 The objective of telling you about this T 10 K T workshop is how technology is being effectively used to interact with a large number of learners. Here teachers are learners who are participating in this workshop and this interaction is face to face as well as local activities which is conducted in each remote center. Now, this gave us an idea of how we could extend the massive open online courses to our advantage by using that in combination with normal face to face teaching that happens in colleges. First let me tell you about the books phenomena. A massive open online course as the name suggests is actually a course which is to be done completely online why I cannot see them sorry. So, let it be there I would like to see it. Sorry for the disruption I was not able to see you now I can see you. So, therefore, I know that I am relating to live people there. So, speaking about the books phenomena a massive open online course is actually a course which is conducted completely online. There is absolutely no face to face interaction, but the course can be taken by people anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection. They register for the course enroll for the course just as you would enroll for a regular course in your university. Each course has a certain duration of 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks or whatever. During that period the learners undergo a systematic study of various topics typically organized week by week. For each topic there are some video lectures which the learners visualize see they can view those lectures. They can also view the material that is given typically as PDF files a large number of practice problems are given which they attempt online only. And finally, for each topic there is typically a quiz comprising several questions which results into grades or marks for that particular topics evaluation. All of this work is done online. The advantage is that instead of fixed duration lectures which individuals may not be free to attend here the entire material for the week is available and learners can study absolutely at their own pace. Somebody can study a particular lecture on Sunday night, somebody else can study on Tuesday. They can attempt practice problems exactly when they please. The quiz that is announced for every topic is typically announced at the end of the week and two full days are given so that participants can appear for that quiz at any time of their choice within those two days. This is how week by week the course progresses. Of course, the natural question is suppose I am a learner and I have some doubt what happens because there is no teacher that I can talk to. Extensive discussion forums are provided again online and any learner can raise a question by posting a question in the discussion forum. Now, at the back end the teacher and the team of teaching assistants who are running this massive open online course are constantly monitoring that discussion forum. So, whenever a question is raised in a short while it is answered by one of the TAs or the teacher himself or herself. There are occasions in largely attended courses where some students themselves answer the questions raised by others. In fact, the discussion forum is the equivalent of lively discussion that would happen in a actual classroom. The methodology is slightly different people have to get used to doing things online and people have to get used to weaving the lectures alone in their home or in their lab or whatever. Now, that takes some time for people to adjust, but the effect has been so phenomenal across the world that larger and larger number of learners are opting to learn certain topics and subjects from these MOOCs which are being offered by the best known teachers from the best known universities across the world. At the end of this course whenever I finish for example, if I am a learner from Mongolia or China. If I successfully pass all the evaluation as per the stipulated norm I will get a certificate which is called an honor course certificate. The reason it is called an honor course certificate is that unlike our regular examinations in universities which are strictly supervised by the teacher you know there are invigilators and there is a big paraphernalia of printing question papers and correcting answer books and so on. Nothing of that sort happens on online thing. I can give the quiz at any time of my choice and at my home. So, there is no control or supervision over individual learners who give their quizzes that is why the certificates given are called honor course certificate. Every learner is required to certify at the beginning that I will not cheat in any one of the exams and I will do my own efforts to answer all questions. Curiously we have found that by and large is hardly any occasion of cheating because the students know they are primarily trying to evaluate themselves assess themselves using this online mechanism. The MOOCs have been offered in the last three years increasingly. Let me tell you once again that online learning is not a new phenomena. For example, ever since computers came to the fore and started getting used in learning teaching activities you would have heard of tutoring systems online test, online material. The content for example, Wikipedia is the largest source of content available in open source. So, use of the technology for online learning teaching activities is not new, but they have now combined all of these into a very specific course being conducted just as we would study a subject in a regular semester in a university. Now, this is where it makes a difference that for such course teachers and teaching assistants are available at the back end to constantly interact with us and solve our problem. If you look at the Indian efforts here is the website which gives courses from IIT Bombay X as I said. We are running three or four MOOCs in the coming semester which I will describe shortly. There are similar efforts from NPTEL. Many of you would have heard of NPTEL which has more than 1000 courses available online which are either web based courses or video recording lectures. These are not regular courses which are conducted, but these are rather course content. What NPTEL has now done is it has started offering a MOOC kind of course for some of these courses which they had prepared earlier. This is also a great noteworthy effort. The third Indian effort is from IIT Kanpur. You can see Professor Prabhakar here who created the MOOC platform at IIT Kanpur and they are offering certain courses as massive open online courses. You might have heard of Swayam which is the name given to the national MOOCs platform. The work on Swayam is progressing and we should soon get a national platform for offering all such courses online for all our Indian students. In this context let me talk about the blended MOOCs approach. So, what do we mean by a blended MOOC? In a blended MOOCs approach, we