 So, welcome to the next session where I am going to talk about use of technology in the general education process and how things have been rapidly changing in the last few years. Let us begin with how the educational system has evolved, I am talking about the formal education system. So, in the formal education system the main component is a classroom, the typical technology used in the classroom traditionally has been a blackboard and chalks. The traditional mode of education is lectures to a group of students. All of us continue to use this general model although the blackboard and chalks have been replaced to quite some extent, first by whiteboards and then by computer presentations such as powerpoint and more recently by presentations through video lectures and I am not talking about video lectures which are delivered across the network which is one part of delivering the lectures. In fact, you are all able to see me and listen to me because of the audio video transmission capabilities supported by tools such as AVU that we use for our interaction. But more importantly, the technology also permits us to use pre-recorded lectures. This entire description relates to what we call the delivery of content. So I am a teacher, I have a few pieces of knowledge to share with students. I want students to understand that knowledge and the traditional way in which I expect the students to understand that knowledge is to deliver a lecture, hope that students listen to it, think about it carefully and learn whatever I am trying to teach. In short, the formal mechanisms provided so far including those which have evolved with technology all center around a better and more effective delivery of the content by the teacher. Unfortunately, this does not necessarily translate into better learning by students always. We will note two points then and these two points have stuck with us all through the formal education system evolution. One is the emphasis on delivery of content and the second thing is teaching is central not learning. Does it mean that our students do not learn? Absolutely not, they of course they learn. But the point is that in our educational process, learning by them has not been the central theme which has decided on the structure of teaching learning process. The structure of teaching learning process is still teacher centric and is primarily based on making the delivery of content more and more effective. Does it mean that we completely disregard learning? No. How does learning happen in the minds of students? The learning happens when every individual student applies his or her mind to whatever content that are being delivered by the teacher, applies those concepts, first understand those concepts and then applies those concepts in solving problems on one so on. Invariably the process of learning therefore happens in the following fashion. The first and foremost is listening to the lecture. So let us look at the learning process. The learning process comprises of listen. Oftentimes it would mean read because at home the student would be reading a book. In the classroom the student would be listening to us. The listening and reading both can now be more effectively done through digital media. The quick example is the video lecture that I just mentioned including video recorded lectures as well as e-books which have now become very fashionable and useful. So the learning, the first part of learning which is listen or read is taken care of fairly well by the expanding technology. But the more important components of learning follow after this is understanding. After that is applying the understanding to solve problems. The traditional mechanism which a teacher has to ensure that the students who listen to us or who read books actually understand and actually learn to apply that understanding to solve problems. The mechanisms available to us are by provoking the students by asking them questions a in the classroom, by giving them problems to solve which we expect them to solve at home and by evaluating both their understanding and their ability to solve problems by conducting examinations, quizzes, tests and so on. So our approach to ensure that the learning is happening is mainly through question answer and through assessment. As Professor Ranade said there are also opportunities in several subjects such as computer programming to offer what we call course projects. Indeed we have found consistently that it is the course projects typically a team project which brings out the best creativity among the participant because the problem is new and large quite often open ended, they are initially baffled but that is how they learn to approach a more difficult problem and attempt to solve it. While that aids their learning our knowledge of how much they have learned is based entirely on the assessment. The assessment methods have also started using technology for quite some time. The traditional assessment method is that people are given answer books, examinations are conducted for fixed times and people answer the test papers that are given to them. Unfortunately this assessment has become very stereotyped over the years. The main objective of assessment is not merely to understand how much the students have learned but also to help them learn more. In fact most of us in IIT system believe that every assessment itself must be a learning experience. To make every assessment into a learning experience the assessment must be combined with the normal course of interaction between student and teacher. Ideally therefore just as we ask questions in a classroom and maybe a few students answer them we would like to conduct a quiz session every 15 minutes in the class where we would like to typically teach a concept, conduct the quiz immediately, find out whether 60, 70 students whether they have