 I am going to talk about a topic, by design it is named to be very exciting and controversial. I call it the onslaught of MOOCs, which in my opinion provides an opportunity for what I call a constructive disruption. I have no doubts that the massive open online courses are slated to cause a huge disruption, just like all other online activities on the web and internet cause disruption to normal processes. The first one was commerce, all commercial transactions as you know happened online and disintermediation has resulted in shift of a large number of activities from conventional middleman to a different breed of people. In exactly the same way healthcare and education is likely to be disrupted next, this was predicted way back in late 90s and it has started to happen now. I would like to begin by reiterating a few problems that all of us are aware of but quite often we tend to forget them, they do not remain uppermost in our minds. First, the need for quality in education amongst a humongous scale and amongst the largest possible diversity. I would like to remind all of you that we live in a nation which has unparalleled diversity. We have all ethnicities, all religions, all multiple languages and we specialize in fighting over each one of these issues with each other. Under these circumstances to achieve high quality is not very easy, add to it the fact that the scales that we wish to work at are truly extraordinary. In fact there is absolutely no other nation in the face of the world including China which has more education seeking young citizens than what India has. We have a low gross enrollment ratio, it started with about 11 percent, it has reached about 15 to 17 percent and we expect to reach 30 percent by the end of 2030. This is pathetic given an extraordinary number of young Indians wishing to step into higher education. So, here is the scale to remind you 350 plus million Indians are younger than 40 years old. They were so in 2011, in fact these are 2011 census. The first leading wave of these 350 plus million Indians has hit 18 years which means they are now ready to seek higher education. Our entire higher education system today with given the existing gross enrollment ratio and given an extraordinary increase in number of colleges and universities still handles only about 2 to 2.5 crore students or about 20 to 25 million students in the entire system. This includes all students doing 3 year or 4 year degree courses in various disciplines, all postgraduate students, all PhD students, everybody included. As opposed to that about 2 crore new prospective students will be entering the fray starting this year. India has absolutely no way to handle this large number properly if all of them wish to get good higher education. So here is a scenario in a short way. If you look at any individual learner, the desire of an individual learner is very simple. Please permit me to acquire good skills. Please permit me to acquire knowledge so that I can earn a decent livelihood in later part of my life. It is precisely for this simple reason that everybody seeks higher education of an appropriate kind. An additional expectation not often articulated but an additional expectation of an Indian learner is please give me an opportunity to learn and please give me that opportunity to learn at my own pace in the topics of my own interest and suitable to my ability. There is nothing wrong with this desire. In fact every young child or growing child would earn for this anywhere in the world. As I said in India we have a harder problem. The problem is made much harder by the response of our educational system. How does our system respond? The system says please remember that only our degrees are recognized in the world. That is an important fact of life. The prospective employers select candidates for interviewing them for possible employment based on the degrees and marks scored. Society therefore accepts these degrees as important components of the lives of young. Not only the system says therefore since our own degrees are recognized you have to do these degrees. Not only that you have to do these degrees exactly as we dictate and what we dictate? That a bachelor's program will be either 3 years or 4 years duration. That it will run under specific disciplines. That under each discipline there would be a program for example a BSc program in physics or an MSc program in chemistry or whatever and that each such program will have to be completed in so many years of time doing courses semester by semester. For example each course shall run for exactly 4 months and you will have to study that course for 4 months. Imagine now two different individual learners. One an extremely competent person was actually studied a subject already in the high school in his or her spare time. That student comes and says sir please this introduction to computer programming is a obligatory course in your syllabus but I have already done it. Please exempt me. I am told no that is not possible you will have to do this course. I say alright please permit me just to give a final exam. The system says no 75% attendance is compulsory and you have to give all exams. I therefore waste my time for the entire semester revising everything that I already learnt wasting my time. Consider a second individual a slight laggard please note that not everybody learns at the same pace I am a slow learner well just to remind you there are large number of people who are slow learners but they are not bad learners. Given more time they can learn it well. So I go to the institution and say please permit me to study this computer programming course in one year rather than one semester please spread it across for me. So no no the system says the semester course means you have to do it in one semester but sir I cannot study it even in semester I will require two semesters well please go ahead do this course fail in that course then you will get an opportunity to repeat the entire course next semester by spending one more semester. This appears patently stupid to me from the point of view of a learner but is our educational system sensitive to the learners need or have we become captive of ourselves our own defined rules and we are refusing to relook at the teaching learning process. These are hard question friends we rarely raise them because we are all part of the system and it is very easy for all of us to continue to run the system as we run it is in this context that the massive open online courses have arrived there is nothing new about online education this is age old at least more than three decades ago I remember myself and many other colleagues working on intelligent tutoring systems for example online content is nothing new it has been there ever since computer escape many of you would have heard of Gutenberg project which was in my opinion the first open source project in creating open source contents which were easily