its affordability that what used to cost 50000 rupees for a disk with 7.25 megabytes capacity you can get multiple multi terabyte disk in that kind of amount today and they all can be connected with your laptop or with your standard what you call desktops and you therefore feel that you are not short of storage. The unfortunate property of any storage disk is that it fills up eventually it is just like work expands to fill up available time data expands to fill up available space. So, even terabytes is perhaps not good enough thousand terabytes make one petabyte and the cloud that we have created is of three petabyte storage capacity. We believe that when we use it for putting all the digital assets we will have enough storage to at least capture the essential critically important and useful cultural information and knowledge information. Let me come back to the point that I was making that even though I choose the name of a file very carefully it is impossible to indicate all the relevant information about what is there inside that file. So, I was telling you about this example when we created the eminent personality side and as an example we were asked to create a site for Sardar Patel all of us know Sardar Patel. We needed data when we designed the site we needed data. So, we had decided that we will include every available information about Sardar from various sources. We got photographs, we got images, we got video clips, we got audio clips, we got newspaper clippings. But as I was telling you when we saw the newspaper clippings that were given to us by a certain museum which hosts all these data which had all these data and somebody when they gave us that desk we suddenly discovered that in different directories they had files called scan 343.jpg scan 344.jpg. Some joker had serially scanned all the newspaper clippings and put those names as scan 343 scan 344. We could not even understand whether the what the contents were in newspaper clipping whether the content was a photograph whether the content was something else and we had no clue whether Sardar Patel appeared in any one of those documents and if he indeed did then in what capacity was there a document containing Sardar Patel's own handwritten letter or was there a document which mentions Sardar Patel attending a meeting with some maharaja of some state we had no clue. What we had to do we had to open each file I had large team which actually read the entire document or saw the image or photograph that was given and deciphered from that photograph or deciphered from the write up that was there in the newspaper clipping as to what it was all about and how did it connect to the great Sardar Patel. Such information that you need to extract to tell anybody about what are the contents in a file is called metadata for that file the metadata of that file could have a large number of things fortunately there is a standardization about such metadata that must be included. The best standardization that you may be partly familiar with because it was there even before ICT came into being is the bibliographic standardizing. If you go to the library as a book you will see that book in a rack and that book will you will notice it as ISBN number it has an accession number which is given by the local library and you are very happy because that accession number is used whenever the book is issued to you you take that book after you read you give it back and the same accession number will be used to return the book. You believe therefore that the accession number is probably the only information that is relevant and perhaps the digital record that this book is there is based on that accession number dot something well that is not sufficient because associated with the book is one or more authors associated with the book is publisher associated with the book is year of publication associated with the book is a set of keywords which describe what that book is all about associated with the book is the edition first edition seventh edition eighth edition there is all this information kept and how is this information organized this information as I mentioned will be called the metadata about that book in particular the bibliographic metadata. If you go to any library and meet with the library or meet with any one of the library staff and ask them please show me how is the information about a book is maintained then they will tell you various fields which are actually listed in the old time they would write them in the register. Nowadays there are metadata repositories and metadata utilities which can be used on computer to feed all this information. Whenever library purchases a book much before it is made available for circulation the library staff without your knowledge will be doing this thing they will be writing down all the metadata in the standardized format against various fields. There are several well known international standard for metadata related to such information Dublin core is one standard for example, mark 21 is another standard these are the standards which are extensible standard because you need to have standards on how to describe coins for example. Now, you take a photograph of a coin or you have a physical coin with you the coin has two sides you might have two photographs, but the coin also has inscription the coin has a date the coin is associated with the period of a king or someone who circulated that coin all of this can never be captured in the name of a file which is say something dot j p j which says is a photograph of a coin. This metadata needs to be made part and parcel of the information that you store as I mentioned the library staff in all our institutions is probably the only set of qualified people who understand the importance of such metadata. To appreciate what we lose when we do not have the relevant metadata consider this aviu session this aviu session is being recorded after it is edited it will be made available as a dot m p 4 file when