 Good morning everybody. I am Deepak Phatak greeting you from IIT Bombay. Welcome to this ISD workshop on basic electronics being conducted by Prasad Dinesh Sharma and my other colleagues from the Department of Electrical Engineering. We will have a very brief inaugural function in which I will act as your master of ceremony shortly. Let me begin by welcoming the respected faculty members and the chief guest of the function today, Prasad Karnan Maudgalyar, who is coordinator for all MHRD National Mission Projects at IIT Bombay. May I invite Prasad Karnan Maudgalyar here please. Thank you Prasad, joining us. May I request Prasad Dinesh Sharma. Thank you Dinesh. Prasad John. Prasad Patil. Not here. Prasad Patil could not join us today. But of course he will be meeting you very often during this course. Ms. Madhumita, before I request Prasad Karnan to say a few words. Let me just tell you that in the series of ISD workshops that we have been conducting in this mode, we first began with some pilot workshops and carried on. Initially we conducted courses in computer science, computer programming and database management systems. Just this year, almost a month ago, we forade into the first non-computer science course for this workshop, which was on thermodynamics and was conducted by my colleague Prasad Gaitonde and his colleague from mechanical engineering department. And now we have another extremely important course in engineering in basic electronics being conducted by Prasad Dinesh Sharma and his colleagues. When I started this mission project, the ambition was to have more than thousand teachers in a workshop like this to address the issues of large-scale faculty members who wish to attend such workshops and benefit from them. We use a blended mode of instructions here. The lectures will be delivered from IIT Bombay whereas the lab assignments and tutorials will be conducted at remote centers under the supervision of expert faculty members who themselves have participated in a one-week preparatory program physically at IIT Bombay. What is so special about this course is this course has recorded the highest ever attendance so far. When we began, we had workshop attendees in the range of 700 to 800. The largest attended course so far was the Database Management Systems course taken by Prasad Dinesh Sharma and it had about 1049 or so attendees. I am very glad to record that this course has more than 1300 teachers attending from all over the country. This is the largest ever attendance as I proudly claimed that teachers empowerment on this scale has never known to have taken place anywhere else in the world. We were the first country to attempt it successfully and now I am glad to add further to that record that never before 1300 teachers assembling at multiple places have benefited from a two-week workshop of this kind. So by compliments and welcome to this workshop. Without further ado, let me request our Chief Guest Prasad Kannan Mavgalya to make his brief remarks. Good morning. On behalf of the National Mission on Education through ICT which is sponsoring this event, I would like to invite you all to this course. So first about myself, although I started as a chemical engineer out of the love for electrical engineering, I maintain got another master's degree and I do more work. My work can be more classified as electrical engineering work. By the way, although you may have several departments, electrical, electronic, telecom, separately, here all of them come under electrical engineering. So when I say electrical engineering, it covers all the fields including microelectronics. So I want to say in brief about the National Mission on Education through ICT. This is started to raise the levels of education in the country including the colleges, private colleges, aided colleges, unaided colleges and so on. The total outlive on this mission is 4600 crore and in fact the first phase of that is going to end by the end of this financial year. Hopefully this will continue in the next plan period also. So I will not spend too much time on that. I have already created a video tutorial and it is available at spoken-tutorial.org slash enemyICT.intro. So already available, it is about 8 minute video. It explains that essentially the mission has 3 components. One is to create content, the second one is to give bandwidth, third one is to give low-cost access device. You would have heard a lot about this low-cost access device and we expect the first lot of 1000 to arrive very soon and it is going to be available at a cost of rupees 2200 rupees. Now about this, I will just say a few words about the content generation. You would know about NPTEL. NPTEL is the flagship project of this mission. As a part of this mission, content generation, IIT Bombay also created a lot of courses live. In fact, following the footsteps of what professor Patek started here, in fact in this very room where I am talking from and I am glad to say that we transmitted almost 5000 hours of lectures and about half of them happened to come from in electrical engineering. In fact towards the end, I would say that electrical engineering courses exceeded computer science courses. So, that makes me you know it is an appropriate remark for this talk. The other important thing that I want to talk about mentioned here as a part of this National Mission Projects is the virtual lab because the question is if you just make available only the theory courses, it is not complete training. So, what do we do? So, the government thought that virtual labs is possibly one option and I am glad to say that you will see, you will get exposed to virtual labs in the EE area through this course. So, finally, I would like to point out some of the projects that are being done as a part of this mission at IIT Bombay. One of the