 All right. So, thank you very much for turning in time. I must frankly admit to really appreciate what you have done. This is the first time in 40 years that I have seen the entire class being present before 8.30, barring a few people who came in late, I think two or three people. So, thank you very much for that. It is not easy to maintain it throughout the semester though. And it is much more difficult to maintain it throughout the life, which is the objective of any announcement of timing for any group activity. How many of you have not been able to watch the uploaded video? Can you raise your hands? Amazing. One. Only one person. Two. So, can you share with us what was the reason why you were not able to watch? Yes, sir. You can announce your name to your friends. My name is Kosh Goyal. Kosh Goyal? He did not see his mail. You do not have any friends who remind you? I was outside and I came to buy one. Oh, you were outside? When you came to your room, there was no friend? There is no mail. It told me that you were too late. I said you were too tired, I see. That is interesting. Okay, too little. There is one more person. So, please tell all of us your name and the reasons why this happened. I am one. People have told me about it, but I have not. So, one of our friends was too tired. The other friend, although people told him, he did not bother because he did not think it was important. I am very happy that you are stating these very frankly because frankness and admission of any issue is an important aspect of effective communications. The point is not that. The point is whenever we work in group or in teams, there is a certain team discipline and a group discipline that needs to be followed. Otherwise, what happens effectively is that a very important time of the entire team and group is wasted in recovering from delays, for example. Or for work that is contributed, which is not of up to date quality because of lackluster performance of any member of the team. Group discipline and team discipline is absolutely essential and therefore there are special communication requirements for communicating within teams, within groups. When we have a group like that, coherent group with one assigned task master in the form of a teacher, the teacher takes the liberty of announcing activities and timings. To fulfill those activities is the job of every individual. To adhere to the times is also the job of every individual. The most important consequence of not adhering to time by any individual is loss of time for the entire group. Look at the discussion that has been happening for last five minutes after you finish your quiz. All five minutes were spent in analyzing the impact of two of our friends had. Imagine what would have happened if twenty people had turned up late or not seen the video. In general, we as a society lack in group discipline. We are often alright with us individually but when it comes to group, we lack that discipline and that is because while we might be outwardly courteous, we do not necessarily imbibe that courtesy in ourselves perpetually and regularly. So, look at simple aspects of social discipline. Crossing a red light. Is there anyone individual here who has never ever in life crossed a red traffic light at any time of day or night? Anybody? Good. I continue to search. I have been searching for 45 years. I do stop at red light throughout my life. I have stopped. And I request others to stop at red light, those who cross that red light. The red light is not important to you. The red light is important to others because people from the other side imagine that they have a green light therefore they have a right of way and accidents happen here. So, that is the social discipline that we have. Similarly, timely execution of any activity including attending an event in time is important because if you are delayed by one minute, the whole group gets delayed by one minute. You are losing time. The most important timekeeper has to be in a setting like this where there is a class and the session has to be conducted by a teacher. If a student comes late by one or two minutes, it is tolerable. But if a teacher comes late by two minutes and there are 120 students, 120 into two minutes are lost. Do you know that time by the way is the most valuable commodity in life? If you lose money, not wealth, not anything, why? Any idea why time is more important than anything else? Correct. It is a one way traffic. If you lose wealth, if you lose money, you can always read back in your life. Lose time is gone. That is it. Every instance comes only once in your life. That is why I always say enjoy your life because every instance you let pass just goes away if you have gone it without your enjoying it. Bad luck. Anyway, so let us enjoy this effective communication class together. To begin with, I would like to introduce a team of my colleagues who will help us in conducting these sessions here. May I request my colleagues to please come on stage? Prakash, Sameer, Nagesh, Hiruja, Rahul. Let me first introduce the colleagues who are present here. Professor Prakash, why don't you talk about yourself for a minute? Hello. I am an expert here. I passed out in 1970. When Dr. Patek was three, he was infected at that time. After that, I worked in industry. At present, I am working in industry. Education is a matter of passion for me. For the last 10 years, I have associated with various