wish to combine the face to face education and learning through MOOCs. How do we do that? Face to face education happens in our classrooms. Learning through MOOCs happens online. Well, our method of blending this is to say that normal MOOCs which run for 4 weeks to 6 weeks for the blended MOOC we will run a MOOC course, online course for the entire duration of the semester. So, suppose in this coming semester from July to December, some students in a college are studying course on thermodynamics. We are offering an online course on thermodynamics simultaneously such that those students in Amal Jyoti or Coimbatore or some place who are studying this subject as a regular university course for their own degree can benefit from this online course also. If we just left it at that, the advantages will not be as great as a very thoughtful purposeful design combination of these two approaches. And what is that combination? Well, the combination is that we would like to say that teachers who are teaching such courses in face to face mode should take advantage of the fact that their students are also simultaneously studying online. What kind of things can be done? Suppose I am a teacher in Coimbatore where I have 100 students who are studying thermodynamics and I am teaching them thermodynamics. The course on thermodynamics is also being offered by IIT Bombay by a team led by Professor Bandarkar, Gai Tonday and Professor Millindathri. That is the online course. What I will do is I will tell my students in Coimbatore, let us say I have 100 students. I will say look ordinarily I will teach this course in a normal fashion where I will give you lectures and you will give you exams and do assignments and so on. But here since you will also be studying online course simultaneously at least for some topic may be for majority of topic, I will simply not deliver any lectures at all. Why? Because the best teachers are available online and you should listen to their lectures. Now week by week as their lectures progress, I will do the following. On a certain topic I will say that in this week the only session that we shall have in the regular classroom are discussion session where we will solve problems and have discussion on the common issues faced by the students. Why it is called a flip classroom? This is a old term by the way. A flip normal classroom you have lectures and you ask your students to do their problem solving and homework at home. In a flip classroom students are advised to view lectures at home and come to the classroom to solve problems and do homework and do discussion. By the way the flip classroom has been used by many teachers across the world including several at IIT Bombay for last so many years. You do not require a MOOCs platform or a MOOCs course. What we have been doing many of our teachers here including me is that we would record our lectures and keep them available on the local server. And then week after week we will be only conducting flip classroom. In fact the CS 101 programming course which I taught with Professor Supratik and others actually did not have any lecture throughout the semester. Students were required to view the lectures in their respective free time in the hostel or wherever but come to the classroom for problem solving and discussion session. Most of the discussion session therefore were tutorial problem with extensive discussions and problem solving with the students. Our own experiences are not only mine but of several people who have conducted such flip classroom their experiences that the engagement with students increases significantly. Every student is required to participate in problem solving. Every student is required to make some observation or comment. We form small groups, discussion groups in every class and we will ask them to discuss the solutions which are prepared by individual students in 5 to 10 minutes after our announcing a problem. We did face some issues. For example, suppose the students do not view the lectures before coming to the class then they will not be able to benefit from the discussion session. What we do then is we conduct short quizzes in every class in every lecture hour. We conduct these quizzes to ascertain that the students have actually viewed those lectures. We would like the advantage the great advantage of such flip classroom to be made available to our students of other institutions and the blended books approach is one which permits us to do that. This effectively enhances the active learning by the students which is considered an extremely important part of modern teaching learning pedagogy. Sadly our conventional teaching is still lectures in a sermon like fashion with students occasionally solving problems at home. We know what happens. Many of our students may just copy their assignments and submit them. Many will study only just before the examination, but this approach of flip classroom forces all students to study regularly week by week by week. Now, I come back to the blended books approach. In the blended books approach, we are saying that as I gave an example, if I am a teacher in Coimbatore, I am going to tell my students that look you will study from both from me where I will be using the flip classroom. If not for all topics at least for some topics and you will be studying the lecture material which is delivered from let us say IIT Bombay extreme of teachers. You will solve both. You will solve online books quizzes which are given by the online course and you will also solve the quizzes, tests, exams which I will conduct. Most important, I announce that the final course grade that you will receive as student will be a combination of both regular tests and exams in the college and online assessment in more. You will notice that students generally think in an examination oriented fashion. There is nothing wrong with it because every student needs to maximize the grades and the marks that are scored because that is what ultimately will decide their opportunities for livelihood later and therefore, there is nothing wrong if students want to maximize their mark. However, if we just tell the student study the MOOC scores and if the exams online exams on the MOOC have no effect on their grade, many students may neglect the MOOC. On the other hand, suppose I tell my students in Coimbatore that you give online exams on the MOOC and whatever marks you get will be your grade in this course, then they will neglect me and my test and my local evaluation. That is the reason why in this blended MOOCs, we are suggesting that the final course grade for a subject will come as a combination of both the regular test exams in the college and online assessment in MOOC that is online. This kind of pilot to the best of my knowledge has not been tried anywhere in the world except for local institutions. For example, when I use a blended MOOC for my own students in my own college, I am the teacher who