projects is this 1000 teacher training program. So, I am glad to say that we will have to rename this, rename the title of this project to 1300 teacher training program. That is a very first one. So, you will get I do not have to say anything more than that. I want to talk about, I want to mention briefly the other projects that are happening here and many of these in fact all the projects do invite your participation, active participation. In fact, you could all become partners in this. One of the things that professor Patek is planning in this, this 1000 teacher training program itself is to have lectures delivered by experts from any college. So, long as that person is an expert, the affiliation actually does not matter. So, this project will go towards, go in that direction in the near future. So, I would like to emphasize that we invite your participation. In fact, would like you to become partners in our endeavor. The first thing that I would like to mention, one of the projects that happening here is Sylab. Sylab is an excellent replacement for MATLAB. I know that most of you are using MATLAB in your curriculum. I just want to point out that most of your students will not have access to MATLAB when they leave your college. Whether they go to industry or whether they start their own private enterprise, whatever it may be they will not have access to MATLAB because it is extremely expensive. So, we have been supporting, we have been promoting an equivalent open source software called Sylab. So, the website for that is sylab.in. In fact, one of the coordinators of this project is Professor Madhu Belour of electrical engineering at IIT Bombay. So, we are under this we have a project called Textbook Companion. This project involves creating code for workout examples of standard textbooks. And I am glad to say that in this summer alone, IIT Bombay is hosting 50 students from around the country. Some of these students, in fact many of these students could be from your colleges. And then by the very soon we will have about 100 textbooks. Sylab code for 100 textbooks in our in this website. And this is something that is participatory, collaborative and good students from your college can help create this national resource. The second thing that I want to talk about in Sylab is one is textbook companion. The other one is promoting this as a tool for hardware interfacing. So, for example, we have been able to connect through Sylab almost 150 A to D cards, digital IO cards and so on and so forth. Completely through open source software without any proprietary tool such as LabView. In fact, as a replacement for LabView, we are working on a product called GNU Radio. GNU Radio of course, we have now made GNU Radio to work with Sylab. GNU Radio has very nice hardware, nice graphical features like flyders, knobs and so on. And I believe that this can replace this is extremely important because our entire virtual labs project of the mission, which I mentioned earlier is dependent on LabView and LabView is a proprietary tool. So, this is another thing. So, as I mentioned earlier, we would like your participation in all of these. We have a project called Ask a Question. So, let me write the website for this. Co-learn.in.ask. In fact, this is a one hour contact program, one hour per week and it is in this one hour session, our faculty members, electrical engineering faculty members answer questions posed by students in a forum available at this website. More information on how to join this is given here and I would like you to bring this to the attention of your students who can pose conceptual questions. And then maybe during this course itself, there can be more mention of this. It is right now supported by our, we are doing this only in electrical engineering to start with. We might extend this to other subjects in the future. I think we have already completed 20 plus sessions uninterrupted in this. So, I think I would stop here because it is already 9.30. I would like to stop here. There are few other things like NG Spice, eCard and things like that that we are working on, but you would actually see them during the course of this, you know, 10 days, next 10 days. So, I want to congratulate you for participating in this program. In fact, I am really excited by this. I myself plan to attend some of these lectures whenever I have time. I want to wish you all the very best and as I mentioned earlier, even in this course, which has been planned in a collaborative mode, this Moodle interface will be available at least for one more year. And it is going to be a national resource and whatever you create now can be used by you. And do please participate. Do ask your questions and grill our faculty members with your questions. And nothing delights the faculty members more than tough questions. With that, I welcome you all. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Kannan. I would just like to correct him by adding that not only you all, but all other teachers and students across the country and in fact across the world would be able to use the contents that get created as a part of this workshop and all such workshops because all of them are going to be released in open source under the Creative Commons license. Indeed, that should be an additional incentive for all the participating teachers to contribute significantly during and after this workshop so that we collaboratively increase the accessible knowledge contents for the benefit of all learners across the country. May I request Prasad Dinesh Sharma, although he and his colleagues will be engaging with you over the next 10 days. But on this occasion, I would request him to say at least a few words. Prasad Sharma. Welcome to the workshop. We will get to know each other quite well. I have Professor John here