projects, education projects and all that. And within that, my specialization is use of language. So, I will be conducting some sessions on written articulation, that is proofreading and use of commas and other things. And I will also be teaching about public speaking because many of you might not be a good public speaker. So, how to use techniques for public speaking. So, these sessions I will be conducting. Thank you, Prakash. By the way, Prakash is actually an expert in embedded systems. So, when we set up the affordable solutions lab and designed early systems like thin clients or affordable smart card readers and subsequently the Akash project, he was in the thick and thin of all the design issues. But for this particular engagement, those things do not matter. The other expertise matters. I am sorry. In India, animation can be used for educational purposes. Rather than anything, that is not what actually my strategy is. I worked with the supplier for last couple of years here, nine. So, I am kind of an institute of social sciences before coming back here. So, I would be really talking about presentation skills and mainly how you can plan your presentation, what is the importance of visual presentation and how you can change your thoughts in a better way. So, the presentation is communicating what you want to communicate and people take the message rather than take it away by the message. So, that is my area. Swami Sastravudde actually left industry to join academics many years ago when I was setting up our distance education program. He actually set up the entire distance education program initially along with Professor Kavyaariya who helped in those days. He recently finished his PhD in educational technology with Professor Sridharajya. And now Dr. Sastravudde is here to help. He also runs an online course on IIT Bombay X on Blender animation. This is an open source tool. So, that course will be, in fact, it is scheduled to start from, registration is scheduled to start from 26th January. Those of you are interested in Blender, it is a free course on IIT Bombay X which is a MOOCs platform. You can use that. What was your area of work? So, there is some confusion in my mind because Rahul is seen as a fresh PhD student enrolled on the ASC for this course and had a dilemma as to how a student who is enrolled as a student for the course can also be a teaching assistant. But then he clarified that he is signed up under Duras. He has already done this course while in Emte and he needs a certification from me saying the course is where so that he can re-register, am I right? Good. So, we will do that certification. So, today technically, he is a student. From tomorrow onwards, he will be here. Well, as usual, he is too shy to talk about himself. Nagesh Karmali is an engineer in Goa many years ago. I have been persuading him to try and do his PhD except for doing PhD, he does everything else. He is probably the most well-read person in my group of all kinds of research papers because he helps all of my Emte students to do their research surveys and other things. He also participates heavily into our online courses and he is actually an instructor in the CS11X course which I and Suprati gave at the beginning of this year, which we are repeating now. Good morning. Good morning. I have been a teacher and I have been teaching not on-site. Firuza did her Master of Computer Science from Bombay University many years ago. But I had a privilege of knowing her when she was actually studying in school because before she passed out her school, she had written a book and a friend of mine from Pune who was her father's friend asked me to write a foreword. I was quite amused, a school kid writing a book. Since then he has written six books. They are not fancy research kind of textbooks, they are simple books on programming but they are used by a large number of people. So she is actually an authorist, probably the most prolific author among all of us. I don't think anyone including me have written five or six books. I haven't written even one. Eighth book is invading. Eighth book is invading, fine, fine. Currently she helps us in this course in various organizing. The quiz for example that you just gave was a combined effort by Prasiprakash, Vaidya, Me, Nagesh and Firuza over about three hours last night. So in fact another question that I did not ask in the quiz. The last question is did you find any mistake in the quiz paper? That is usually a question. If you might not have noticed it because your entire concentration was answering the questions as you understood them. But whether there was any difficulty in understanding a question, whether the wording was confusing or whether there are any spelling mistakes. All of these issues are actually important in any kind of communication meant for a group and that is why a lot of time has to be spent on that. He is a veteran TA in the sense that he also helped me last year in conducting the same course. All right, thank you very much. Why don't you go ahead and see. As all of you know the communication skills course for last two years has been divided into two components. There is an institute component and your first lecture for the institute component will be held when you already know what time. Where LH 101 is this. This is a smaller classroom. Your classroom 302 is on the other side of the corridor. It's a larger classroom because that