has created the online course, I am also the teacher who is teaching. This model is different because a large number of institutions can jointly participate. I am very happy to announce that over 40 or 50 autonomous institutions across the country which are our remote centers like Amal Jyoti college, but which are autonomous institutions have agreed to join in a global first pilot in the blended MOOC. Our massive open online courses in three subjects will roll out from 16th of July. They are available to every learner including students in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, in Punjab, anywhere in the country. They can all register for this course, but students of these 50 institutions have a special privilege. The teachers from these 50 autonomous institutions will announce to their students that look, we will be studying a blended MOOC course. I will be teaching you largely in a flip classroom scenario. I will be conducting some evaluations and assessment, but you will also be studying the online course and as I mentioned earlier, your final grade for the course will come as a combination of the online course as well as the evaluation that I do in my face to face teaching. This is a very exciting experiment. We believe that students will not only benefit, but they will be attentive to both the online portion as well as face to face portion. This enhances the autonomy of a teacher also because a teacher locally can decide what percentage weight is to be given to online test and what percentage weight is to be given to local test and exam which I conduct in my own university. I am very excited about it. We are all excited at IIT Bombay. As I said, we are starting with three courses and we will be able to comment on the effectiveness of this entire effort in about three to four months time as the coming semester enrolls. That is all I wanted to share. I am sorry, I started late, but if there are any questions or observations, I would be very glad to have those. Good afternoon sir. Good afternoon, this is Dr. Janardhan from Nitter, Chennai. Good afternoon sir. Happy to meet you. Sir, this is regarding MOOC for Autonomous Institution. How far this can be doubted to Affiliating Type Institution? Because the university plays an important role or can we replace the internal assessment for the mark which we can have it to you and remaining 80 percentage mark for the Affiliated University? It is a very interesting observation that you make. A similar observation was made by one Dr. Vithal Kama in one of our teacher training workshop when he had made a similar suggestion to the assembly of all affiliated colleges affiliated to Gujarat Technical University, where he had said that even a normal college which does not have freedom to decide on the exam, they are all required to assess the students locally for something like 20 marks and the university conduct exam for 80 marks. So, what is the problem if the colleges decide that these 20 marks will come from the MOOCs offering? And if I recall correctly, the vice chancellor of Gujarat Technical University had said this would be perfectly fine. However, this is a matter to be decided by the respective affiliated colleges and their universities. IIT Bombay can only make an offering, but you give me a very interesting idea because the MOOCs courses are going to be offered to all the students in the country. These will include students from affiliating colleges also. Now, I will tell you what we are making available to the teachers of the participating colleges in the blended MOOCs. So, if I am a teacher in Coimbatore, initially I will supply to IIT Bombay the list of 100 students whom I am teaching here. And what IIT Bombay will make available to him on a regular basis is a dashboard in which the teacher can keep looking at the online marks of these 100 students as the weak spark. These are made available as downloadable files and then I as a teacher in Coimbatore can decide at the end what percentage of marks and marks of which online quizzes I should consider for my merging with the assessment. Similarly, what you say it can be made possible, maybe let me think about it is an excellent suggestion. So, I would write we are going to announce these to all the 80,000 teachers with whom we have interacted in the past several years just making an announcement that these MOOCs are available. I will think of writing an additional later to them saying that if those teachers want to independently try and use the online assessment for equivalent of their local marks, they should be free to do so. And we will be glad to supply them the marks of the students, their students who attend the online courses there is no problem. Second observation sir, in the case of NBA graduate attributes, one of the graduate attributes for both undergraduate and post graduate is lifelong learning. Are these MOOCs can be a supplement for continuing education units in terms of modular basis, how we can give some certification where some CU points I can have it so that my lifelong learning credit can be earned easily through MOOCs. So, that is a slightly different question currently as I said we are we are focusing on merging the conventional learning teaching that happens in our regular universities with the online learning. But what you say is not only possible, but it is actually happening. For example, there is one short duration MOOC that we are offering which is a skill based course on blender animation. Now, the certification that students will receive will be honor course certificate and the learner need not at all be a student of a college. The learner can be a professional, learner can be a school kid. Now, those credits that the learner accumulates the question is of the recognition towards their lifelong learning. Now, the recognition process will have to be set up separately and independently. All that we can do is keep offering such short duration MOOCs courses on specific concepts and maybe link those through a variety of related courses such that a specific topic or something is probably well covered. It is a good thought, but we have not yet made we have not done much thinking on on the lines of lifelong learning. Thank you sir. And we have more questions. So, the session was very informative on behalf of Amal Jyoti College of Engineering and Aspire 2015. We would like to express our gratitude for accepting our invitation and delivering an informative session on blended MOOCs through EDX for millions of Indian students. Thank you sir. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. In fact, I must confess that I am so impressed with the activities of the Amal Jyoti College that I have been dying to visit that college personally. Somehow it has not been possible so far, but I will do that one of these days probably in the coming semester or in the semester from January to April. Thank you so much. Over and out. Thank you sir.