 Hello, welcome everyone to IIT, I am going to talk about IIT Bombay which is one of the learning platforms that we use within IIT, of course it is accessible outside to all students who are interested in attending courses provided from IIT Bombay. I belong to the application development group within IIT, so computer science department is executing this project called IIT Bombay which is a website which is accessible to all. How many of you have access to Udacity or Quaterra? How many have got Facebook accounts? How many have got Git accounts? Fewer than Facebook accounts definitely. So yeah, why I ask this question is because IIT Bombay is based totally on an open source stack. And you will see how open source has made a difference to how we were able to or how fast we were able to deploy this platform. It is in keeping with the open source principle that you know do a lot of good to the entire society with the help of a lot of people contributing in a small way. So big difference made by small contributions just as Professor Fattak was saying. So my name is Aparna, I have been here for two years also all of it on the IIT Bombay platform. Before this I have always been in software development about 15 years of experience in IT industry. Then I decided that my calling was to do something related to giving back to society and I decided that I wanted to spend few years in IIT Bombay and that's how I came here. I will tell you a little bit about IIT Bombay. I will give you an overview of the entire platform and then we will see what customizations we have done on IIT Bombay on top of the open source stack that we had used. So this is what the website looks like, the homepage of it. Anybody accessed IIT Bombay starting? You were aware? Two people I would like more people to enroll, see what the experience is like. What is IIT Bombay? It is a customization of open edX, a platform which is similar to say Udacity or Corsair or if you have attended edX courses. It's a customization of the open edX platform. So edX they made their entire software open source in the year 2013 and after that we took it over, we took the source code and we have customized it. Why the customization was required is because requirements of India may be different, the Indian learning system works differently. So probably what works best for say American universities may not work really well in India. So that customization was our small start in trying to understand, trying to build something which will be specific to local requirements. So what customization we have done? I will talk about little later. As of now the platform is focused on higher education. So the courses that are there on the platform are relating to engineering mostly. There are one or two courses relating to some horticulture and all that, but it's mostly focused on higher technical education. IIT Bombay is a MOOC platform. You've heard the word MOOC? So it's massive open online courses. So Coursera offers MOOCs. So that's become like a buzzword. Advantage of MOOC is that it provides unlimited participation. Just host the platform, make the courses available there and anybody and everybody in an open way can register and attend the courses. So courses from MIT, Stanford, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, wherever your preferred professor you would have heard about from your friend, you can attend his courses without actually being a student of that university. So you get the similar course content, the similar kind of assessments, everything as if you are attending the course in that university just that you are not a student. Just because probably you didn't study hard enough at the time of taking admissions or whatever. So yeah, so unlimited participation, you make it once, it can run for a lifetime. Open access, anybody can access it, it's online via web. You can understand MOOC is important in India, for India, because the level of education, the quality of education, the quality of assessments, professors, infrastructure, everything varies all over India. All of you are fortunate to belong to the best universities in India. Not every engineering college can meet that level of sophistication in terms of the facilities and course content, faculty. So yeah, it's important for India. Somebody may be doing computer science. He thinks he is doing computer science in some village, but his computer science knowledge will probably be very different from what your computer science knowledge is. So why not give him a platform where he can learn what you guys are also learning, how much he learns out of it, what use he makes out of it, that's his thing. But the access to the information has to be available. So that's the concept of a MOOC platform for India. But of course, MOOC is difficult to implement in India because infrastructure is not uniform. Again, just as colleges, the quality labs, all of that is different. Similarly, 3G access is not available to everybody. Since this is web, of course you need to have some kind of internet, but things are getting better. I mean, we are hearing of free Wi-Fi at railway stations here and there, in Cafe Coffee Day has Wi-Fi. So hopefully we'll have a lot more internet all over India in the next few years. So yeah, so that was the concept behind the MOOC platform, making the content available and then leaving it up to the students how best they want to make use of it. These are some of the features. Just a slide where I wanted to put some images and show you what it looks like. I'll talk a little bit more on the features in the next slide. So what the platform has, it's a complete learning experience. It's not just a bunch of videos which are uploaded to YouTube and you keep listening to the videos. That is important. Of course, that