class will be a mix of students from multiple branches. So, there in fact two slots they use either Monday or Tuesday. The branch for our branch it will be there. I will attend the first lecture anyway. The objective of the institute level course is to strengthen some very fundamental aspects of communication. They will declare the course contents and you would be using Moodle extensively both for that course and this course. There are two different course numbers. Our course CS 792 did not exist as a separate course earlier. It is to be a common course course 699 where HSS department used to engage all students for one hour a week and the departmental coordinators were supposed to engage students for two hours a week primarily giving them assignments and out etc. It was discovered that that was not working out well. The HSS department traditionally handles communication skills slightly differently than what the engineering and science departments wanted to emphasize to their students. So, technical writing for example or technical communication was not necessarily covered as strongly as it would have been. Consequently, Sinead decided two years ago to break this course into two parts. One part is the institute common course and the other part is the departmental course and students are now required to complete the course. The rule is very simple. If you fail in any one course you will have to repeat it. From my experience I will tell you it is not worth it because you would have learnt whatever you would have learnt in one set of lectures or sessions in one semester and there is not additional learning that you will benefit from if you have to repeat it. So, don't repeat it. But don't repeat it means you have to pass. There are no credits for this course to be earned. It is a pass not pass course. I attended a meeting convened by HSS department yesterday where they announced that 80% attendance is the criteria for passing or failing for the institute component. I was quite amused because last year also there was a similar requirement. By the way, I am one teacher who does not care one whoot for attendance. Attending a session is an individual choice. If you feel you will benefit by attending a session you will attend. If you don't, you will not attend. If you don't feel like attending but the institute rule says you must attend. Physically you bring your body to the class and park it in one of the seats. But nothing much will be achieved except wasting your entire time and by wasting the time of your neighbors. Obviously if I stay in my seat people around me are affected. So, I don't believe in that. However, I have found time and again that attending a class particularly if the class can carry out its business in a fairly entertaining and jovial way is a very useful thing. And when you pass time in an entertaining and enjoying fashion you obviously learn something. Learning by the way is not an activity which can be switched on or switched off. I hope you are aware of that. Every time your mind is active, mind is learning something. Most often subconsciously. You are walking somewhere, your eyes are looking at some posters somewhere or the signs or the shops and things like that. Without your realizing it, your mind is absorbing that data. You learn. You are participating in a conversation, you don't talk. You just listen to whatever is going on. Your mind absorbs something. What it learns is a different thing but it learns. Learning or acquiring knowledge is an individual activity of every human mind. People wrongly say knowledge is transferred by the teacher to the students. That is the biggest nonsense. Is knowledge a commodity that can be transferred? And if it indeed was, then a very peculiar situation will happen. Imagine I was transferring all my knowledge to you. In 40 years, everything should have been sucked out. I should have left a complete moron. There is no knowledge is left. Everything is transferred. Fortunately, I am still not wrong attempting to achieve that status but that's a different story. The point is that knowledge is always generated in every individual mind independent and the job of a teacher is primarily as a facilitator. Facilitator to ensure that you spend enough active time of your mind in learning, understanding, analyzing, practicing, whatever. And your learning will entirely be dependent on that. That's one of the reasons why physical attendance is of no consequence whatsoever unless it is enjoyed. However, if you decide to attend physically, then there are certain group disciplines that you must follow. All of us must follow. We will be announcing a sitting arrangement. We will be breaking you into groups, smaller groups and subgroups. The group logic we have worked out is very simple. The last digit of your roll number decides your group. So it is either group 0, group 1, group 2, group 3, group 4, etc. Statistically, if there are 120 students, there should be about 12 students in every group. It does not work like that because the distribution is slightly skewed. This number is too large. A number of a team should be somewhere between 3 to 5 people at the most sex. So we decided to use the category adopted by Delhi Chief Minister Kejriwal, the odd-even strategy. So that means the last but one digit of your roll number will decide your subgroup. So if it is even, then the subgroup is A. If it is odd, the subgroup is A. So if the last but