understood that concept or not. Without the use of technology such an approach is infeasible because I may conduct a quiz in 5 minutes but to evaluate that quiz for 60 students will take me 1 hour or 2 hours which I cannot do in real time. However the technology such as online tests which can be conducted on a desktop in your labs or in classroom tests which can be conducted by using devices such as clickers make it possible now for the assessment also to be made a part of the learning experience. The question answer sessions which are important because when a student asks a question or when a teacher asks a question and student responds to that question this dialogue might happen only between two individuals but the entire class benefits from that dialogue. Technology now permits this kind of dialogue process to be scaled up significantly. One example is this simulated classroom of this workshop itself where about 8,500 participants are sitting in 270 places and yet when somebody from Shastra University asked the question to Professor Ranade and when Professor Ranade answered that question both the question and answer could be heard and the person asking the question and the person answering the question could be seen by all participants at all 270 remote centers. The feeling that the technology is helping us to create is as if all of us are sitting in one gigantic classroom. So, you will notice that not only the technology has evolved to help us enlarge the scope to help us enhance the quality of interaction and the frequency of interaction with people and the technology is helping us to conduct meaningful assessments with greater frequency such that they do not remain only a mechanism to evaluate a student to give some marks at the end of the course but they become a mechanism or a part of the learning process itself. There are other aspects of technology which have evolved to help us significantly in the conduct of any educational program. So, let me speak about some back end technologies now. The back end technologies are those which help us to manage our educational processes better. Some of these systems have specific names depending upon what component of the activity of the educational process these technologies handle. Let me begin with what is known as LMS or a learning management system. All of you have been using Moodle for interaction with me over the past 4 weeks. Moodle is a learning management system. I do not know whether all your institutions use some such learning management system or not. The feedback that I got is that only a small percentage of colleges effectively use learning management system for all their courses. 10 years ago the same thing was true with IIT Bombay as well. Although we had online registration and online printing of attendance sheets etc., but in true manifestation the advantage of the common back end systems or technologies became clear to us when over the last 10 years LMS has been completely adopted for running all our courses. All our courses. It is important to repeat that there is no course in IIT which runs without beginning the course registration on Moodle and continuing with the Moodle usage throughout the semester for teaching of that course. Every teacher now allocates assignments on the Moodle. All students submit all their assignments online including the handwritten assignments which are actually scanned and uploaded just as many of you have been doing. All of you have done it in the context of this particular workshop. My humble request to you is to go back and look at the tremendous advantages, the simplification of the procedures and the standardization of the procedures that obtains by use extensive use of a learning management system as a common system for all teaching learning activities in your institution. As I said in IIT there are typically over 200 to 250 courses or subjects which are taught every semester. For each subject there is a Moodle entry. The students who register for say 6 subjects they will see only those 6 subjects on their interface. A teacher who is teaching 2 subjects will see only those 2 subjects and all the students who are registered for that particular subject. One of the things that I would like you to do in the afternoon session is that go over to the Moodle. You might have used the Moodle only for uploading your assignments or only to get notifications for the assignment. I would like you to explore the Moodle, discuss this exploration among your own colleague participants who are at your place and I would like you to spend as much as 10 to 15 minutes just doing this. So one of the lab exercises that I expect you to do in the afternoon is explore Moodle. For example we have made groups of participants based on which remote center they are attending the workshop at. When you go to the Moodle interface and click on the participants the main list comes out will contain all 8600 names. Actually it contains more than 9000 names that is because when we say all it includes not only participants who of course are being treated with a slightly different nomenclature they are all being called students because that is the term Moodle uses for participants of the course. In addition to the students we have teaching associates or TAs. We have non-editing teachers for example every workshop coordinator and every remote center coordinator is a non-editing teacher participating in this workshop. There are as many as 500 odd people 500 odd people of that kind. Together they form the total list of participants. But on the Moodle in the participants page if you go at the top and instead of all you select a particular remote center name which incidentally represents the name of a group you will suddenly find that you will be able to see only those participants which are located or which are part of that group