distributed for anybody however what happened about three years ago was remarkable some people put together the notion that look we have contents we have systems we have online tests and so on but there is a fundamental difference between all of these independent components and the way a particular subject is taught in the university system over a period of time six weeks eight weeks ten weeks or what is important that happens during those eight ten weeks is that students together are guided towards a particular set of activities spread over time supervised intervention by the teachers interaction with the teachers this forces the flock of students to apply their mind in a consecutive manner week after week studying different topics appearing for assessments and establishing that they know something this is what makes a difference between just the availability of content just the access to those contents and actual learning actual learning does not happen by making lot of contents available internet is full of huge amount of contents including free content excess now as Professor Condon said is becoming available even for Indian students but it is available elsewhere but if excess to high quality content was the only criteria for knowledge acquisition then I often say jokingly that in the past years and centuries librarians would have been the most learned people because they had the maximum excess to the highest quality stuff there is no evidence of that happen please understand that the availability and free access to a large amount of content does not translate into knowledge knowledge has to acquire by every individual learner by applying his or her mind solving problems understanding thing perhaps discussing with others in all cases applying the mind and that is what a regular course in a so called system does it forces individuals and groups of students to apply their mind to learn something well some of them who may copy assignments will learn incident because even while you copy an assignment you read that assignment you write that assignment you learn something but a majority of them would apply their mind in solving some problems participating some discussions and thereby learning some we say people are exam oriented but please understand that when students prepare for an examination they are learning something in short a course being conducted by a faculty member with probably help of teaching assistants and other colleagues for a group of students is still the best way of ensuring that learners actually learn some it is in this context that massive open online courses were offered started about three years ago three big companies in the United States were at the forefront Coursera EDX and Udacity they were of course several other attempts all over the world but what has happened is these MOOCs have got the imagination of people and literally lakhs and lakhs of learners globally are participating we also joined the consortium of EDX IIT Bombay is a member of EDX we offer some courses to the global learners we have since then launched IIT Bombay X as an extension online services for IIT courses I will speak more about it later during the talk but what MOOCs permit is courses to be learned from the best universities and courses to be learned from the best teachers this is something which is not always possible in my given setting suppose I study in as in a small less known college which probably does not have adequate number of well qualified and well experienced teachers then I feel that I am at a great disadvantage and if I could learn from the best teachers from the best universities I would like to do that today MOOCs are not recognized the MOOC certificates are not valued by the employers but the day is not far away for example when IT giants like Tata consultancy services start saying that look I can judge the quality of programming knowledge and software knowledge of the people by running an online test for lakhs of people and if that knowledge is adequate I can give them an employment I really do not need a degree if that starts happening and if that spreads then if there is no importance attached to our degrees by the employers and therefore as a consequence by the parents what will happen to our system fortunately this is not likely to happen very quickly because there are some shortcomings of on the MOOCs but as they are corrected there is a great disruption that may occur in the entire education process let me first mention the shortcomings first and foremost shortcoming is that MOOCs marks are not recognized by industry and by employers and by society at large therefore however as I mentioned this may start happening slowly the second is absence of face-to-face interaction perhaps I belong to the old school but I firmly believe that a lot of learning is helped when I interact with people whether it is my teacher in an outside the classroom or whether it is my colleague students or whether it is others it is the human interaction which actually forces my mind to work on some issues and problems and I learn from these interaction this is totally missing in MOOCs which is everything is online of course we have online discussion forums they are good they are helpful but when compared to the value of human interaction in my own opinion the online discussion forums are a poor substitute as of now for engineering education lack of laboratory work is a very major problem I call it elephant in the room nobody in the MOOCs community has looked at this problem and without appropriate labs I do not see how good technical education can be conducted to its companies these are the MOOCs that are offered from IIT Bombay IIT Bombay x dot n is our site we have started offering courses tailored for Indian students and in my blended MOOCs portion I will mention some very exciting experiment that we are doing now there are courses from NPTEL online courses they are being offered with some kind of a certification for which you have to pay a fees they conduct only one externally supervised examination and they are also going to run a large number of courses in coming years IIT Kanpur professor Prabhakar has led the effort on running MOOCs this year I believe they will be offering a large number of courses in agricultural engineering you must have heard of Swayam which is the national portal proposed for MOOCs the work is progressing and soon hopefully all of you will hear some announcements regarding what you need is internet bandwidth and affordable access devices in the hands of students most of our engineering colleges will have adequate computers in their labs many of our students have their own laptops and some who cannot afford high cost laptops can use affordable devices which professor Kannan and his team has designed but as I said using these devices and using the access to the internet actual course has to be done by students in order to learn something