one digit is 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, you are subgroup A of that group. So 0 A, 1 A, 2 A, 3 A, etc. If it is odd, then it will be B. These groups will have to sit together because there will be discussions and group assessments of submissions made either by members of that group or by members of some other groups. Unfortunately, the statistics of roll number distribution is so skewed that we found out that in one subgroup, there were 3 students and in other subgroup, there were 7. Now that is a bit odd. I have to still think about what to do about that 7th group. We might break it into 4 and 3. Even in order we have used, we will have to use some other random number generation formula or something. But we will figure it out and we will make an announcement. The sitting arrangement displayed in a sheet on Moodle and that will be applicable from next session where we meet on Thursday. So positively look all by Wednesday evening for the sitting arrangement and you should actually sit according to that. That is something. Second, this is I am talking about the general group discipline of timing and curtsy to others. Invariably when people go to a hall, whether it is a classroom or a convocation hall or even cinema theater. Cinema theater of course have numbered seats. Now whenever people go into unnumbered and occupied seats, they usually start sitting on the chairs nearest to the lobby through which they are walking. So for example, if I go in, I will occupy this corner seat or this corner seat. Every person who comes later will have to cross me, jump over me and go somewhere. People who come in from this door will first occupy chairs in the front. The late comers have to go back. Now late comers of course are discursions as I mentioned but they need not be late with respect to the starting time. They may be coming later than you. Or they not deserve the curtsy of having to travel less than what you did to find a seat. So you find in ordered set of chairs, unordered set of chairs which means there is no seat numbering or sitting arrangement. The common discipline says the first comers must take the seats at the back and they must take seats in the middle of a row not at the corner. So that anybody coming in late will be able to sit in the corner with least wastage of time. Follow this. Did it ever occur to you that it causes disruption like that? Perhaps it did not. And that is because while we are curtsies to others in our mind and heart, we do not display that curtsy by our actions often. Very, very important to do that, right? Of course here this will not apply because we will have a sitting arrangement. Every row will have a small group or subgroup sitting so that there will be discussions. We will be conducting this course mostly in a flipped classroom fashion. How many of you have heard of a flipped classroom? A large number. So you have already been experimented with in the previous semester. Anybody conducted flipped classrooms for your course here? No one? Oh, you have not been taught by Suprati? No. Baskar Lab. Everybody must have done software lab. This year who taught this software lab? He believes in personal communication not flipped classrooms. Anyway, flipped classroom is a simple name given to an approach where there are no lectures delivered. The lectures are all pre-recorded like the video that you saw. It was a short video and you are supposed to view those lectures ahead of coming to the class. And when you come to the class, the class is entirely problem solving and discussion session. There is no lecture. And that is found to be very, very effective for engagement of students. Professor Sridhar Ayer and Sana Murthy actually did a strong research on measuring the engagement level. How do you measure the engagement level of students in a class over a semester? Interesting question. Any suggestions? If I conduct an examination, it will assess hopefully the learning that you have had in the class and possibly your ability to crack an examination independent of your knowledge. But it will not give you any indication of the engagement. Engagement is if there are 30, 40 hours of physical engagement in a classroom, then out of those 40 hours, what is the amount of time on an average every individual has spent actively engaging the mind in the issue that is being discussed. That is engagement. How do you measure that engagement? Sorry? Tapping the brain activity. Tapping the brain activity. He is going way ahead. Someday it may happen. But I will also tell you a very sort of novice observation, which I had once made and which Professor Shaman Chakravarti endorsed. Tapping the brain activity and trying to understand the engagement at the abstract level with the knowledge gathering. Isn't it something similar to measuring voltage and currents in the circuits of a PC and trying to figure out the complexity of the operating system? That mapping is almost impossible. Perhaps knowing the complexity of operating system you can eventually figure out what is the current that is flowing through and and or gates. But knowing the current flowing through and and or gates to figure out that let's say a C++ program is using a doubly linkless would not perhaps be easy. That is the that is the observation that I would make. So tapping the brain activity, excellent scientific suggestion, hope at this level of our knowledge and understanding is not