and Madam Date. Professor Mahesh Patil will join soon and we are hoping that we will persuade Professor Apte who gave some lectures in the forerunner of this program to give at least one lecture in the course. He is away and cannot take as many lectures as he did in the forerunner. But as a preamble to this course, I would like to begin first of all by thanking Professor Fatak. We have a small community here of teachers who are passionately interested in enlarging this community and including all teachers outside of the IIT system, outside of the talked about institutions. And worried together about the level of education in our country. And it has taken the vision of Professor Fatak to expand it to a level where we have reached today so that we have this course and there will be more than a thousand teachers participating together in this venture. As Professor Kandan pointed out, there are many other means and activities through which we have been trying to reach through to this community and I am really privileged to know that through these efforts now we will have a big enough community and this community is not restricted to a period of 5 or 10 days that we have a means of communicating with each other, sharing each other's concern, providing solutions to each other over a period of at least one year. And that this is a scalable solution and versions of this for other courses and for other disciplines will surely follow. I think this is the way to go. One of the major bottlenecks to education in a country is the availability of well-trained teachers in large enough number. And every effort in this direction is indeed welcome. We must put our shoulders together and there is no question of being a teacher or a taught in this series of courses. Eventually we are together shoulder to shoulder in this and most of the remarks made up to now point to that direction. We would like experts among you to do the lecturing work. We would like you to come up with ideas on which is the best way to go about and train a very large number of teachers in this and many other courses. That done I would like to now come specifically to this particular course. Basic electronics as the name implies is indeed a fundamental and base course in electrical engineering. This is the course that all the teachers that you see here have taught earlier to our first year students to second year students. Not only to electrical engineering students but in fact to all students who join IIT Bombay. And therefore it is indeed a pleasure to share the lessons that we have learnt in the teaching of this subject with so many of you. I am sure we will all enrich our experience through discussions with you because I am sure most of you have also had this experience. The topics included in this course are not necessarily the topics that we teach in the IIT Bombay curriculum. In fact it is a union of the courses taught in your curricula in various universities and centers around India. Therefore, we have assured relevance the points that we discussed the labs that we do and the lectures that we take are indeed the lectures that most of you would be taking in your universities and colleges. Therefore, we are not essentially forcing down your throat a curriculum which may or may not have been relevant to your situation. Indeed one of the points of discussion would be how to improve the contents of this course and how to make it more uniform. However, this course is not only to teach you about the content it is to discuss which is the best way to get the material across. And how to develop tutorial material which can be of use to a large number of people right across the country. So, you have the curriculum of this course with you and through a series of lectures over the next 10 days we will take up various topics. And we will have discussion sessions as the professor Farthak had pointed out. There was a forerunner to this course which was conducted in March where people from various organizing centers came here in person. We had classes for them in person at that time and indeed the labs were conducted very enthusiastically I am very happy to add. Indeed there were people doing these experiments till late in the evening well beyond the hours of normal closure of our lab. And I hope to see that same level of involvement and excitement when these labs are conducted at all organizing centers for this course. I am indeed very happy to see the wide acceptance that this course has received. It has encouraged us. It makes all of us feel that our efforts are worthwhile and it will also motivate us to include other topics in future. Indeed during this course there will be a short session in which we will introduce two further courses which will be carried out in this series itself. There is going to be a course on embedded system and another on photovoltaic. So please spread the word around to your colleagues who might be interested in these courses and there will be an introductory session on these courses later. I think that is about the introduction that I have and for the closure of this session I will hand back to professor Farthak for the concluding comment. And I have comments and I have a request to our studio technical audience to introduce the support staff as well by a pan across. And to introduce all the people who have made this considerable effort possible through their hard work and through their dedication, getting the network ready, talking to various people, sending all the electronics equipment across and so on. So I think this will be a good occasion to pan through and to introduce the people who have made it all possible. And I will now hand over to professor Farthak. Thank you Prasharma. In fact what Prasharma suggested is the standard part of my Thanksgiving at the end of the inaugural