which means who are located at that particular remote center. This facility of creating groups the facility to announce assignments the facility to collect assignments the facility to monitor how different groups are doing in terms of their submissions in terms of the quality of their work etcetera etcetera this monitoring facility is an extraordinary facility for a teacher. This facility is also an extraordinary facility for the student who does not depend upon the traditional notice boards for example for announcement of the quiz schedule or a test schedule or an exam schedule. The student does not depend on a printed paper to be circulated in order to understand what the next assignment is. It is delivered electronically to the student's place of access be it the laboratory, be it the hostel room or home where the student has access to the Moodle through a laptop or a desktop. What I mean to say is that the availability of such backend systems is what makes the technological advances far more meaningful for the educational process. If you had internet that is one thing, if you had connectivity between you wherever you are and the teacher that is another thing but how to exploit that connectivity well depends upon the availability of a large number of such backend systems. Just as you have seen that the AVU application permits us to interact with each other in an audio visual fashion live. Similarly the backend systems such as learning management systems permit us to interact with each other on a continuous basis throughout the engagement during a semester for a subject. It is vital therefore that our institutions adopt these systems as quickly as possible and both students and teachers become very familiar and adapt at using these backend systems. There is another type of technology which I briefly mentioned and which is used in quick and regular assessments is a technology which is centered around clicker. Clicker is a device which is used for conducting polls in a classroom. I think the best example of the clicker which all of you would be familiar with is the favorite TV program of yesterday's called Kornbanega Karodapati. I think all of you would have seen that and when the great Amitabh Bachchan conducts an opinion poll of the audience, he asked the audience to press a button in response to a question which he raises. The question has four possible answers A, B, C or D and depending upon what button the audience members press that answer gets recorded. Within one minute great Mr. Bachchan is able to immediately show that out of whatever hundred audience members 68 have answered B, 24 have answered C and so on. Now this facility is not just relevant for conducting audience poll. This facility has been used for almost a decade in many, starting with many high schools and junior colleges in United States. This has been used in many classrooms for actually conducting online quizzes. IIT Bombay got wind of this particular technology when we decided to design and develop such clicker systems. We started that design several years ago. We actually designed affordable clickers costing about 600 rupees. We developed, we actually manufactured or got manufactured about 1000 devices and used them extensively in our classrooms. Two years ago when we started doing the Akash project, we decided that since the Akash tablet was relatively inexpensive and the application of clicker can be ported on Akash that is what we have done. In IIT Bombay wherever students have been given Akash tablets for their use, whenever they go to the classroom teachers invariably conduct regular quizzes using the Akash tablet. So instead of a clicker device like in Amitabh Bachchan's great program, each student actually has an Akash device which is connected on Wi-Fi to the local server. The teacher raises a quiz. The quiz is seen on the screen. The students get that quiz downloaded onto their clicker device or clicker application on Akash. They get their 1 minute, 2 minutes or whatever is the stipulated time. They answer the quiz and the teacher immediately gets the feedback. What is the importance of getting this instance feedback from the students or any teacher? Well it should be obvious to most of us. Ordinarily when I teach a concept, I assume that people have understood it. Whether they have understood it or not will be known to me only when 1 week or 2 weeks or 3 weeks later I conduct a test and examination and ask let us say one question on that concept. Afterwards when I check the answers then I may know if all the students have answered that question correctly then people have understood that concept. If they have not then probably they have not understood that concept. If they have not understood that concept what do I do typically in the form of post examination analysis when I discuss the solutions I will explain that solution with greater care perhaps taking one more exam. However please understand that that will happen about 3 to 4 weeks after the concept has been discussed. How many students do you think will still recall with the same clarity what you had explained 4 weeks ago? Very difficult. Consider now that you have these aakash tablets or clicker devices or clicker application running on aakash tablets in the hands of all students. Immediately after teaching a concept and explaining through an example you conduct a quiz or even one or two questions related to that concept. Students will answer instantly and within 2 minutes you will get to know what the students have answered. Now imagine if I get to know within 2 minutes of my explanation that a majority of my students have not understood that concept it gives me a chance to think of an additional example and explain that concept with greater clarity while the entire concept is fresh in their mind. Don't you agree that the students have a