implement. Anything that is practically implementable. Observing the body language of the students. Yes, very good. The class is going on. So how do I observe? I can I cannot observe it. You cannot yourself observe it. So there have to be some other people. Okay. But it has to be a non-destructive testing. So if the observer stands over you like this, you won't be able to engage with the course. So the observer has to sit in some corner quietly. This is exactly what Prasidara here in Sanamurthy did. They actually conducted this experiment with a set of TAs who sat unobtrusively in one corner in every class in two controlled groups, one the regular lecture sessions and the other was a classroom session. And they have proven by actual observations that the average engagement level in ordinary class is around 40 percent and it goes to 80 percent when you use a flip classroom. So in fact it is not really the flip classroom but the fact that will alert, alive and active in their minds. That is what is engaged. So you can actually remain active even if there is a lecture for one hour but that can happen only occasionally. It cannot happen hour after hour after hour for semester long. Sometime or the other then your mind will start moving around. I mean I do not know how the status is but this is what used to happen when I was a college student in 1963-64. You sit in a class and for some reason you listen to the teacher and then you look at the teacher and after some time you start looking through the teacher because your mind is thinking of something else. Then you look at your neighbouring seats. In those days there used to be very few girls in engineering and usually the sitting arrangement was decided by where the girls sat so people would be moving around them and so your eyes will not be on the board but somewhere else. Then there are classrooms with windows like this and you have nice greenery outside so you occasionally look outside. So you see human mind has a natural tendency to waver. We cannot continue our concentration for a long time on a particular subject. That is why you will find that good teachers when they sense that the class is losing attention they will break the monotony by asking or cracking some joke. Cracking a joke reminds me of a very interesting incident at the cost of one minute I will share that with you. We had a teacher in teaching us Mathematics Department one professor Paria, a great mathematician but a philosopher kind of teacher. He will come quietly and start proving his theorem and things like that. The morning he came and wrote a poem on the board and suddenly stopped and he turned around and said I will tell you a joke. The whole class was stunned. A great professor Paria telling us a joke so we were all very attentive. He says a cow has four legs, a table has four legs therefore cow is a table. We did not laugh like that because it was Professor Paria who was stating this and we are trying to figure out whether there is any mathematical theorem in this. By that time we realized that there is something different. It took only two seconds. Immediately afterwards he said now we shall prove this theorem and went back and started. We could not figure out why the hell was that and so on. I used to be a member of the college debating team and we were coached by one Professor Kailay and on this Sunday when we were talking to him I was reciting this funny incident to my colleagues and Professor Kailay overheard. He says oh Paria did that. So we were curiously looking at him. He says you know he came to me last week saying that students are not attentive during his lecture so what should he do? So I told him tell them some joke. So he prepared that joke and told it. You see things have to happen naturally and the attention span of the group will always be fickle. You have to appreciate that and in general an activity based learning will keep the mind very active always. Anyway I digress. But I hope all this description has told you a few things about effective and non-effective communication. I will conclude this in the next 7 minutes by telling you about an important aspect of determining solutions to lifelong problems which is actually the job of all of us professionals we learn science and engineering to solve problems. So here I have 3 circles. All of you can see them. I have written single letters on top of each circle. T M H. What do you think they stand for? Tata McGraw-Hill. That is what occurred to most of you, right? Because that is the familiar name. So familiarity automatically imposes an interpretation on anything new that you see. You have to see through it. It has absolutely nothing to do with Tata McGraw-Hill. Although I don't know whether Renzuli was published by Tata McGraw-Hill. No, it was not published by someone else. So this is a very famous articulation representing many different things in the context that which I have drawn these circles. Talks about problems and solutions in real life. So this T actually stands for technology. As scientists and technologists it is our primary ambition to work out solutions to real life problems. The problems could be own field of study. The problems could be generic problems. More and more you will find that the larger problems facing humanity are becoming multi-disciplinary. Have you heard of grand challenge for engineering in 21st century? United States National Academy of Engineers had