that file is uploaded with some name, but a link is given to you on your IIT Bombay X platform. You will know from the context because it will appear as let us say first interaction 25th mark so you will know first interaction 25th mark when you click if you want to review some of the discussion that has happened you will see the entire video file there. It is good as far as you are concerned what about somebody else who is not attending this course, but wants to know what was said in an interaction who said it when it was said should you not think that there should be some metadata there should be created for a digital asset which is a video file do you not think that there should be some metadata created for even a quiz that you conduct do you not think that there should be a metadata that should be created for a pdf document that is circulated as background reading material please understand that while giving meaningful name is absolutely essential it is not adequate we are creating an open educational resource repository in this cloud this repository launch will happen sometime in May. This repository will contain all digital assets that we have created over the years for these and other faculty development programs including the online courses that we given so on so forth. You will immediately sense that by storing these assets even though these assets might have good file names you will not be able to relate one asset with another asset when they were used in conjunction as a part of some course a whole lot of metadata standardization is happening as we speak why I say all of this to you I say all of this to you because as teachers not necessarily involved in this kind of large collection and classification of information but as teachers you will be involved always in two things number one interacting with your students giving them assignments collecting online assignments organizing those online assignments and have other tools which will permit you to give marks etcetera etcetera they may be spreadsheets you may be using model but you will invariably have a large amount of information contributed to by your students either as a part of assignments or submissions and unless you are very careful not only about the file names used by your students you have also to be careful about the organization of that information and at least some metadata about every asset that is created and submitted this is an opportunity friends to learn more about how such things are done elsewhere and how we ought to do these things one of the exercises that I will create a write up and give it to you is to indicate these aspects in brief that I have discussed and give you an exercise to choose proper file names and extensions for some simple documents and photographs that I will indicate and each one of you will have to choose a name in the group activity it would be nice if all of you can do this by tomorrow morning because I will compose this and submit it or put it up tonight it will be nice if you can just spend five minutes discussing with some of your colleague as to what are the names chosen by him or her what are the names chosen by me and enhance your understanding on how better names can be chosen. So, I conclude this session on what is there in a name and say that there will be certain exercise that all of you will have to do which I will compose tonight I would like to use now this opportunity to interact with some of the remote centers. Jay Krishnan tells me that every year as you know we keep making modifications to the style of our FDP to bring in the better practices I already told you about how several mentors have emerged out of top performing participants of the previous FDPs. This year we have started something new one of our remote centers which participated in the last FDP I believe it is in Cochin sorry it is a new remote center and in that remote center they realize that there would be technical issues that they will have to solve concerning this AVU interaction as you know your institute that remote center must have a internet bandwidth which is adequate in addition it must have a PC which loads the software which is on the client side of AVU then there are so many settings to be done to connect it to speaker microphone etcetera and finally there has to be a link established between the AVU server and their place there. In most of our remote centers by the way there are competent technical staff who handle these things. We teachers often do not understand the tremendous value of such technical staff and the technical support that they bring to be here on us. In fact if all of you are able to see me and listen to me it is primarily because the technical staff members in all these remote centers are doing their job perfectly we depend so much on them. I would also add that because we do we should also learn to humbly respect them for what they do and to acknowledge it at least once in a while. Traditionally in academic institutions it is not a common practice for the faculty members to acknowledge the work that is done by the technical staff members although all of us understand that our lives depend on them. So this is an opportunity I would like to take to thank all the technical staff members in various remote centers who facilitate this interaction. I come back to the point in the remote center in Kochi they took a novel decision they said they will train their students to support the AVU technical activities that are required to connect and I believe that there are some students who are likely to be present in that remote center today. So I will request my colleagues to move over to that remote center and request the coordinator to say a few words and I would like even if the student participants are there who are helping us I would also like them to say a few words over to Kochi. Hello everybody I can see you well can you hear me? Yes sir we can hear you. So over to you. I am the remote center coordinator Dr. B. Kannan