 Thanks for the introduction. So we will get started. I am going to be giving a talk on this national mission on education through ICT. That is what you are supposed to do and we are supposed to be giving talks on Thursday once again where we will give an overview of CDP, Moodle which is the LMS that we use which is the open source software and possibly a talk on Python. In today's talk I will give an overview of this national mission on education through ICT that is being coordinated by CDP. So this is the outline of the program. These are some of the projects or missions that are supported by this national mission. One is talk to a teacher, second one is open source software, third one is laboratory related work. I see that some of you have electronics background, you may find this useful also. And then of course NPTEL is a very popular project and it is already the first phase is over and one can even say that it is a success of NPTEL that has led to in some sense this mission itself being taken up. By the way I am using this software called latech. How many people use latech here, are there people who use latech, 3, 4 people. The reason is that I just converted this file from handout to animation based. So the national mission on education through ICT has been launched by the Ministry of Human Resources Development Government of India. The objective of this mission is to raise the levels of education in India. This mission focuses on higher learning that is college level onwards. The outlay is 4600 crore for a period of about 3 years. Out of this 40 percent is reserved for content generation and the remaining is to establish bandwidth to all colleges, for example I have written 30,000 colleges, I think it is more like 20,000 colleges and 200 universities to give bandwidth to everybody whether it belongs to a private college or a government college. This is the largest and most ambitious plan from MHRD. I would even say that this is the most ambitious plan amongst all similar activities and it is likely to continue in the next plan period as well. Here I told you that 40 percent of the money is reserved for content generation. What is this content generation? We have a list of 18 line items which I will show in the next slide. NPTEL phase 2 and 3, phase 1 is already over. When you see it in blue it means that IAT Bombay has a project in this. We have an active NPTEL work here. PG classes, UG classes, video content digitization. So, these are all the line items that the ministry has identified that the ministry can support, provision of e-books and e-journals free to the learners, standardization of quality assurance, certification and things like that. Coaching suitable pedagogical methods, development of language converter and translation toolkit, virtual labs, virtual technological universities, by the way blue means IAT Bombay is involved, low cost access devices, low cost PCs, this is a very interesting thing. To read this talk to a teacher to provide a substitute for coaching for the economically poor students, cannot be more explicit than this, software controlled hardware programming for robotics, adaptation of open source, simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB or CAD etc. This is also very explicit. By the way I am going to spend some time on the open source equivalent of MATLAB during this talk, unified ERP system, motivating the trainers, conversion of available content in various regional languages and then vocational educational modules. Some people are some people here, for example, Amruta, they already have projects on some of them, they are also our partner institute in some of them. The minimum requirement for funding is that it should be related to education, that means I am going to actually talk about the mission, how you can all participate, how you can write proposals, get money and so on. It should be related to education for research, there are other funding agencies such as DST, CSIR and so on. It should be inter institutional, it is not possible for one institute to get the money and say they will do it themselves. The idea is to promote collaboration amongst institutions and this is very important. Any material developed through this mission has to be delivered as open source and it should belong to one of the 18 line items mentioned earlier. Administration of the mission is as follows, there is a mission director Mr. N. K. Sinha who is the joint secretary, distance learning training, this is his designation and then we must be the first country to have such a high level position for distance education and he is a great administrator, if you are interested I can talk about it later. The administrative structure is as follows, there is a project approval board chaired by the secretary of M. H. R. D. and there is a steering committee which is chaired by the mission director, so this steering sorry by the way this should be standing committee. The standing committee is chaired by the mission director, we just change that because that is in the nomenclature. The standing committee chaired by the mission director, it recommends projects and there are review committees, internet is used heavily for this project submission, review etcetera online, the website is saksha.ac.in. We will also give you our newsletter, CDIP newsletter reach out which gives you information on how to submit some of these things in little more detail. The procedure to get the funding is as follows. You submit a project and also a pilot for 6 months, the project is reviewed and the inputs from the, this is not changed, input from the standing committee members and other experts are given and the pilot project is recommended as standalone project or you are asked to participate in one of the already approved missions. In the worst case you will be asked to rewrite the proposal, so this mission has taken a stand that we would not reject any proposal, at the most you will be asked to rewrite and help will be provided to rewrite the, to improve the proposal. After a successful completion of the pilot project, the main project is approved, so this is the scheme that is followed. Talk to a teacher, so now I am going to talk about some of the projects that are being done at IIT Bombay. This is talk to a teacher mission, it is a synchronous education effort and in fact we have, I will talk