 So, good morning everybody and welcome to this first session. I have deliberately chosen not to use slides, just to illustrate that an equipment of this kind can be used very very effectively. We will of course have slides in the subsequent session and so on. One of the reasons why I was encouraged to think about it was because a copy of the theme paper I have already put in your folders and I thought I will very briefly go through the entire methodology and the purpose of thinking about this methodology here. So, as you can see from the objectives of the theme paper, the faculty effectiveness in teaching learning process is the matter of concern which we are trying to address and traditionally we do it through IST QIP workshops. As all of you know these workshops are conducted for 25, 30, 35 people and that is neither here nor there because the scale that we need to achieve is of a stupendous magnitude. We have been trying to take our distance education to various places, but still there are limits to what we can do with distance education alone. Synchronous interaction is a requirement. More importantly through the Eklavya project which we launched a few years ago, the genesis of Eklavya by the way was I had taken a sabbatical leave for a year and gone around the country giving talks to engineering college students and teachers and I realized that there is amazing talent in every nook and corner of the country and there are a few dedicated teachers even in the smallest college I visited. Unfortunately, they are in minority in their respective places and therefore, I termed them as Eklavya and then I came back and started this collaborative movement and decided that if we release useful contents in open source perhaps access to those contents will be more easy and therefore, people would use it. We started doing that through some funding from Typhag and what we found was very interesting. We found that we were releasing special workshops on technology issues on issues related to education on issues related to specific subjects and so on. But when we asked people whether they are using these contents in actual teaching the answer was a flat no. So, we actually sat down we discussed with people and we asked why is the content not being used and the reason they said is that they and their students do not find the contents relevant for the activities which happen in those institutions. So, if that is the problem then it is like having the best books and journals in your university, but if they do not cater to the syllabus and question paper pattern they will not be used. So, first of all just making material accessible is not equivalent of creating knowledge and additionally if the material is not directly relevant the chances of people using that material become remote. And therefore, we thought of this scheme so that we make sure that all stakeholders including our students teachers administrators everybody feel that there is some benefit. Before going further I would like to jot down the issues which I have felt are coming in the way of increasing effectiveness in our teaching learning process. So, this is by the way just to complete this theme in under the ecovue project we have a scheme called e guru scheme through which we help the final year projects of engineering students. We have an e outreach program in fact it is the e outreach program under which this entire mission is conceived which essentially conducts courses, workshops and release contents in open source. So, primarily Kalpana Kannan has been handling this particular e outreach project for us. There is a third component of the ecla.vue program which we call the e content program we are looking for a better name for it because e outreach also creates contents. But the e content program which is still the government which has not come out in large scale is actually creating contents in Indian languages. So, that is the purpose of this program. And as we shall see later on there is actually a component of Indian language that we would like to see in some of our subjects that we cover under this mission. So, let me now explain the background for this mission primarily the issues which we need to address. The first issue is that a scale this is something well known although the exact numbers are not available. If you go to AICT website the details are still about the institutions which were approved in 2004 or 2003 or 2002. When I took my sabbatical it was 2002. At that time the details were still earlier. But 2000 colleges were there in place in 2002, 2003 itself. I was talking to Dr. Mantha who has recently taken over as vice chairman of AICT and he was telling me that the number of colleges should be close to 3000. But we do not know the details that is another problem but we will figure that out. The fact of life is that there are almost 2.5 million students studying in our engineering college and almost 6 to 7 lakh students are admitted every year. And these numbers are extraordinarily large. So, number of teachers that you require by whatever conventional ratios that you talk about is still 150,000 teachers. Now, you can imagine a high STL QIP workshop of 30 people is not going to happen. So, this is the problem of the scale. The second problem is I have written educational background but it is essentially qualification of our teachers. This is not an easy problem to resolve anywhere by the way. When IIT started for example, even in IIT there were hardly any PhDs who were available. So, originally there were a lot of our own students who after MTA decided to continue teaching and they did their PhDs when they were teaching. In fact, when I joined the computer science department, then electrical engineering department, computer center or whatever in 1971 and subsequently I have been there. There was no PhD in computer science. There was no computer science field per se. Many of us were appointed as faculty members with just MTA degree and the rest of the colleagues in the institute used to laugh at us. We had to remind them that 10 years ago they had the same situation. So, all of us did our PhDs while we were teaching and there is nothing wrong in that. However, the same thing is not happening in other educational institutions to the extent it used to happen earlier. Remember, in 70s and 80s, there were very few 60 or 70 colleges. I mean, if you take Maharashtra for example, COEP, Vijay Tia, Walchand Institute, these were the Nagpur original engineering colleges. These were a few institutions and there also not all teachers were PhDs, but most of the teachers had master's qualification. Today, unfortunately, most teachers have BE as the qualification