published the great achievements of the previous century and have recently published about 10 years ago the 14 grand challenges which need to be solved in this century. And when they say century they mean that solution will probably require the whole century. So brain mapping for example is one of the problems that has been mentioned there. Advancing personalized instructions is one of the problems, the challenging problem. Personalized instruction not group instruction. Clean water is one of the... Solar energy one of the... It is interesting and go to their site and read that. And imprint an Indian counterpart of similar challenges some 10 challenges have been recently adopted and the president of India actually had this announcement. The important point is almost all of these problems are multi-disciplinary problems. And we suddenly find that our entire educational system has been built around solid silos isolated from each other. So computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering. I mean it's amazing that computer scientists believe that they must not understand anything about mechanical engineering. If they do that's a... on their career. They must do programming, they must understand theory, whatever, whatever. And this is not new. In the computer science department the... He's first and had put a key there but he had converted a horizontal model which was the common model for a PC into a vertical model. First and it was opened up in the lab and I was quite shocked to see that it had a power supply on the top. Somebody had just moved the orientation that's all. And the fan which was being obstructed now by the PCBs which were there. So I asked my students who were hovering around it and I said, don't you see anything wrong in this design? They looked around and said, no sir, it has been working fine for the last two days where it was in an air-conditioned lab. So one smart student found out that the power supply was sitting on top and he said that is wrong, it should be at the bottom. Then I asked them, what about the heat flow? And you know what one of the students, the brightest in the batch reported? Ah, that's a mechanical engineering problem. So heat flow is associated with mechanical engineering. I must have nothing to do with it. This is not true anymore. This is not true earlier, this is not true now. Now the technology is supposed to work for us in working out feasible solutions to multiple problems and the need to work together is important. Technology permits us to determine feasibility of a problem, solution. Whether you can solve the problem or not and if you can solve what will be the nature of the solution is what technology tells you. But whether that solution can be implemented in real life or not cannot be understood without you understand the basic concepts of management particularly the finance and economic systems. Without financial analysis, a solution which is feasible may not be viable. So viability of the solution is determined only by application of financial and management. Technology can determine the feasibility, management and finance can determine the viability. Ordinarily you all learn this and you learn some of this either formally or informally later. But the third one and its relevance to general problem solving is often not impossible. It stands for humanity and the human aspect, the societal concerns will tell you whether a particular solution is desirable or not desirable. Nuclear energy is a technically feasible solution. It is viable to construct both the nuclear power plants which generate energy and nuclear arms which destroy life. It is the humanity or human considerations which will tell you which of these is more desirable and that is the reason why we need to constantly be in touch with humanity. That is the reason why independent of reading a whole lot of technical literature and all we must constantly read and appreciate the prose and the poems in any language. That is what brings us close to human people and our job is to create solutions which are not just technically feasible, which are not just economically viable but which are also humanly desirable. I would like you to appreciate this and think about this when you come to the next class. There will be a survey that will be uploaded on the model. I would expect you to answer it over this weekend but most important which one of you will have to give a short presentation of 5 to 7 minutes which will be recorded. This will be done on Saturday and Sunday as per time slot and it will be done for different groups. So, keep mark your calendar this Saturday, Sunday and Sunday you have to be participating in this. There will be a similar recording done of your presentations at the end of this course. Obviously, I expect you to ponder over the presentation that you make initially because it will be recorded and it will be made available and point out yourselves any mistakes that you might have made in that presentation and we will also get a peer evaluation. At the end, we will do the same process and if you do not find a significant improvement in your presentation at the end of the semester as compared to your presentation at the beginning of the semester, you know what it will mean? I shall deserve a fail grade in the course. Agreed? Because effectiveness of your communication has to be tested by yourselves. Thank you so much. We will meet again on Thursday.