 Good afternoon, and my apologies for showing up a bit late till I was preparing for an evening event in in the town a book reading by Kiran Karnak. I don't know how many of you have read that book, Crooked Minds. So basically he meant innovative minds, but he called them Crooked Minds. Like all I call my friends from IIT Kharagpur as partners in crime. It's a very sweet crime that we're committing. I'll not take more than 15 minutes to share with you an action agenda that we have in mind and which to execute nationwide we would need your continued support. I had already told you about the AV interaction feature, which we are trying to implement, which is independent of a location. So there is no concept of a hub like IIT, Bombay or IIT Kharagpur. There's no concept like a remote center. So any place where associate faculty, including me or anyone from IIT, is sitting and 10, 20, 30 other places where the desirous participants are sitting. They can interact on audio visual thing, adding a dimension of interaction, which was either to not possible. AV would make it possible. You must have seen the presentation by my colleague on the blended MOOCs operations. The blended MOOC philosophy is not just meant to be a MOOC running from only one institution and 100 other institutions participating in giving their students a blend of learning. They can learn both from online and from face-to-face activities. Although that is the central theme for which the software was developed. Even internally, an institute can use blended MOOCs as about 40, 50 faculty members in IIT, Bombay, routinely do. So when we run our courses, we don't run them in the conventional way at all. There are no lecture sessions. So all lecture sessions are attended to by students online and they attend only flip-class room where there are only descriptions, problems solving and so on. There are many who have actually conducted rigorous studies. The best possible is by Professor Kannan, who has got a paper in an IEEE journal which says, and that is a point which has been proven time and again by a large number of people across the world. Namely, if you don't waste your and students time in lecturing and let them listen to shorter video clips at their own convenient time, but engage them in a class entirely in active learning. So there is absolutely no lecture at all, period. There may be short bursts of explanations, but it's a flip-class room that is conducted. That is in fact one of the major points that we make in our pedagogy workshop for training people. All of us who have tried that and Kannan has proven by taking two sample classes. One, a controlled class, which underwent flip-class room for a course. It's a regular engineering course, chemical engineering course. And the other class, comprising of same students. So there's a large batch of 100 people divided into 50 and 50 randomly chosen, all IIT students. One group of 50 participated in the flip-class room. Other group of 50 participated in the normal classroom. Both batches were given exactly identical assessment. And the group which did flip-class room performed significantly better, which means learning is significantly better. That is one unfortunate thing that we as teachers generally are completely unable to measure. All of us spend time, I have spent 40 years in trying to improve my teaching. Without really wondering how much of improvement in learning is happening. Now we talk about outcome-based learning so we can have that. Now what it means is that in IIT Bombay also, we use IIT Bombay X platform. No lectures are delivered in these courses. And the students spend time in active learning through exercises, activities, interaction and so on. A blended book offers another possibility. You may choose each one of you. Suppose we are taking a course on data success and algorithms and thermodynamics. Now one extreme case of using these blended books in your institutes, let your students study thermodynamics both from the online course that is offered by IIT Bombay and face-to-face interaction that you have. Of course you are encouraged to use flip-class room, asking them to attend or view the lectures delivered by Professor Gaya Tunde, Professor Bandarkar, Professor Millindath Ray. But you spend time in actually discussing problems with them and enhancing them. This is in fact the way for which the blended MOOCs platform or the extension has been prepared. The other way is to say that you will modify the MOOCs itself. So you will edit pre-defined video lectures which are on the platform. You will add your own lecture sessions. You can record those and add them. You would add your own exercises. You would modify some of the lectures and use those as MOOCs lectures for your students. This is one great advantage of releasing content in open source so that you are officially and legally permitted to use, distribute, modify, reuse any kind of material that we put, including olivariably. A third objective of our platform development is that the IIT Bombay X platform, which is based on OpenEDX, but it has some flavors for Indian users, including the blended MOOCs platform that Shweta's team has developed and including the pedagogical innovations for increasing interaction even when it is a plain MOOCs. This is something which my colleague, Dr. Samish Sastra, will explain. Amazing experience of running a skilling course. First as MOOCs, then as blended MOOCs, then as a modified pedagogy MOOCs. You should listen to him on it. So what we are saying is that this IIT Bombay X platform enriched by this pedagogical input such as blended MOOCs conduct and methodology which will be outlined and documented, this platform itself can, the entire thing is in open source and we are creating a distribution. What it means is you can take the entire software and just as you download Moodle and use it in one of your college servers or some other software, you can also use this and we will be