about it, we have, I am representing CD, Center for Distance Engineering Education program and that is many of its activities are supported by this mission under the synchronous education effort. IIT Bombay leads this mission, we have partners in this national mission, they are Amrita University, the Albaag Educational Institute in Agra and Triple I T Lahaban. Talk to a teacher, what is IIT Bombay's effort? Distance education through IIT Bombay's one courses, teacher training through edusat, it is this part that you have come for. All of you are going to be supported through this teacher training through edusat. I am going to give a brief overview of CD, maybe this is just one slide because there is going to be a detailed talk on CD or later on, on Thursday, but today I am going to talk only about the national education mission, so this is only a summary, this is CD, it is formed to disseminate IIT Bombay's courses live and recorded to students and faculty of colleges and also to working professionals and CD has been transmitting live IIT Bombay's courses for close to a decade. I forgot to mention that we do not disseminate only IIT Bombay's courses, we also disseminate educational methodologies, the educational methodologies can be transmitted only through a live course because if you go through a recorded course, you will see the content but not how it is delivered in a class, how questions are raised, how they are answered, that interactive thing will not be there in a pre-recorded course, so it happens in a live course. As a matter of fact, one of our partners in this distance education is College of Engineering Pune and the chairman of COEP is Mr. F C Kohli who is considered as the father of IIT in India, so he said when he came to CD, he said that he wanted live courses from IIT Bombay because he said he wanted his students to get what is known as IIT experience, what is IIT experience, he said that when you make a mistake, when the IIT faculty members make a mistake, he said he wanted his students to see it because he wanted his students to know that it is okay to make mistakes. The second thing is he wanted when the faculty members crack jokes, he wanted the students to see that you do not have to be serious all the time. At the same time, he wanted his students to see that IIT courses are delivered online on time, so if there are 40 lectures, all 40 lectures are delivered, so Monday 8.30 means Monday 8.30 that course will be delivered. So he wanted his students to see it and possibly go and demand the same kind of performance from his other teachers and he wanted this will give an opportunity also for the students to see the level of work done by IIT students, what kind of assignments, what kind of tutorials that the faculty members can go and ask, demand similar kind of work from their students. So he said that this is what he called as IIT experience that he wanted, so that is what I meant by education methodologies. We transmit courses live to the outside world free of cost. Now of course this funding for all the expenditure has come from this national mission. Through edusat, we have two-way audio-video connectivity, through webcast only 100 kbps is required. If you look at some of the transmission from western universities, they typically look for half mbps or one mbps and as a matter of fact, there are people who have said that we can receive Stanford's lecture or MIT's lecture, they clearly write on the blackboard I can see it. Unfortunately, we find that the bandwidth access to our students is actually very limited. In fact, we were surprised to see even in the office of the director of prestigious institute, he was getting not even getting 100 kbps. So we have a major problem with bandwidth. So to expect the students to have access to half mbps or one mbps is not going to work. So when we started transmitting, we made a conscious decision that we will transmit only in 100 kbps. As a matter of fact, this resulted in some changes in our technology itself. Blackboard writing does not come out clearly in 100 kbps. So we said that we will use only A4 sheets, that people will write on that and then we will project it. So this is made by the restriction we have, the lack of infrastructure that we have in our country. And of course offline interaction through Moodle especially for this webcast course. In this semester, we are transmitting about 30 hours of 30 courses of our own classes. One course is 40 lecture in IIT's terminology. It is what you might call as semester's subject. So we are transmitting 30 courses in this semester free of cost. You go to that place, at that time you will receive it. I will be able to in fact demonstrate to you during the course of this, may be after the classes over I will show you that you can actually receive it through webcast. Last semester we transmitted 1200 hours. The semester before we transmitted 1500 hours and about a half of them happened to be in electrical engineering, computer science, IT areas. So you can visit this site, receive the courses live. And it was started by Professor Fatak about 10 years ago through a satellite program. What do we do with the recorded courses? IIT Bombay has more than 100 recorded courses, NPTEL also has a large number of recorded courses. How do we put them to use? At present I am using a previously recorded course at IIT Bombay. So because of lack of time I will skip, explain, skip explaining what I do here. But if you are interested I can explain to you later. But I would like to talk about this extending this infrastructure to in a bigger way. How do we put it to use? How many of you are aware of let us say NPTEL? So many are aware. So supposing you want to start using it in your curriculum, do you have any difficulty? Can you start using it? So NPTEL stands for National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning. The first phase is already over. It is created by all 7 IITs, the previously started 7 IITs and IAAC, 8 institutions started this and in that they created about 240 courses, 110 video courses and 130 web courses. The idea is to create educational material to cover the core curriculum in 5 engineering disciplines. So those are civil, computer science, electrical, electronics, mechanical. So there was a major planning exercise, national level coordinator for each subject, institute