 Good morning. I am Deepak Phatit, the principal investigator of the T-10KT project under which we try to empower 10,000 teachers at a time in a chosen subject. Usually, the job of giving the inaugural address is done by my colleague and the overall national mission coordinator at IIT Bombay, Prasad Karnan Mawgaly. But as I speak to you, he is flying out to U.S. somewhere and therefore, it is my privilege to interact with you briefly in this inaugural session. To begin with, let me welcome the faculty in charge of this workshop, Prasad Kameshwari Chabrol. Welcome, Kameshwari. Thank you very much for joining us. I would like to take this opportunity first to tell you some of the achievements of Prasad Kameshwari and then I will come to the general discussion on teaching and learning. She is one of our youngest colleagues, not youngest anymore because there are so many younger people who have joined recently. We are privileged to have actually two of them because of her. She herself and her husband, Prasad Bhaskar Raman, both are accomplished academicians. She has the distinction of having won the Excellence in Teaching Award of IIT Bombay. For those of you who are not aware of this award, it is a very rare award given just to one or two teachers every year and it is entirely based on the feedback by the students on the effectiveness of the course taught by the teacher. She is also keenly interested in spreading education. As you can see, she volunteered readily to address over 8,000 participants who are interested in learning more about networking. But more importantly, she has successfully tried the flip classroom model in her courses that were offered here, found that the model results in more effective learning by the students and embarked on preparing a large software platform for offering such courses in blended mode. Platform is called Bodhi Tree. You may be aware that IIT Bombay will be offering massive open online courses shortly through a partnership with EDX which is a consortium of global universities. Simultaneously, Government of India is proposing to develop and launch an Indian MOOCs platform for all dimensions of education in India for Indian students. We have been charged with the responsibility of early development of such platform. While we will be working largely with the open EDX architecture, it is a privilege to have the Bodhi Tree development and we shall be incorporating all the important features of Bodhi Tree which permit easier execution of blended model of MOOCs or the flip classroom model of teaching in learning. So thank you, Kamishwari, for joining us. Thank you for taking the trouble. I can only tell you that she has hardly slept over last several months both preparing for this course and enhancing the scope of Bodhi Tree. Let me spend a few minutes on the general issue of teaching and learning. All the colleague teachers who are attending this workshop are privileged in some sense because you are all teaching in engineering, stroke science colleges or technical colleges. As you know, there is a very heavy demand for the courses that we all offer and only the select few students get into engineering. Even then the number of students joining engineering undergraduate programs in all of 5000 colleges in the country is about 1.25 million per year. This might appear to be a large number, it is certainly large as compared to many other countries but you must recognize the fact that this 1.25 million or 12.5 lakh students joining per year an engineering course is merely a small number of the total number of students who join higher education in the country. Approximately 1.25 crore students are in the higher education sector in the country today. This number has been achieved after almost 65 years of independence with lot of efforts, large number of colleges and universities coming up and so on and yet our cross enrollment ratio is a pathetic low as compared to global standards. For a nation on the march with intention to quickly join the quality of the developed nations we need to increase this enrollment due to greater emphasis on education that continues to be insisted upon by the society and by the government. It is expected that by 2022 the total number of Indian students participating in higher education of one kind or the other will increase to 5 crore. You can imagine 1.25 crores in 65 years to go to 5 crores in just next 8 years. Doesn't it appear impossible? Well, if we continue to pursue a linear growth that is what would be the fate. Very obviously we need to use technology to the hilt to ensure that a very good quality education is imparted to an exponentially increasing number of aspiring students. Please appreciate that for a country of 125 crores the total number of capable people amongst our youth is very very large even though the percentage might be same as any other global percentage. It is to them that we owe a great responsibility and it is towards that end that all efforts such as this and the subsequent efforts of popularizing massive open online courses, the blended model, the flip classroom etc etc are being undertaken by the country. IIT Bombay is very happy and proud to be a part of this national initiative under which this T10KT project is but one small contribution. I would like to speak a little on some very basic teaching learning processes. All of your teachers, so some of you will perhaps think that what I am speaking is elementary but there are times when we tend to forget some very elementary principles in our hustle bustle and anxiety to know larger amount of technical details and are enundated by those forgetting these basic principles as I said. So let me relook at what does effective teaching learning depend upon. I am speaking from a teacher's perspective. First as a teacher I must have the necessary knowledge. I must have that knowledge well grained into my mind. I must understand how to apply that knowledge. I must be able to solve technical problems using that knowledge. To achieve that competence I would have studied in my undergraduate degree. I might have done a masters where I would have studied a bit more or I might even have done a PhD. Considering a large number of our teachers did not get an opportunity A to properly do their undergraduate training in a well groomed fashion because they had to go to colleges which themselves were not well equipped. B many of our colleagues like you did not have an opportunity to do their masters or those who did did not possibly get admission or get an opportunity to study at more established and better known places. Consequently the knowledge that you have acquired is perhaps not equivalent to the best in the world although there is no lack of desire on your path to achieve that knowledge. Now these are circumstances. These are circumstances. These are environments. There is another aspect of us teachers. There would be many teachers