from Kochi University of Science and Technology. First of all I have a big salute to you sir for all these ideas and making all this a success. We borrowed from you the idea of using students in the remote center because we see what you are doing there. We are doing this basically for two reasons. One is even if some of our sometimes some technical staff is absent our students will be trained to handle the things. Secondly these students are the teachers of the future. They will be there in the future and once they are here to do things then we are safe. That's why we are doing this once again I salute you for all this. Thank you so much since there are more than three thousand teachers watching. I would love to have our student members briefly introduce themselves so that they also have the pleasure of briefly talking to three thousand teachers and I hope most of your students will join the teaching community later. Over to you. Hi sir I am Sariga from Kochi University of Science and Technology. I am doing my post graduation in computer science. Hello sir my name is Anju Anand and I am doing my MSc computer science here and this is a wonderful experience for me. Hello sir I am Anjidha Mohan doing my MSc computer science post graduation in Kochi University and it was a wonderful experience to be part of this remote center. Hi sir I am Pinshi doing MSc computer science. I am a student of this more than that I am my volunteer of this great experience. So I am so happy that you are contributing to this work. I would suggest that please spread this message to others in your college. I would also suggest that all other remote centers may want to experiment like this where some interested students may be trained in providing additional support to your technical staff. In addition the students themselves will benefit tremendously because they will be doing some hands on thing with real life tools which they will become more confident about using such tools in future. Similarly the participants from various institutions who have assembled in our remote centers when they go back to their own colleges. Please remember one thing your college or your institution may not be a remote center today but what is a remote center? A remote center is nothing but an institution which is connected using AVU to some other hub. Today IIT Bombay is a hub but there is no reason why one institution in Kerala cannot be connected to five other institutions in Kerala or in Tamil Nadu or wherever they wish to. So Q set for example I hope that they will use this to become a hub in the state of Kerala where they could connect with maybe 25 other institutions and actually conduct not just these training programs but even seminars, workshops on various things where instead of people having to travel to a single place they can actually participate creating this audio visual large virtual classroom. So once again thank you so much Kochin for this initiative and thank you all the students. I notice that all of them are girl students so you are also representing the great women power of the nation. I am also happy for that. Thank you so much. Can we now we can now interact with people we have still about half an hour. So I would request the remote centers if people have any question to ask on whatever we have discussed today or in general about this please do a hand raise. I can see a hand raise coming there. Can we go to one of the institutions Saint Vincent where is it located? Saint Vincent College Nagpur over to you. Yes, yes your audible you are visible perfectly clear please go ahead. I am hopeful that these small problems will be solved shortly but I am happy that there are so many teachers participating from this college. I understand that you are a new remote center but I will tell you this over the last eight years that my colleague Sajjan Dixit has been establishing such remote centers with the help of his friends here his colleagues in the team mates. It is often we find that first time in a center starts interacting there are a large number of problems. I notice that with your center as also with the Q-SAT we did not have any hassles in reaching out to each other. For example, you are perfectly visible you are perfectly audible and I understand that you can also see me and hear me. I do not know whether I should attribute this to the better technology and better bandwidth that is available or I should attribute this to more sincere technical efforts by your staff and thorough testing that is done by my team jointly with your team. Perhaps it is a combination of both any final comment that you would like to make over to you. Sir, one question. Sorry, sorry, sorry let us follow one protocol. Everybody who speaks must identify oneself please understand that you are not only speaking to me there are three thousand teachers who are watching you. So, although you should be brief but you should also always start with your name and then say whatever you wish to say over to you. That is possible. Security in metadata and security in data is a very larger topic. I do not think I will be able to answer it in a short while but we note this question and I will request the Jai Krishna's team to comment on this. I would request one more thing please do raise this question in the discussion forum on IIT Bombay X. I will take this opportunity to tell you that in India people do not use discussion forum very effectively and that is there is a reason to it. It is a societal problem. We generally do not like to write. We generally like to speak and therefore whenever an occasion like this comes good questions come out. This was a good question for example but I would request you to jot down this question in the discussion forum and I would request all other participants to do this definitely. In fact, I would suggest to JK that as part of the evaluation process should also make it obligatory for people to at least ask one question and at least answer or comment on