and there is nothing you can do about it because higher qualification means you have to spare those teachers to do an ME course somewhere and it is not easy. If you spare them, there is nobody left to teach and as an added attraction, if you spare them and they do an ME, there is no guarantee that they will come back to your college. So, there are problems of this kind and these problems have to be addressed individually and independently. We cannot address them here. I have suggested a mechanism to take it to create a collaborative framework for doing ME in which 50 or 70 or 100 colleges recognized through distance mode will conduct courses, evaluate people and these credits will be transferred to any other institution. So, a teacher can do all courses in distance mode and only get attached for 6 months or 8 months for doing a ME project to one institution which gives the degree finally, but that institution recognizes these credits from other place. Now, this is a huge change is required in the present philosophy and the rules etcetera, but I am a mad man. So, I keep hitting my head against stones mostly the blood flows here, but sometimes the stone breaks. So, we have to continue with that zeal something have to be done, but this is a problem. There is one more thing if you take teachers in every other field you take primary school teachers there is a training program for them called BA or whatever in every other field there is a management training there is something for teachers there is no training. It is assumed that somebody gets a professional degree means he can he or she can teach immediate generally smart people join engineering and therefore, generally this is true that when they join as teachers they can somehow learn teaching, but there is no effort that is one problem that we have. So, scaling up and qualification is the third problem is the mindset of students and what is this mindset the mindset is to get very good grades in the examination get a degree with good marks first class or higher. So, that their career opportunities are better majority of the some people who would like to do masters of PhD, but there is a small person majority of them want to do that means examination becomes more important than anything else. Of course, they can knowledge, but often that knowledge is incidentally gained while trying to prepare for exam rather than the other way. Believe me we cannot change this mindset even in IIT you ask them to do something because it is interesting and two days later you ask them well hardly anybody has attempted, but you give a one mark assignment submission date tomorrow morning before 8 o'clock all assignments are over. So, this is a universal mindset we can fight with it. What happens is in the IIT kind of this is the reason why our courses which we are putting in nutshell and releasing them are not used is because our courses are taught as per our syllabus and the problems and questions are as per our exam pattern. Now, that is not useful to the students. So, therefore the students do not find such material useful. In fact, they do not find even conventional teaching useful in their own colleges. In big cities at least this is a known syndrome that large number of students walk around coaching classes who compact the material and say exam this question three question five etcetera can be addressed like. So, this is the mindset of the students and unless something that students find useful is available through our efforts they are not going to be attracted and if they are not going to be attracted teachers are not going to be attracted to use that material for teaching which is the next issue that I talk about namely the mindset of teachers. This is another problem I notice that has changed in significantly in last 25 years 25 years ago since the number of engineering colleges were small almost everybody who joined teaching did so with the choice today that percentage has dropped significant there are still people who joined teaching as a career, but that percentage is smaller as compared to the larger number of people who are getting into teaching and this has happened because of the atrocious differences in the reward system that the industry has created particularly in areas like computer science IT and electron. I mean if I teach at a college for three years and a student whom I have taught and who has done well starts earning five times my salary on Devan well I may accept it, but my family may not and even I will find it difficult to accept. So, unless we improve this what I call the reward and recognition pattern for teachers it is going to be a hard job. This is the reason why you will find many teachers who come in even with B qualification because there is nothing wrong if the teaching is good that is ok, but they are not looking at academic career as a long term path. Many of them are there for a short term and would be willing to switch over the moment the opportunity comes that is ok it is a free world and people should have that choice. The point is because of this mindset their concentration, focus and efforts in teaching reduce to that extent. So, can we do something by which we can tell the teachers that we understand whatever be your compulsions you may want to go whatever, but if you are teaching for one year for two years for five years even for six months can you not do something fantastically better so that not only your student, but you also will benefit. So, teacher is a stakeholder we have to remember that and we must do everything which will benefit the teacher also personally apart from benefiting and that is why this mindset needs to be understood appreciated and something has to be done to counter it. The last problem is the mindset of administrators. I will say limitations I have used the word limitations in my write up who have at least two senior faculty members amongst us who handle you know these administration there are two kinds of administration today one in the traditional government funded colleges where the deans and the directors and the heads actually do the administration. The other a large number of private institutions where apart from these functionaries the trustees of the management board also do administration and what kind of administration they basically decide what should be the reward and punishment package for the teacher. So, the teachers mindset is directly affected by the mindset of the administrator, but at the functioning level you look at the dilemma that administrator faces. Let us say I had the principal or director of a small college now as it is I am finding it difficult to get teachers. So, I have got some teachers now