level coordinator for each subject and so on and so forth and it took about I think 3 years, 4 years. In fact, amongst us we have Professor Tembe who is a very active member of NPTEL who created NPTEL course in chemistry. So now this is made available more or less free of cost. I think for government institutions it is made available free of cost. In fact, for students I think a whole course can be received for about 200 rupees, just the dbd cost. You just send 200 rupees the students can get and start using that. And of course this the NPTEL program looked at some major institutes, major universities to identify the syllabus and made the syllabus slightly bigger, made the coverage slightly bigger to cater to more than one university. So let me, I asked a question. So there will be more information made available in case in the next few classes or so. The problem I see about, this is what I had experienced about IIT Bombay's courses. To a smaller extent this is the problem with NPTEL also that it is like a textbook. You take a good textbook, it has lots of material and the student has to study a part of it. Then how does he access that part only? So that seems to be one of the problems and so what we have done is we have made this proposal to, can you see this? Not sure whether you can read the writing, what I will do is I will go through this. So what we have is, we have the video course, whether it is NPTEL or whether IIT Bombay's course or for that matter any other good course. The idea is that we will transcribe it and put it in the wiki. Now of course along with the course you have slides, written sheets and so on that also can be scanned and put as PDF file or if it is already a PowerPoint slide or PDF file it is already there. So from the wiki you can put links to these also. Now this wiki, I am calling it wiki, it is essentially a technology that will have this material and this can grow by collaborative participation. So we can have a few people, for example if you take CS101 as the subject and you have a wiki created from here. Now 5-6 people, 5-6 experts from around the country can collaboratively help expand this wiki including topics that are missing, including examples, including problems and so on. So this wiki can grow. Now define the concept of syllabus, sorry this circle says syllabus. So if you can define the syllabus in terms of keywords, index, terms, difficulty level, prerequisites and so on and so forth, then using a book authoring tool extract only the relevant portion for a particular university and then create a textbook. You follow this? So once you create this, now this is going to be let us say an e version which is available free of cost, anybody can go and see it. One can also get a PDF file out of this which a low cost publishing house can print and make available at a low cost. So for example a college teacher in Nashik for example can say that I want 100 copies of CS101 book and there can be a low cost publisher who prints, binds and sells it at 100 rupees a copy and he will also make a profit of 20 rupees because the material is free, it is just cost of printing, binding and so on and what is important is it comes from an authenticated source. It does not come from just wiki or Google search because you do not know about the authenticity of some of the things, how reliable they are whereas here we are talking about starting from a good source and putting it to use and of course what can happen is if some university says that in a one chapter for my syllabus is missing, one can always contribute, the moderator accommodates that and the thing can grow. The idea is extract only the relevant portion and put it here. We are in the process of explaining how to implement this. In fact we are actively looking for bright programmers for this activity. We are looking for people who are familiar with Python, XML and things like that. So if you know some people who are looking for jobs, we have jobs. This is a very interesting, very challenging job for computer science people because the question is how am I going to build this database. So there is a lot of work involved in this. Of course from the wiki you go to spoken tutorials and about the spoken tutorials I will talk about. I have some slides on that, that is why I have taken the audio also. Now next one is teacher training from IIT Bombay through Edusat for which you have come. So I do not have to say too much about it. This is led by Professor Fatak. The objective is to train 1000 teachers at a time through Edusat remote centers and train the coordinators of remote centers first. By the way this is the second coordinators workshop. Another one was done earlier, I think it was done in June if I am not mistaken and you will host the college teachers who teach CS101 in your Edusat centers for the real program which starts on December 14th, December 14th to 31st. So through you we can train 1000 teachers and of course we have already received offers for other courses for example FOSS, free and open source software, can I make it available. So that is something that we are contemplating on making it available, train lot of people in one stroke and then there are also other subjects, we would like to do this for all difficult subjects. For example, we are looking, we are, we have got an offer to teach a course on thermodynamics which is a very important course and it is taught in most curricula and then it is a fundamentally very important one, it could be difficult if it is not taught properly. So it is for topics like this we would like to make this available. Next I will talk about, so this is the talk to the teacher mission, that is one of the projects that is being supported by this National Mission on Education through ICT. Now I will talk about the open source software effort at IIT Bombay, this also is supported by this mission. Now CDP is coordinating all of this, why do we have to go for open source software? One reason is the commercial software is expensive, this is not the real reason for colleges because for students it does not matter, so do you know what I mean? So I do not have to explain it any further, so the students use commercial software packages because they are, for example they have nice interfaces, nice document, right, they are stable, they do not crash, so people use them in, use the commercial