much greater chance of embedding the better understanding of that concept in this fashion than getting a feedback 4 weeks later. Now this is where the technology is useful. However the existence of technology and availability of technology alone will not guarantee that what I just said will happen. For that to happen you have to be able to conduct quizzes in your classroom every time you explain a concept. Not only the students have to have the aakash tablets or the clicker devices with them all the time which is what by the way is definitely going to happen for all students in the world whether it will happen in 5 years time, 10 years time or 20 years time is a matter of detail. In developed countries it has started happening. Now in our societies we wish that it happens as quickly as possible. We have started this experiment with the clicker application on aakash. Why I stressed it so much is that each of our remote centers barring a few is also our aakash project center. Each of the remote centers has been given sufficient number of tablets they will be used during the year by their students for developing other applications and content and so on. But whenever a workshop is conducted those aakash tablets are to be made available to participants. My colleagues who work on the clicker application tell me that the latest version of the application has been informed to all the remote centers and most of the remote centers through testing have confirmed that their aakash tablets are ready to be used for conducting such quizzes. I am taking this opportunity to inform all the coordinators to ensure that the aakash tablets are distributed to all participants today itself during the lab hours. The participants should ensure that the aakash tablets are fully charged and that when they come tomorrow and attend tomorrow's session, Professor Sridharayar is going to demonstrate the use of clicker application for conducting online quizzes. I will clarify one more thing you may be wondering because the example that I gave is that in a single classroom I will have my students holding the aakash tablets and I will be displaying a quiz which they will be answering. How can I do that synchronously with 8,900 participants across 270 remote centers? We have actually developed an innovative add-on to this clicker application which is called the distributed clicker application. In fact, it was a good amount of research done. Initial implementation by the way was done by some smart summer interns, students from colleges such as yours. Of course, the whole exercise was coordinated and designed by my clicker team led by Rajesh Khushalkar. There have been several MTech students who have also contributed. The distributed application works in the following fashion. I display the quiz on the screen. It is possible simultaneously for that quiz to be loaded on the server and automatically be described and synchronized with the corresponding servers at each of the remote centers. However, very often we conduct a quiz which need not be downloaded into your aakash tablets, but the aakash tablets are equipped to give generic answers. Only a quiz number will appear and you may be able to answer A, B, C, D or E depending on whatever choice you select. The choices themselves and the question is often displayed on the screen. So, let us see one technology namely internet-based delivery of the lecture audio video is being used to convey the quiz to all 8000 participants. Now, these participants will respond to the quiz from their clicker device, from their clicker application on the aakash tablet. Very clearly, the radio unit of your aakash tablet cannot emanate strong enough radio waves to reach all the way to IIT Bombay. So, every remote center is equipped with Wi-Fi access points to which your tablets will locally connect. So, 30 participants in one center or 50 participants in another center will answer the quiz in their remote center. The quiz answers will be collected by the local server. Once this collection is done, the entire collected answers will be transferred using a file transfer protocol to IIT Bombay. When this happens for all 270 remote centers, the teacher at IIT Bombay will be able to access the responses from all 8500. You might think that it will take too long. No, fortunately transfers happen at electronic speed. Our experience has been that within about two minutes of completion of the conduct of quiz, the responses from all 200 or 300 remote centers get collected. As a result, the teacher here is not only able to see, but is able to show to all participants what has been the response. And now you can see that if the response is on the wrong answer side, the teacher has an immediate opportunity to use something like this whiteboard which I am using here to explain the same concept with greater clarity using additional examples. Please understand that these mechanisms help ensuring better learning by the students. Better delivery has been already guaranteed and whatever technology is available, it will be used by the teacher. But there is a difference between better delivery and better learn. Better delivery is important. It is necessary but not sufficient. Better learning requires several things, one of which is the quick regular assessment to get a feedback. There are several other important elements of better learning, all of which are going to be discussed tomorrow by Professor Sridhar Ayer. In very, very important four sessions on pedagogy, I noticed that in the beginning today not all participants were present at all the remote centers. We are monitoring the remote centers through a video tool so we could see that the number of registered participants are actually quite a few at some remote centers. But the number of participants actually attending the sessions were few. Of course, we will know