is like a classroom lecture. So it's an important part of the learning. But besides that, there's a whole lot of other facilities available. There are a lot of assignments, different types, right from essay type questions to your multiple choice and the whole lot of assignments. There is a discussion forum which is inbuilt into the platform. So it's a very context specific. Whatever subject you are studying, the discussion forum belonging to that. There can be discussion forum, fora, associated to a particular topic if you are interested in only that particular topic. There is a wiki within the platform. So like Futter server is saying that you can write a small article or write up and if somebody is interested, you can read up about it. So there's a wiki within the platform. So yeah, it's a complete learning experience as if you are having a classroom session. These are the bunch of features, a whole lot of them. So it's not, as I said, it's not just a simple video delivery or video streaming system. It has all of these features, right from different types of roles. You can have teaching assistants. You can have beta testers for courses. You can have staff, faculty, discussion forum administrators, moderators and all kinds of access control is there in the platform. There is, of course, the content management, the content authoring part where the faculty creates the courses. There is a lot of analytics reporting so that faculty can get feedback about how well his course is being received. In the course where you can have multiple types of components, you could have HTML, you could have animation, you could have videos, variety of different types of content. Then there are different types of problems as I said. You can customize the type of problems. You can create your own assignments like for a computer graphics course. Somebody wanted that he should be able to ask students to upload image files, compare image files and then based on the difference of comparison between files, you should be able to grade the students. So that kind of a thing. You can build something of your own. So very, very specific kind of assessments can be developed depending on the type of subject. You could have something specific to chemistry. You could have an electronic circuit builder, a mathematical expression evaluator, all kinds of things are possible. The platform allows for a lot of customization so you could integrate with different other learning management systems. You could integrate with other software systems like we have a workshop management system. So you could integrate with the workshop management system through APIs which are provided in the platform. The application, not the IIT Bombay application, but the Open edX platform is also available as a mobile app. And then there is the social part of it. So there is a linkage with Facebook, Twitter and what have you. As I mentioned, Open edX is the open source software which was taken and it was customized. It's available for anybody to download. I would encourage. I mean those of you who are really interested in open source just go ahead and download that software. You'll find out how complex and how powerful Open edX or open source can be when you do that. Because typically even when I joined here, I used to think that open source is just some, you know, small little things which somebody writes, you know, in his spare time and it doesn't serve any great big purpose. But when you look at this software, that's when you realize that open source can really be powerful. It can be really complex and you can get to learn a lot of things. Besides the job market for open source is also hotting up. So that's another motivation for all of you. Those who haven't opened a gate account should just get started and try to make a, if not a contribution, at least learn from the work that other people have done. This is just a very small list of the technologies that are used in the platform. I mean I could write a whole page full of technologies and it still would not be complete. It is based on Django Python. Databases mainly there are two. So SQL Database and no SQL Database which is Mongo Database. Then there is the queuing system. There is file-based integration, database-based integration. All kinds of technologies that you can learn about when you use the platform. So this is what the architecture looks like. I'm not going to bore you with all the details of all of it. But the picture just shows how big and how complex the open source code can be. And it works. We find very few breakages in it. I mean the defects are really not substantial compared to the size of the whole thing. And all of this, if we had to develop it, it would have taken ages to develop. So it's all available for free and we just have to customize it for our requirement. So this is the power of open source. The system is supposed to be, it is architected to handle. In Indian context, LAX is nothing. It has to work for crores. Every system which is massive, it has to reach people, has to work in crores. Even the Americans are just flabbergasted when they look at the number of students, the number of users that we keep projecting that will be required on the system. So it's a really scalable system. And so far, we have found that it works. Yeah. So this is the user interface of it. It just depicts how the student is shown the orientation where he is at any point of time, how you can navigate, easy to navigate. These are the various things that you can do with it. Videos with transcripts, transcripts where you can click as per your speed of reading or your speed of how fast you want to go with a topic or how slow you want to go with it. You can just skip a couple of topics if you are comfortable with them. You can have essay