software packages in colleges, they are not expensive. But the problem is that the commercial software is not available for small and medium scale companies, SME, the cost is a major problem. I was teaching this course, the controls part of this course called embedded systems taught by the computer science department, it is a PG level course, so there were 25 students in the class and I was teaching Sylab to them, how to use Sylab, I spent couple of classes, then I asked the students, how many people used, in the class used Sylab, out of 25 students there was only one person who raised the sign, so I asked him, so why did he use Sylab, so he said that he was working for small high tech company in the Pune region and they were creating embedded systems, embedded systems for washing machines, air conditioners, mobile phones and so on and so forth and it was a small company, it had just about 10 people and by the way, such companies are, there are, there is a large number of such companies in Pune region. You will see a similar thing in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, in fact, in lots of places because these companies are started by entrepreneurs, often people with just BE with some experience, people who have experience in hardware or people who have some, they team up with management people and get started, these are high value added areas, but very small turnover, only about 10 people could be working, but then the profit margins are high, but the turnover will be small because they will be working on only a few projects at a time. Also he said that, that company could not afford MATLAB, his boss told him that to get MATLAB, they had to pay how much, can you take a guess, how much money would it cost for this company to buy MATLAB, it was 2 crore, it was 2 crore, so the company told him you cannot buy MATLAB, he said he used sila, that is why he came to use sila. So, what is the big deal, what our students do, why cannot the companies also do that? If you do that, in fact I have a true story to tell, one of our consultants, he actually is the founder of Chennai online, which is a very popular website, has received more than half a million hits and so he told about a company for which he was working, an Italian company and during a raid in one of its installations, they found in one of the machines, they found an unauthorized copy of a software. So, obviously I mean it is a raid, these people had to pay a penalty. Now, just to give an idea of this, supposing somebody gets caught travelling ticket less in a train, they will have to pay from origin to destination plus some fine, in a similar way, whereas he might have got into the train only in the previous station, so that does not matter. What the company said was, what this person who created this software said was, count the total number of machines in all the installations, not only in that location, but in all locations throughout the world, multiply by cost of one unit. So, this company ended up paying 200 million dollars as damage, because they had unauthorized copy of this in only one PC. So, this company had to do it, otherwise their CEO, CIO, CTO will have to go to the jail and so on and so forth. So, this is the cost to the companies. So, as a result most of our SMEs, small and medium enterprises in India, do not use any software, commercial software is expensive and they are not aware of open source software, we are not training our children on open source software. When the, when our graduates end up in these companies, they find that they cannot use the commercial software, if they do indeed use commercial software taking risk, you know it is a big risk, right. The moment any SME is found using any software illegally, you know they will have to close down, that is a very serious risk, nobody would take that. As a result, our SMEs are not competitive at all. This is extremely important for our economy, because if you look at the total investment in SMEs is not more than 10 percent, whereas the contribution to the GDP by these companies is more than 50 percent. It is a small investment, but large value addition, but they are not competitive, because we have not given, we are not generating people who can do this. So, I assert that there is no alternative to open source software. And so, open source software mission is supported by this national mission on education through ICT. IIT Bombay is leading this, very active in this. What are the open source software initiatives at IIT Bombay? One is Python. On Thursday, I am asking professor Prabhu Ramachandran, who is leading this Python effort to come and give a talk. We have a software called Blender. Is anyone aware of Blender? I think I have one slide on this. Sylab, how many people are aware of Sylab? Not many people. I have, I will spend some time on Sylab. Latech, how many people use latech? Okay, few more people use. So, Blender is a 3D animation software, a free software. There is a major animation effort at IIT Bombay. And more than 20 full time staff members are working on it. What they are doing is to try to develop animations using this 3D software to support our courses. This is being led by professor Sridharayar. He is actually looking at different courses. Courses developed through our own recording as well as NPTEL courses, trying to see whether animations can be added. So, there are people who are doing this to develop animations to go with courses. And of course, we need programmers who can write Python script for Blender. It can be done at a higher level. One is just use the buttons and so on. The other one is to do it as a programmer. So, this is another activity for which we have openings. Slide by professor Sridharayar of computer science. Web address for this is asker.iitb.ac.in. Next one is Python. I will just quickly go through this because I have asked Prabhu to give a talk. It is a high level scripting language, easy to do computations. Also for machine level device drivers and so on, it is extremely useful. It is led by professor Prabhu Ramachandran of IIT Bombay. And the website for this is foci.in. Free and open source software for science and engineering education. That is what this foci stands for. There are two S's here. Two S, two E. Then Sylab. Sylab is a good substitute for MATLAB. I will spend about 10-15 minutes going through Sylab.