function. So let me begin by thanking my own colleagues from the teams who have been working tirelessly for many months and in fact for many years for similar workshops. We have the pan over people please. So let me begin by with my managers Dr. Mukta Atre and Kalpana. Many of you would have received correspondence from them related to this workshop. I have Mr. Sajjan Kumar Dixit who is in charge of the video facilities. Sitting in front of him is Mr. Prakash Vaidya who has been advisor to the project for a variety of things including contents. We are using the AVU tool which has been developed by Amruta. In fact Kamal Bijlani and I have decided to work together to release this entire tool in open source. Currently by the way the only non open source proprietary component used by the tool is a video streaming server which is used from Adobe. We are trying to replace it by an open source RAID 5 server and we will soon succeed in that. So this is my team here. I would also like to thank the colleagues from electrical engineering department who very enthusiastically sponsored the idea of teaching non computer science, non theory courses. Virtual labs were mentioned by both Prashant Kandan and Prashant Sharma but perhaps it is a right moment to tell you that under the ages of the virtual labs activities in electrical engineering department, Mrs. Darte and her colleagues have done enormous amount of work and in fact as we speak some of the cars are leaving Mumbai physically to reach you in time for the last day of experiment. This is extremely important because this is the first time we are trying this on a large scale and if this succeeds we would like to extend it to other disciplines as well. So Prashant Sharma, thank you very much. You and your colleague John Spatil is not here. I would like to mention that just teaching core courses is useful but not adequate because we need expertise in faculty in all courses that are taught in engineering. I am in fact hoping that the government funding will be extended next year to start not only to continue the hub at IIT Bombay but to start many such hubs at other IITs and NITs which could actually specialize in specific fields such as mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and concentrate on conducting such workshops for specific courses including electives at the higher level. As a part of this program itself we are trying to make another ambitious activity to be realized next summer. So let me just take one minute to mention it. There is a course on research methodologies and research approach. A very short course which was conducted at IIT Bombay by a colleague professor from IIT Madras, Professor Karmalkar. In fact our current head of chemical engineering professor Sachin Pathwadhan had facilitated that course and our research scholars found that to be an extremely important foundation course on all aspects of how to begin and continue your research. It not only talks about research methodology, it talks about research motivation, talks about problems that you face. That is not a course which requires a lab, that course requires discussion and some kind of internal working and reporting. So I am planning to convert it into a one-week IST workshop and this workshop my ambition is that it should reach to 10,000 plus people. So that is the next level because practically every researcher independent of the field in which one is working would benefit from such a program. And there are teachers amongst us, very large number in fact who are either pursuing their PhD or wish to pursue their PhD. So please keep this in mind. There will be a pre-workshop small questionnaire by the way which will be administered, which will be put up on the model by today. Please do answer it, please take about 10-15 minutes to answer that and we will be putting up the post-workshop feedback in a similar fashion. The objective of these small questionnaires apart from the other surveys that would be conducted is to get a feedback on making these courses better. There are other people who should be thanked. First people from the institute who are missing here. Two of my colleagues who head the respective organizations which help in such extended educational programs. One is the head of our continuing education program, Professor Ashok Joshi. And the other is the current head of our center for distance engineering education program, Professor Timbe. Both of them and their organizations have been supporting this workshop extensively and we are grateful. The entire mission project is run under the office of Dean R. N. D. Professor Rangan Banerjee and Professor Balaji are our Dean R. N. D. and associate deans currently. And that office has been extensively helping us. You will realize that about 32 remote centers, 35 remote centers and 1000 teachers and all their monetary transactions involved. Handling the budgets, handling the invoices, handling the bills is not a small affair and we are helped extensively by these people. And of course, we receive support from all other deans and the director of this institute himself in absolutely all respects wherever we need anything. Before closing this session, I would like to mention a few names which are very critical which in fact those people nobody has ever seen in these workshops. One particular person I would like to mention Mr. Sinha who has been a dreamer like some of us here and he is the one whom we can properly call as the architect of the entire national mission project. I think it is only fitting that I expressed my gratitude to him and his colleagues in the ministry for supporting this idea and for generously funding this project. I would like to end this now and I think the lecture begins immediately or is there a break now or lecture begins immediately. Thank you so much.