that by the attendance which will be taken and submitted by the workshop coordinators every day. But the point I am making is that not only tomorrow's sessions but all the sessions of this workshop I believe are very, very important and relevant. Each one of us should try to pick up as much as is possible and then use it subsequently in one's own teaching learning process once called. But specifically I would like to request that tomorrow's four sessions are very critical to the method of teaching. Professor Sridhar Ayer, as I mentioned, is going to actually shape the four sessions in the specific context of computer programming so they would be very valuable. The clicker device therefore is an important component of enhancing the learning experience of the students. There are many such technologies that are emerging which not only enhance the effectiveness of teaching learning process but which also help us enhance the scale. The distributed clicker application mechanism that I just mentioned permits me to enhance the scale. Instead of applying it only to 60 students or 100 students in a classroom, I can apply to 8000 students at 300 places. You will notice that the logic is so simple and straightforward that I can extend it to 1 lakh students across 500 or 600 remote centers. Eventually I can send it to 1 million participants existing at thousands of centers. As long as I have very good internet bandwidth I will still be able to collect the entire feedback of 1 million students in 2 or 3 minutes at most because the servers are becoming more powerful. The internet bandwidth is becoming better. What it means is that the possibility of some of the well-known teachers amongst us being able to address very large number of learners effectively as if they are teaching a set of 100 students in their own classroom. This possibility has suddenly become a great practical possibility. The last I would mention is the onslaught of massive open online courses. The MOOCs you are all familiar with. I am assuming that you have read about the MOOCs as was required in one of the weeks assignment. I notice that not all of you have submitted the feedback. I would encourage all participants to complete that work and understand MOOCs better. Very briefly, the massive open online courses are actually meant for direct delivery of courses by expert teachers to the learners without any intermediate requirement of colleges, other teachers, technical staff, administrative staff, et cetera, et cetera. I have already described the shortcomings of this massive courses delivered online and I have recommended a blended model. Now notice that if the blended model has to be used, the blended model requires a significant empowerment of teachers because they will be participating in the tutorial discussions, in the problem solving discussions at the local centers when some well-known experts from the top universities are delivering courses. In a curious way, the workshop that is being conducted is actually a curtain razor to a blended MOOCs course. Look at what is happening here. People like Professor Abhiram Nanade or Seetha Raiyer who has spent decades of research and teaching expertise on a subject are able to address 8400 teachers, but these 8400 teachers would not benefit as much from these lectures if the entire interaction was online only. They will benefit because there are an important intermediate component called the workshop coordinators and the workshop colleges who are ensuring that whatever expertise that Professor Nanade and Professor Raiyer and I have actually is translated to better learning by all 8000 people because the conduct of local discussion, the conduct of local labs, the coordination among various teams, all of that is being accomplished through these experts whom we today call workshop coordinators. By extending, the blended MOOCs will merely say that tomorrow if Professor Abhiram Nanade teaches computer programming to a million students then all these 8000 teachers would be such important intermediaries in extending Professor Abhiram Nanade's reach by conducting discussion sessions, problem solving sessions and tutorial sessions. I will close this session a bit early because as I mentioned we have an extremely important visitor today. I would like to welcome Professor Khincha. Welcome sir. For those of you who do not know Professor Khincha, let me introduce him. He is a well known professor. Of course his expertise is not in computer programming, so rest assured that he will not give you a talk on computer programming. He is the national renowned expert on power systems. He is also a very passionate person about the educational processes, works on various government committees related to education. I have had the privilege of working very closely with him on two committees. The most recent being the SEADAC committee sir. You are familiar with the fact that these T10KT workshops are conducted under national mission. What you may not know is that there is a standing committee of the national mission which examines all project proposals, gives important feedback and supervises the project execution. Well, the chairman of that standing committee is none other than Professor Khincha. He has of course come here for a different purpose, for a different academic purpose. He is interacting with Professor Kannan whom you briefly met today morning. I am so happy to have him here. What I would like to do is request him to share some of his thoughts very briefly in 5 to 7 minutes and then before we close for the lunch I would like him to see face-to-face interaction with some of the participants at one or two remote centers. This is something new I am doing. This is the first time I am doing this and let me say my greetings to all of you wherever you are at this point of time. Professor Patak said that