putting together a larger repository. As I mentioned, we are building a large cloud to host all such open source contents, digital contents. We will allocate a space to create a open source repository of all course contents with all the courses that we have offered, all the workshops that we have offered and these will be accessible, downloadable, editable and usable by all. To use this humongous amount of digital asset set that we have created, it will require a lot of work at your end and that is another reason why not only you should have all your faculty colleagues, independent of which subject they currently teach in conventional way, all your faculty colleagues should become well versed with these platforms, with these technologies and with the pedagogy. This is the purpose for which those two FDPs are considered to be important for all professionals. The preliminary version of this platform, the composite platform for distribution will be presented by a large IIT Bombay team in the Open edX conference that is going to be held in Spain, have been invited to make a presentation there that is in May end and by June or July we would be releasing that which is actually a configurable platform. So that means you download that platform and you say I am not IIT Bombay but I am NIT Agartala. So you fill in all the proper places, parameterize them and the whole thing will become NIT Agartala platform or IIT Kharagpur platform or any issue platform. It's just like you configure model at least that is our intention and we'll proceed towards that. The second action agenda is that like we did in 2015 and some of you may be familiar with the fact that we actually ran blended MOOCs courses for students. That was our first effort where students from certain colleges and those could be only autonomous colleges because one of the requirements was that any college which participates in that blended MOOC learning from us must ensure that part of the performance of those students for their university grades comes from online courses. We have said anywhere between 20 percent to 80 percent each autonomous institute can choose the factor that is to be assigned to the online assessment and that blended MOOCs platform or rather the MIS platform permits you to actually access downloadable data files how your students are doing and so on. We will be running now these three or four courses again but this time we have decided we will not limit it to only autonomous institutions and we will not limit it only to our remote centers. Of course our remote centers will get early information as I am sharing with you now. In the month of April I'll be writing to all technical university affiliated colleges and all other universities all heads of the institutions saying if they wish to participate then if their students attend a MOOCs course which we'll run for the semester long like we did last time but this time we might run a different set of courses and all teachers who wish to get the benefit for their students from this composite thing are most welcome. However for proper interaction with us that means we at IIT Bombay the teachers of these courses will be interacting frequently with both the teachers and students attending this course that will be limited only to those colleges where the teachers teaching those courses are themselves trained in both the foundation of ICT and Pedagogy because without that we believe it will be only paying a lip service just telling my students go watch those lectures there and I will continue to teach the way I want is not a call for. So in the month of May and June we would like to work with such teachers which wish to offer these courses jointly and we'll work with them through a view or whichever way we may even run a formal FDP for those teachers they may be 200 300 500 thousand in number it doesn't matter for specific subjects we'll run two or three FDPs which will be subject specific nothing advanced but how to teach those core courses using the combination of online and that is what we are going to do. Why all colleges can access it because it was pointed out in our last interaction that while autonomous institutions have the complete authority to decide how the assessment will be done and what percentage of marks to be allocated to online and face-to-face assessment even other institutions which are affiliated colleges do have the autonomy of allocating up to 20 marks based on internal assessment and there are institutions and teachers who are willing to say that for our institute if our students take this course a blended MOOCs course then their internal marks will be given entirely based on their performance on the online course that way they will benefit from the online course and of course they will have to give the conventional university exam our long-term ambition of course is to completely revamp the university examination system and even similar system which pertains in very many autonomous institutions as well and make those examinations also a different experience a learning experience but that is a long-term goal. In a nutshell we would like to offer the blended MOOCs courses with the pedagogy for all those who are interested you will receive a later in the second week of April I'm just trying to ascertain things from the AICT chairman and others we will possibly have an aviu interaction with those of you at remote centers and at other places where teachers would like to participate in such courses we are not sure which courses will be offering there is one new course which Professor Sundar my colleague has been very successfully offering in a blended MOOCs manner and that course is called communication skills it's an obligatory course which is a non-credit course in IIT Bombay which is compulsory for all M.Tek and PhD students I do not know whether you have a communication skills course like this or not but if you have you're most welcome to use this communication