one answer. It is already there in the pedagogy. It is there in the pedagogy part not this part. In this one it is there. Okay. However, I would like to add that it should not be done because it is compulsorily mandated by the process of assessment and so on. It should be done to develop a good habit. So, cutting short this further elaboration I would request our lady first of all thank you for asking a good question but please raise this question in the discussion forum. There will be an answer eventually from my course team here but please also all other participants please remember to look at the discussion forum regularly and whenever you come across a question which you believe you can answer should go ahead and post your answer. If there is somebody who has posted an answer including an answer posted by my team and if you find that either there is something wrong with that answer or you can give further elaboration to that answer do not hesitate in coming to the discussion forum and writing this. Let me give you an example some of the courses that we run here we also run on EDX which is the global platform like this FDP we run our skilling courses which are meant for students typically 15, 20,000 students participate. When we run the courses globally they are 15, 20,000 students from all over the world from United States, from Europe, from Australia, from Japan, from Korea, from China, from Mexico wherever. There is one trait which I see which is so different whenever we run a course on a global platform the global students who participate are extensively busy in contributing to and in benefiting from the discussion forum. The discussion forum activities in the courses taken by international students and international learners have a very large participation. In India on the other hand we hesitate to write this. So, I am emphasizing this I would like people to come up with their good questions but also remember to post them in the discussion forum. Let us go to another remote center. This is another new remote center R. V. R. Good morning sir. Good morning over to you. We are from Puducherry. Hello. Yeah please go ahead. We can hear you. Everybody can hear you. Yes sir. Yes sir. We are very much proud to be a remote center for the IITB. I think we are the only college as in polytechnic level. We have entered as a remote center for your programs and for all the training sessions. Thank you very much for selecting women's polytechnic as one of the training center of IITB sir. It is very interesting that yours is a women's polytechnic and I see a lot of men here in the crowd. So perhaps you do not have enough women teachers. You still have to depend on men teachers which is good. Is there any participant who would like to make a brief comment? Over to you. Good morning sir. Good morning. I am Tamil Selvi. Sir, your presentation is really very, very nice. Even I used to give name for my document as scan 001 and today I learned from today onwards definitely I won't commit such mistake and today I face many problems because of giving names to my documents like this. Thanks a lot for giving information and we need more information or explanations to create wordpress. If your explanation is more and deeper we learn a lot. Thank you Selvi. Very nice point that you make. I am happy that you appreciate the nomenclature. As far as wordpress is concerned, I will tell you one thing. Any tool that you take whether it is wordpress or Drupal or the complex tool or simple tool, any amount of information given will never be adequate because when you actually start using it will always be something which is not there in the document. This is not true just about a 10 page documentation. This is true about 1000 page documentation also. There is also another problem. If the documentation becomes too big nobody actually reads it. So, tell me whether whatever documentation has been given have you read each and every word of it, each sentence at least twice generally not. What happens is and I am not finding fault but I am saying this is a natural trade. We human beings because we are intelligent will skim through any document and noting points in our mind and we believe that we have understood it. When you start working that is when the problems start happening. Now here is one clarification that I would like to issue. Please understand that the objective of this exercise is for you to try out things. To try out means making mistakes. Don't at all be worried and afraid of making mistakes that is how we learn. When you make mistakes there are two ways of correcting it. You will understand of course that something is not working out. One is of course to go back to the documentation and say this is how I should do it. The second is to try out different things. The third is to talk to your own colleagues that is precisely the purpose and objective of a group activity. There are people in the group. Sure you might have to do a final submission of some assignment on your own but when you are learning please utilize the availability of the group to find that out. If some problem still remains post it on the discussion forum. Maybe the documentation that is given as explanation will improve next time based on the feedback that is given. So rather than saying please provide more explanation. My suggestion would be use whatever explanation is available and simply roll up your sleeves or saris or salwar or whatever and start working. You will make mistake something will not work out absolutely no problem. I assure you that that is exactly how we learn. Do that and whenever you still have persistent difficulty which is not solved either by your trials or by a group discussion post it in the discussion forum and insist that an answer to that we circulate it to wider people. That is how we empower ourselves by trial and error by efforts attempts and by making mistakes. Thank you so much. Go over to another remote center please. This is in Durga is it? Yes