among us for whom the academic profession was probably not the first choice. That is perfectly fine. After all so many students whose first choice is an admission to IIT Bombay Vitaic program do not get that admission but they are good. They go elsewhere, do their engineering or some other course and succeed in life. So there is no problem if you did not get the first choice of your job. You might have joined the profession reluctantly but the fact is you are a teacher today and therefore you are expected to work in that profession as diligently as you would have worked in any other profession. As I said your aspirations may have been varied but today you are a teacher and it is the teacher's job that the nation and the society expects you to perform. There is an additional dimension other than just your knowledge and your aspirations to teaching and learning and that is teaching pedagogy or teaching methodology. Classically teaching is considered equivalent to a preparing and delivering lectures regularly throughout the semester as per the assigned timetable. Be conducting test quizzes and examinations and evaluating the students and see in the process ensure that through limited interaction that is possible in the left over time we interact with students individually and severely to answer their questions, answer their doubts in the process and reaching them. This is the classical model which has been followed for centuries. However there are new methods that are emerging some which have emerged over the past few years. There is a course on teaching pedagogy when technology is heavily used because offered by two of my colleagues Professor Sridhar Iyer and Professor Sanna Murthy as an experiment to the QEEEE teachers recently. A similar course was offered earlier by them. The course contents after editing will soon be released in open source. Before the end of this workshop I will let you know the site on which these lectures will be housed. I urge you to go back and view some of these and try to see if you could incorporate some of the established practices which are new to many of you but which are known to have been very effective for the teaching learning process. The third component I spoke about as teachers our knowledge and our aspirations. I spoke about the teaching pedagogy or methodology that we ought to adopt for teaching effectively but the third and most important thing is the impact on the actual learning by the students. Please realize that all of us spend quite a significant amount of time in bettering our knowledge such as through processes like this workshop. We spend quite a bit of time in ensuring that we follow the correct methodology whatever is the established methodology of lectures, assessment tutorials and so on. But the third one measuring the impact or measuring the effectiveness of learning by individual students and groups of students is sadly left only to the assessment marks that are obtained by the students. If a large number of students pass our examination with distinction we presume that they have learned effectively. If several students fail we presume that they have not learned effectively. That alone cannot be the measure of how effectively our students have learned. You know the final arbitrator in such matters is the industry and you know very well that the Indian industry has been saying time and again that a large number of engineering students passing out of our colleges are not able to discharge their duties as engineers in the field and therefore are not employable. Now this is directly a slur on us because we have not bothered to ensure the effectiveness of their learning. This is a third parameter which sadly can be ensured only through larger interaction with students, constant casualing them into activities and challenging them with harder and harder problems. That is a different issue and related to the process of teaching and learning in general. But please do try to see if you can do something to ensure a greater participation, a greater sense of activism, a greater sense of involvement and a far greater emphasis on problem solving by your students in your classes. As I said we are all here as teachers and in this hardest task of training increasingly larger number of students preparing them for the greater challenges of 21st century, preparing them for doing their jobs better in the industry when they join those after passing. We are primarily responsible for the, for ensuring the exchange of knowledge, the learning that happens here. As teachers to my mind what counts more than our being present there as teachers, what counts more than our being able to deliver lectures in time, than our being able to conduct assessments in time, what matters far more is our own personal individual attitude. If we are committed then we have a far greater sense of enthusiasm and a far greater sense of responsibility. I would like to urge all of you to kindly ensure that your commitment, your enthusiasm and your involvement in teaching learning process is absolutely at the top. The youth of this nation has far greater aspirations than what many of us had when we were young. They wish that the educational systems helps them to realize those aspirations. It is our duty to ensure that first they learn that these aspirations can be met only if they learn their subjects well and second we ensure that through all our actions, needs we help them to achieve this kind of learning so that they become the best and comparable to the best in the world not only in India. In this context I will only mention that we have a small window of opportunity for about a week from today. I have requested the remote center coordinators earlier to ensure that the remote center start functioning at least 20 minutes before the start of the session and remain functioning particularly for labs as long as the participants wish to complete their assignments in the afternoon sessions. I am sure that the remote center coordinators and the workshop coordinators at respective remote centers will ensure this. My only wish is that in this limited time that we have we should start every session dot on time and we should maximize our learning process. Please understand that it is not just a one way traffic. It is not as if IIT Bombay has some extraordinary great knowledge to share with all of you. Knowledge exists in every nook and corner amongst each one of you through the interaction either directly during question answer sessions or through the local discussion sessions in the afternoon and a feedback on the model or on the forums. Many of you will be making important contributions to our learning. We will be glad to share those with all of you. Effectively it is this combined wisdom of this 8500 strong community that will enrich the very subject of networking and the method of teaching it most effective. Thank you so much. God bless you.