useful Kannan showed you Akash tablet here is a picture of an Akash tablet with an Arduino based Anudino board which contains which actually has a temperature sensor connected just to show that how experiments can be conducted using affordable devices these are not virtual experiments they are actual experiments that people could conduct on low cost devices you have already seen this network you are aware of the T10KT project under which you are doing this workshop suffice it to tell you that the and this kind of workshop is an important bearing on what I am going to talk about in the blended book so please look at just two important aspects one these workshops handle large number of people assembled at remote centers so we have established more than 350 remote centers across the country they are more in the pipeline once funds are released by the central government for the next phase the project will establish more remote center more importantly the modus operandi says that 35 40 50 100 teachers assembled at each of these remote centers simultaneously for a two week program as you have assembled the interactive lectures in the morning sessions typically are delivered from IIT Bombay or IIT Kharagpur which is our partner institution and there are tutorial sessions laboratory sessions as required which are conducted locally at each remote center now this 35 40 50 teachers assembled at a local center their activities locally are conducted and coordinated by a workshop coordinate one important question which was raised by a review committee very early in our project is how do you ensure that these tutorials and labs are conducted with the same rigor with which they are conducted in the IIT system so what we decided to do is to collect all these workshop coordinators physically bring them to IIT Bombay and interact with them for one week telling them the kind of lab that will conduct the kind of tutorials that will conduct and also understanding from them what topics they teach how is the emphasis given to different topics how the assessment and etc this interaction proves very useful after this interaction workshop coordinators go back to their respective remote centers spend about two months in setting of the lab tutorials or whatever whatever and that is how the workshops are conducted so in short this is a scene from the coordinators workshop this is a sample remote center just like where you are sitting today the blended books approach is nothing but trying to use a blend of conventional face-to-face education and learning through books please remember that even in our workshops we use online devices such as Moodle but the entire course is not run online here we are talking about a conventional face-to-face education that happens in your institutions and learning through MOOCs simultaneously jointly all together we propose to use MOOCs as a complement for the normal education that happens in your institution we propose that teachers in local colleges will start using flip classroom the model is simply like this take a course in thermodynamics which is one of the courses being offered for blended MOOCs it the MOOCs course is taught by three of my colleagues led by Professor Bandarkar, Professor Uday Gaito and Professor Millindathri let us say there are 50 institutions in the country which studies thermodynamics locally with one or two teachers at each place now imagine all these 50 70 teachers and these three teachers here form a team and they said now we will together offer a course which will be a unique course in that course the MOOCs part will be handled by IIT faculty all students in each of the 50 institutions will register for the MOOCs course simultaneously the local teachers will use their classroom engagement a for doing their normal teaching if they so wish for some topics but more importantly b they will say these certain topics I will not waste my time in giving you lectures these three stalwarts are giving the lectures listen to those lectures I will flip the classroom and we will use the classroom time for just plain discussion session problems all we have done that for many years was a Canon in fact has been doing it for five years and we have found scientifically that the engagement factor with students increases significantly in this model is a new thing and therefore there may be some hesitation there may be some misunderstanding so in order to ensure that participating teachers in this model are absolutely in sync with everything we propose to run three simultaneous teacher training workshops for the teachers who participate in this blended MOOCs thing. So this is an interesting experiment that we are planning to do we expect to improve the learning process significantly through this mechanism the main point is that the participating institutions will award weightage to both the internal score and assessment done in their own college and university and the marks scored through both this is the first attempt to make the MOOCs marks being recognized in the normal subjects that people study in their university and therefore I call this mainstreaming the MOOCs. So my humble thesis is instead of waiting for the MOOCs to independently disrupt our educational system why not adopt the good points of the MOOCs and try to evolve a better teaching learning environment which combines the face-to-face education complimented by the MOOCs. There are 45 plus institutions who are going to run this program jointly with IIT Bombay by the way these 45 institutions are all autonomous institutions or deemed to be universities selected from amongst our own remote centers of course we chose remote centers because we need to have a face-to-face interaction with all participating teachers every fortnight for each of the subjects we propose to start with these three subjects to begin with from this academic year and based on the learnings of the system we will see how to extend it. I am convinced that this might provide not only a marriage of massive open online courses with conventional teaching but it might provide a change for the better and together we might be able to achieve much better quality of teaching learning process. We expect about 30,000 plus students to benefit in the coming year from this pilot so that we can run it for may be 3 lakh students first and then for 3 crore students subsequent. I solicit comments and suggestions if any from any one of the participants and particularly from the remote centers incidentally on 6th of June we are meeting with heads of the institutions or their empowered representatives from those institutions which have agreed to factor MOOCs marks into their own course grades they will be coming here for a day long session on Saturday afternoon I have requested Professor Parsharthi all of you would have an interaction session with Professor Parsharthi I presume at 2.30 in the afternoon on Saturday. Thank you so much and all the best.