sir. I am course coordinator Arpana Rahul from Bhilai Institute of Technology Durga Chhattisgarh. R C I D 1166 very good morning sir. Very good morning. We are all happy to see you again in the next season of FDP. Thank you. My question it's a question from the whole participants group. It is you have just started coloring one inch of the ocean. Hats off to you. Congratulations. Many, many congratulations. Sir in this mission my question is what do you perceive till what time you will see the whole nation using this ICT facility for advanced pedagogies. What is what is that perception time span? So I will very good question and thank you very much. When I started the distance education program I still remember when I used V-SATS we had some 4 or 5 remote centers only some enthusiastic institutions which subsequently grew to 8 and then to 10 and we could never reach out to more than 300, 400 people which itself was a large number given that typical faculty development program used to have 25 to 30 faculty members. The 10,000 teachers program as you all know was to try we can address up to 10,000 participants at a time because I believed that unless we reach such scales we will never be able to cover the needs. You are very right this FDP for example 3,000 participants are participating but even if you keep doing 3,000, 3,000, 3,000, 3,000 we have more than 200,000 teachers just in our professional colleges. We would have almost a million teachers if you take the entire higher education and I shudder to think of the number of teachers which are involved in school education. The problem indeed is large and the only solution is not to scale up like this but also scale up horizontally. I had in my dream when I decided to set up these remote centers that someday these remote centers will become local hubs. You are in Durk for example how many high secondary schools do you have in Durk? How many other colleges do you have in Durk? What prevents you from saying that you will assist the teachers and even students of all those schools and colleges by establishing an avu linkage between your own institute and all these colleges. And by conducting such training program for which you need not create content from scratch all the content that are available that are part of these FTP as I told you will be releasing them in the OER repository. We are also releasing a distribution of IIT Bombay X which can be configured and installed in your own local server. So instead of IIT Bombay X the open edX distribution that we are planning you can download it. This will be ready by month end or by May end and you can configure it. It could become the Bilai Institute MOOCs and you can offer those MOOCs courses to anybody on the internet but particularly for your own people. You can conduct such training programs for other teachers. Please remember one thing all these years a majority of our teachers participate in such programs because there is a certain recognition by AICT there is a certain recognition by their college. If I am a teacher in one of the colleges if I attend and successfully completed FTP I get some brownie points which add to my career advancement. Surely that is an important reason but it is absolutely essential to convince all the fraternity of the teachers in schools, high schools, colleges etcetera etcetera that serve or madam please do not learn these things just because somebody recognizes these and gives you some points for career advancement but please adopt these things please learn these things because to discharge your very basic beauty as a teacher you will be helped immensely by using these technologies. So forget others please learn these things for your own sake. Now who will send this message? All the participants who benefit from this course have to send this message. Who will execute the action on this message? I expect IIT Bombay will continue conducting this program but I expect many of our remote centers to become local hubs. I would like to point out that one of our new remote centers the QSAT in Cochin is trying to do exactly the same thing. They will be creating other remote centers they may not necessarily be the remote centers but IIT Bombay in the conventional sense although I do not see any reason why any college which is using AVU cannot be connected to IIT Bombay. After all the nomenclature remote center was given because there were certain responsibilities that were allocated to a remote center and when the remote center carried out those responsibilities there was some funding available under MHRD in those days to recognize by paying honorarium to the coordinators, technical staff etc. But since the government funding is not there such funding support has to be obtained by doing local activities. Here is a simple arithmetic. We have now 460 remote centers. One fourth of these 120 remote centers decide to become local hubs and connect to 100 institutions each. Realize how many institutions you will reach out to and if you can use the readymade content that will be made available in open source by us and by others you can use open source contents available from any source and plus you can actually create your own additional educational content. Please understand that creating a video lecture snippet is not as difficult as it used to be in old days. You can sit in front of your laptop or desktop have a webcam, have a good microphone and believe me you can record a very good 5 minutes, 7 minutes session in your own domain, in your own language. For example, if you are in Chattisgarh, Indore and if you are trying to address the higher secondary teachers majority of these higher secondary teachers or 10-12 standard teachers might be teaching their students in Hindi and they might have studied only in Hindi. Whatever material that you pick up from IIT Bombay which is in English may not be directly useful what prevents you from actually because all of these are open source resources what prevents you from taking this, creating it in Hindi and actually conducting training programs for teachers in Hindi. We can all do that and that is what I would encourage you to do. He is saying that in last year's FDP the participating teachers had created web pages in their own language for example, Manipuri and so on. Video. Video. Video. They have created a video on how to create WordPress web pages. So is that video available? They have. But why is it not made part of that link is not made part of the IIT Bombay XT? It is already a part of the IIT. I see. So that link is available you may perhaps use it. Right. Any closing comment over to you? So we also foresee to fulfill your dream of becoming one of the local hubs. Thank you sir. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. We still have about 7 minutes we can go to couple of other remote centers. Good morning sir. Good morning. Very good morning sir. Good morning sir. Happy to see you. Yes. I am Smita Desai remote center coordinator as well as a workshop coordinator sir. We have 91 participants. Wow. We have 91 participants. 91 that's a very large number. 91. Sir one of my participant want to communicate with you sir. She has a doubt. Sure. Very good morning to all of you. My name is Pallavi Maha Gaukar. I am from MIT college. First of all I would like to thank all your team members and efforts what you are taking for taking this FDP and developing some ICT or teaching learning process. So I am very much excited with this course and whatever activities I have done in these two weeks I learn many things. So thank you very much. One incident I would like to share with you one day I was giving question to my student that find the value of register and he has to do that manually but that student gave me one application where he was just given me the things that madam instead of doing it manually we can use this application for finding the value of register and that day I realized the students are motivating and using the technology very much. So I am little bit behind that I was not knowing the application for that and by doing this course I am excited that I will learn many things related to recordings, developing website and many other things. So for that I would like to thank you and for morning station I got the solution for my problem. From many years I used to give the name as assignment one, assignment two, assignment three and if I want to find out any one assignment I have to search 15 or 20 files so for that I got today I got the solution so thank you for this, thank you very much. Thank you Pallavi for your observations they are very correct observations I hope that all our 3000 colleagues participating in this session would understand one very important thing which was obliquely hinted. Pallavi said that one of her students was able to point out an easier way of doing certain thing and she commented that students seem to be ahead of her. Number one there is nothing to be ashamed of in any time period the students have always been smarter than teachers so all the teachers who are participating I will request you to go back in time when you were students. Did you not genuinely believe that you are smarter than your teachers? I am not talking about wisdom and intelligence but our students also believe the same thing it is partly true. The part which is true is that students of every generation get more and earlier exposure to technology than their older generation. So Pallavi you were speaking of your student let me tell you my own story I have a grandson who studies in standard he lives in Pune his team from millennium school got some prize in a competition and I was very surprised to know that he was actually doing Arduino programming Arduino programming is something which our embedded systems people do here and he asked me Abba how do I connect this particular sensor what C++ statement do I use I have to tell him sorry I do not know but when I studied I found out so you see the point is our students will know better which is okay just like the problem can be solved by someone else than me our students can also solve the problem I will once again emphasize the importance of discussion forum please post such relevant information on discussion forum please acknowledge the person from whom you got the solution that is a curtsy that should demand and please keep your eyes and ears open because your students in all likelihood are more exposed to the technology and the current state of solutions that are available and as teachers at least in IIT Bombay we are absolutely absolutely no problem in learning perpetually from our students after all what is the difference between students and teachers both are learners teachers merely have more experience and probably more qualification on paper but as far as learning is concerned and as far as problem solving is concerned whether student or whether teacher all of us can solve that problem some may solve it faster thank you so much we have time for just one or two more sessions let's go to one more remote center which place is this oh Teshpur University Assam over to you Teshpur hello good morning sir I am Manoj Kumar Hazarika workshop coordinator for this FDP I would like to congratulate the IIT Bombay team that actually this course is being re-run and there are many participants who are actually will be benefited who would not attend or complete the earlier events this time in earlier occasions at our remote center we had got participants basically from our institute itself this time we have got some participants from nearby institutes as well some of our participants are having concern some query probably so I will be passing this to you hello sir good morning hello sir good morning good morning please go ahead sir thank you for sorry sorry you have to tell us your name madam that is obligatory I am Shopna Bora sir I am Shopna Bora assistant professor from this university sir I and some of my friends we have enrolled at the last