speak for 5 or 7 minutes on what is on this particular subject of technology in education. I don't think I will bore you with that but what I will do is that should tell one or two points that come to mind. Before that I should mention that you are part of an experiment that is being done in the country and you are in good hands of Professor Patak and his team as the leader of that particular experiment and I am sure directly indirectly at this point of time or in the future the benefit that you will get from these programs that you are participating at this point of time will dawn upon you and you will feel that there was something different that happened to me by attending this type of programs. Future of education is talked about in different ways. People talk about that the future of education especially higher education is going to change and we need to introduce change. People talk about introducing change in different ways. Maybe people say that we should have more technology in the education processes. People say that we should do away with teachers and then have only the technology doing the education. People say that we should have more multi-disciplinarity in the courses and then do that type of courses. People have different ideas on what the future of higher education could be. One thing is for sure that you will not be able to escape technology in education in the future. That is for sure. Whatever way that you take technology in education is going to be there and it is for teachers who want to keep their jobs to be abreast of the technology and to be abreast of the subject matter which this technology brings to you. I think that is a must for the keeping up the job profiles of professors. When I was vice chancellor of VTU, to whichever college I used to go, I used to ask the faculty in that particular college that are you afraid of losing your job and if you're afraid of losing your job are you doing something to keep your jobs aside. The era of one set of notes working for 30 years are gone now and I hope that and I wish that every teacher who is taking part in this program and others also keep this point of view in mind and then try to pick up new things, pick up new methodologies of learning teaching experiences and pick up the new ways in which the world will be seen, the world of higher education will be seen in the future. Thank you very much. All the best to you. Thank you very much sir but I will now just go over to some center randomly. We have an IT Kurukshetra here. Would you like to make some observations sir over to you. To improve the quality of education among the students, the technology should also be well equipped with students at the graduation or in the school level itself. I think this is an issue we are already looking at, tell you very frankly, to provide facilitation at the center or at the colleges to make this a little bit more effective. I think the mission is already looking at this and maybe you will see some results in the near future. This Coimture Institute, yes we can see all of you smiling. So over to you for any observation and comment please. About simple CPP sir, can I ask, yeah please go ahead. Actually the graphical oriented presentation or explanation about computer programming is not suitable for computers and students. This is my way of thinking sir. Actually this is suitable for only a mechanical engineering student in related with computer aided design towards late programming. This is suitable for that kind of programming. In computer programming perspective, in CSC students perspective it is not suitable. I think how do you feel about this sir? Yes, I will answer this question in two different ways. First of all, the experiment by Professor Ranade in developing this simple CPP package and teaching CS101 here, we have found that the learning of all students, including all our computer science students, has been much better than in the previous offerings. This has been statistically observed. Please do not forget that just as you have very good students in computer science, top 75 students of the top 100 of the joint interest exam come to IIT Bombay and majority of them come to computer science. So if they have learned better that means the technique has some sense. Second and more important point, you are perfectly right in feeling that that is probably not the best way. In fact, the beauty of teaching learning process is that each individual teacher goes with one's own feeling. But as long as one has the conviction after a lot of experiments and the courage of convictions, it is perfectly all right for you to teach that subject differently. I will guarantee that if you teach it with the same passion and clarity, your students will become as good programmers as my students because of the second principle which I learned about 40 years ago when I was a young teacher. This principle has two rules. Rule number one, if there are M teachers teaching programming, that there are N opinions on how programming should be taught and N is often greater than M because the same teacher has different opinions at different times. The second rule is irrespective of who and how teachers programming, the students learn programming not necessarily because of the teacher but independent of him or her and sometimes in spite of him or her. Now, this is not a very glorifying thing. But what I'm telling you is please believe in the creativity of human minds whom you get in the 60, 100 numbers in your college and please believe in the creativity of your own mind. Do not go by set patterns or set rules which somebody else has said. Explore and find out the beauty in every subject. I think that is the answer that I would like to give at this stage. But let me profusely thank Professor Kinsher. Thank you so much, sir. Thank you so much. Over and out.