skills course that we offer in a blended MOOC there is a vocational course which Samir Shastrabudde has developed and that is on blender animation it's a foundation course followed by course on architectural visualization none of you would be from the architecture background but many of you would have sister institutions which teach architecture which also comes under AICT norms and such course could also be useful to them what we are saying is it is not necessarily necessary that you must have a formal university course to use blended if we are offering certain courses which we believe are useful to students and learners you are most welcome to pile on and use that opportunity as an elective as a special course whatever name you want to give if you believe that you have students and learners who are interested they are most welcome to join so this is our endeavor going forward the second important thing that we wish to do is we have been told to increase the number of remote centers in states where we have very few remote centers today some of these states are northeast states Bihar West Bengal we have some present but Charakhan Chattisgarh we have only two or so and large stack of UP in most other provinces we have adequate number of remote centers those of you who are friends and associates who are faculty members in colleges in these states I would request you to send me a personal mail connecting me to an appropriate person or head so that we'll take this forward we'll of course be writing once again to the officials in the government machinery but in the past we have had no such response from as I mentioned once the approval comes and I'm very hopeful that the approval for the remaining budget will come we would be going ahead with further empowering the existing remote centers and to the new remote centers we would be giving them the original grant that is approved for the new remote center which is I think 2.8 lakhs or whatever it is whatever I don't remember that figure so there were some remote centers who joined us later and they did not receive the first grant also we'll include them as well the amount of grant is not more important but the fact that IIT Bombay channelizing that money received from ministry of human resources to a sister institution I think it sends a good signal the last but not the least so far you have been recipients and transmitters or whatever happens in IIT Bombay going forward I expect each one of your institutions to become a local hub I have seen this kind of thing happening for example my friend Suman and IIT Agardala organizes sessions with people around in the institutions around them I think Amal Jyoti in Kerala anybody from Amal Jyoti here thank you for coming sir one of the most active centers which takes pride in conducting large number of programs on their own working as a hub for institutions around them the least all of you could think of doing is popularize this concept of digital India being realized through learning from digital assets in your schools colleges in your own city itself just invite students from polytechnics and high schools to visit your facilities just show them how people learn with online contents that message needs to go and therefore the last action agenda that I have is that all of you should become hubs in your own right you should use this association which has been several years association with IIT Bombay now to charter your own independent course become a hub in your own right as Dr. Kamal Bijlani said the AVU is open source not only for client is open source only for the back-end server traditionally there is one component of the server which still depends upon a licensed commercial product and that is the streaming server but the content server the database servers are all open source pieces of software and even the streaming server is being attempted to be replaced by an open source server with some limitations in performance but it should work perfectly fine in your own institution if nothing else you can conduct a large class breaking it into six or seven divisions all seven divisions simultaneously learning from the same teacher just as we have this hub and spoke arrangement I think there is a need now for you to be innovative so far you have done extraordinarily great amount of work in supporting our activity but get out of that support role and become independent actors in your own right please note and I am very proud to say this that these 353 remote centers were chosen after a lot of care believe me when I say this you are among the best institutions in the country and any institution any institution which would like to be called as the best institution cannot always continue to receive things it must start giving things and it must start giving things in its own right in its own capability for people around you you would be aware that there are schools and colleges in your towns and cities and around you which do not have as much facilities as you have which do not have as qualified faculty members as you have which do not get as good students as you get do they not deserve some assistance and help so I think you should take this message forward and that is a continuing process that was my last action agenda to share with you in conclusion start using a view and the parameterizable platform that will release start experimenting these are all open source pieces of software and the machine has a good habit of not shouting back at you if you make a mistake so make mistakes learn things use them but more importantly take this message forward participate continue to participate with us in our joint FDP conduct both from IIT Kharagpur and IIT Bombay and last but not the least become a hub educational hub in your own right and please spread the message to as many institutions schools colleges vocational training etc etc that you can go ahead and give thank you so much I'll take your leave but please do come back