moment that is the 15th of this March so we did not complete this with one and two activities but we have seen that the due date is over so can you complete this activity today or can you get a chance again so Shopna let me ask you a counter question suppose you had some students who joined the college late and who made the same request that madam I could not complete this assignment will you give me extension how would you react for it is a genuine reason I will give you more a chance correct so do you believe that we will not work after all we are also teachers you are also a teacher and we think exactly like that and therefore wherever there are genuine reasons appropriate extension should be given however the deadlines are meant to be respected so I will ask you another question why is it that you waited till late and why did you not register earlier you need not answer this question but what I am telling you is that whenever there is any synchronized activity to be done such as registration and registration completion it puts a date and it creates hassles if I miss that date this is true about every synchronized activity we actually I had in mind to create an FDP which will be a completely online course only and which is a self-paced course that people can enroll anytime people can complete at any time we do run such courses in our books elsewhere in edX and even on the IIT Bombay unfortunately the faculty development program we had to put start date end date and such thing but it was a good point that you made and I assure you that just like you are considerate to your students if there are genuine reasons and difficulties so are we because both you and we are teachers only and all teachers are considerate by nature and by training so don't worry about it thank you so much this is Raishwani College, Nagpur over to you hello we can hear you please go ahead Professor Satter, I am Vijayanth I am from Redhya Amrit Bhai Daga College I am in college I have been teaching for several years now I teach physics undergraduate students what I have noticed in all these years when I learnt myself it was very conventional teaching that students of blackboard lecturing then as we went on as my real progress as a teacher at times had used overhead projectors and all that in 4.5 years and now I actually use a WhatsApp it links to students for various the angels related to their syllabus I have observation that in conventional lecturing as compared to my generation the span of education is much less what has happened I have old child more interested technology related instruction and if I tell him something I will see it copy something on an iPhone or say computer more interested he will grab the portion of the device or the gadget and learn more happily I am very very happy to receive the lectures and audios and it was a very very lucid presenting I am so grateful to you for that I just ask a couple of feedback one is one point was very rightly made that every time that we or our students just to tell us madam this is the app and I do enter it very good suggestion some other remote center audio repeat that question you would know version one yes very good point what she pointed out is that when there is an interaction that is happening with some remote center and if I am at some other remote center while I can hear what the professor in IIT Bombay is speaking I am offered unable to hear what the remote center person is saying while we in the hub can listen to the remote center person when it is communicated further to other remote centers they are unable to listen so one suggestion that is being made and I respect that suggestion we will try and do that that whenever a question is asked a question which is of relevance the person here in IIT repeat that question and then answer the question so that all participants clearly know what was the question I would also like to say one more thing here the reason why the remote center speaker is not very clear is because very often there are some audio issues between that remote center and IIT Bombay independent of other audio issues there is one protocol that is still not understood by all our participants on how to speak into a mic so let me show you if I have a mic like this and if I hold like this it is quite likely that my voice will not be audible I need to hold the mic like this closer to the lips at a constant state what happens is when I speak and I keep moving the mic like this while speaking or because you see I am concentrating on asking a question and as you know whenever we ask a question we move our hands so it is quite possible that while asking a question I move my hand and the mic goes away or it is quite possible that initially I keep the mic like this but subsequently the mic becomes like this when that happens the quality of sound reduces substantially it is possible because of the concentrated technology that we have in the hub our people who have a sound mixer and so on are able to make it so that we can hear you but the quality is not good enough to be communicated further to other remote centers so this is of course a slightly detailed explanation but please keep this in mind if at all you are using a hand mic please hold it like that and please concentrate on holding it just like this while speaking it is not easy but with some experience you will be able to do that and of course thank you for good suggestion wherever there is an important question that has been raised before answering it I will advise my colleagues also that we will repeat that question briefly and answer it thank you so much I have already overshot I can see some more people are interested but over a period of time today and tomorrow I think tomorrow evening again there is an interaction session so we will meet tomorrow sorry I will meet you tomorrow but you continue to meet with each other and others we should have it we have a tea break now we will assemble sharp at 11.30 thank you so much over and out