type questions, not just multiple choice, not just fill in the blanks. Even essay type questions which are automatically graded by the system. So obviously a single faculty cannot grade lakhs of students. So then there are various mechanisms built into it. For example, there is peer reading. So like a bunch of people within themselves will assess each other. Obviously the system has to generate that group automatically. Otherwise you will just choose your friends and form a group and assess each other, which will totally be the purpose. So yeah. So I mean it supports basically everything that is required for a good course. Assessments, as I said, multiple choice for all various types of assessments. This is an interesting thing that you can do. You can build embedded graphics into your course. So the entire power of HTML5 and all the facilities you can build into your course. Discussions I talked about and Vicky, which I mentioned. This is the studio where the faculty can create the courses. The various types of problems that a faculty can add into the course. This is the grading policy. The faculty can decide that I want to have grades like ABCD or just ABC or just A and B, whatever. So depending on what percentage he wants to decide as the cutoff for a particular grade. So the faculty can decide that. There is the certification. So at the end of a course, you get a certificate. In earlier days, it used to be linked with the LinkedIn account. So you could display your edX certificate on the LinkedIn account. For some reason, they have done away with that. But that certificate is still there. On the site, you can always boast of, you know, I have five open edX certificates on whatever. Data analytics, for example. So yeah, so that's a big thing you can boast about. There's analytics for the faculty to measure the effectiveness of their course. So discussion for is a great feedback to the faculty also on how they can improve their courses. So all the time, the TAs are monitoring the discussion forum trying to understand which are the difficult topics, which topics require more attention to be paid by the student as well as the faculty has to dwell on that topic more. This is the progress of the student, which the faculty can monitor. Again, grades are not the best indicator of how much a student has understood, but definitely a measurable way by which the faculty gets a feedback about how well the student has understood. The customizations that we have done, the bare bones at open edX when you install it, it looks something like this here. On the left side, the gray, dull, boring looking site. You obviously want it to be a little more colorful, a little more attractive to people so that they, I mean, they are motivated to at least open the site. We have tried to provide multilingual support. We started with providing Hindi, obviously, as the first language. There are plans depending on variety of parameters to add more languages. But yeah, the idea is to reach as many students in the language in which they are most comfortable. So definitely very important for us. Different types of assessments, as I said. So that computer graphics assignment, which one computer graphics faculty wanted to add, where he should be able to assess students depending on the image file that the student has submitted. Compare the difference now. In my case, both the images are looking very similar. Obviously, so he has got a full grade on that. But yeah, in an automated way, the faculty could have assessed potentially lacks of files without doing a whole lot of manual work. And there are integrations, as I said. You could integrate with a system like Moodle, for example. So a faculty has created some courses in Moodle. Now he has to all over create the courses in the IIT Bombay platform. Very painful. So he will just continue to have his course presiding in Moodle but have an integration with IIT Bombay where IIT Bombay will be able to pull out the course contents and display it onto the platform. So this is, I think, one of the projects that some of you may be doing. Then the user interface customization, the multi-language support, those are few of the things that we have done in Indianization of the platform. This is another thing which we did. We didn't modify the platform for this but an innovative way of reaching out to students. So there is a software called as A-View which has been developed by Amrita University that is used by IIT Bombay for reaching out to faculty. So generally, there are sessions with faculty members. If you have heard, teach 10,000 teachers. So IIT faculty trains faculties in other colleges. So typically used by faculty members but here in a remote center we got a bunch of students into the center and they were interacting with Professor Fatah as part of one of the courses. Actually interactive one-to-one kind of question-answer kind of a thing happening. So I mean these are a lot of things that we can do to make learning more effective and getting the students more involved in the learning process rather than it being just like how I am presenting, I am talking and you guys are just listening instead or that making it more interactive. So the other platform allows for that. So these are the things I wanted to talk about. I want to put more of an emphasis that open source is important. Open source is useful. So I think India doesn't have enough open source solutions which should have actually come out by now looking at how many people we have in the IT industry. Somehow that somebody outside had to take the effort and build it and we are just using it. So maybe in the years to come we should also be making things which the rest of the world should be able to use to make a difference. So on that note I will just end it.