the students have to be increased because unless I increase the students the revenue income through fees will not increase since fees is decided by supreme court these days. It is not a free market economy, free market economy says I charge 10 lakh rupees a month as my fees and those students who believe that I deliver the quality will come otherwise they will not come. That is what ISB does in Hyderabad by amongst the management schools they charge most atrocious fees and still the best students go there because they believe there is a value to why do our people go to Finlandland even to a small university because they believe there is a value to it. But that free market economy has not yet percolated in our educational administration. So, this will not change. Now as a result if I have a principal what am I required to do? I am required to like a magician you know juggle around the same teachers. So, I have to number of students have increased I say okay instead of two courses this semester you handle two courses in a lab. In fact, that is some feedback I would like to know as to what is the average load on a teacher. But my feedback in 2002 which I received by a physical visit to about 67 places was that the teachers are heavily loaded in conventional teaching activities alone. And therefore there is very little time available for them to think. And the moment they get some time to think the administrator will say which means you basically keep people busy in doing mundane work because of which they are unable to improve there. So, there is a vicious circle which starts and that circle continues to take the quality metric of the institution now. These are the five issues. How do we sort out these issues? And this is what set us thinking that in the e-outreach program can we do something different? So, we started by looking at the teaching and learning process at an engineering college that is class 2.4 on page 4 of the theme paper. There if you take any core or elective subject in engineering and any branch, typically there will be a set syllabus, there will be a set teaching pattern, so many hours of lectures, so many hours of tutorials, so many hours of labs. If you look at the syllabus or compared syllabi of a few courses in computer science, they look amazingly similar. They have either been taken from the AICT standard that is recommended or some IIT system or something like that. After all, all good institutions would like to have a good syllabus on paper which is what is there. However, the way it is taught and the way problems and examples are given in the exam is different. Examination pattern is different. In IIT system if I teach a subject, I set the question paper, I evaluate the answer books and I give the grade. In most of the universities, I teach the course, somebody else sets the question paper and somebody else evaluates. You have this notion of solve any 6 out of 10 questions in many universities. IITs do not have that pattern. Consequently, if you see the way the course is taught in those colleges, ideally we would like that kind of freedom to be available to college teachers as we see in IITs and other best universities. And that is happening through some institutions which are becoming autonomous. That is happening. But you will agree that majority of the institutions are not like that. They are still bound by that. So in our effort, we must give them something useful otherwise they will not adopt anything that we do. The teachers who participate in our program may benefit directly but they will not take it further. And our ambition is to improve the teaching learning process of the ultimate learner, which is those 6 lakh students who are joining the program every year. That is the object. So towards this end, in 2.5 I have discussed the approach for engaging teachers and for collaborative content creation. What we figured is that if instead of training teachers in a subject using IIT syllabus, suppose we decided to frame a syllabus for such training program itself through some collaborative activity. That means we try to find out what is the syllabus taught at this place, that place, that place, that place and make a union of syllabus. Similarly, we look at the question paper patterns in different engineering colleges. And our pattern that we train these teachers in ranges from the simplest in wherever, Jalsukuda or whatever to the most complex which may be in IIT Kanpur for example. So we cover the entire spectrum clearly identifying which portion of the spectrum is likely to have a better fit with which syllabus exam pattern in which institution. We conduct our laboratories, we conduct our tutorials exactly in the same way. We conduct the quizzes, tests and exams also in the same way. Does it mean double work? Actually it does not. But it does mean one and half times work. What is our ambition? Our ambition is the smallest college in let's say a small town in Madhya Pradesh called Mansour to the best institution in the country. All of them should be able to give the best quality education to the student. Because believe me the smartest students of the world are statistically spread across everywhere including our country. Even that Mansour college would have 8 or 10 students as bright as anybody has that you see. And there is no reason why they should not benefit from it. So the ambition is to elevate the teaching learning process at every place to the best of that place's ability. But ideally reaching how things are taught at MIT or Stanford or Berkeley or whatever. No reason why it should be different. Now this will not happen overnight. The idea is that if I am able to create such contents collaboratively and release them in open source then suppose I am now a teacher at a small place in Chenwala in Madhya Pradesh or whatever. I may first time choose only those portions which are relevant at Chenwala syllabus and so on. But I may be encouraged to use more complex problems, more complex themes going forward. And eventually over the next 3 to 5 years I may even enforce a change in the syllabus. I may talk to the university saying my students also deserve to do better etc. That is the hope. So our idea is A we should create and deliver contents in our training program for teachers which cover the entire spectrum from the simplest to most complex. Clearly identifying what portion is meaningful to whom as of today and hoping that everybody moves further in the spectrum. Secondly, if let us say I teach a course and I create the content myself only then the feeling of ownership is not there amongst the people. So I put myself as one of the participants in that large program that we plan in July and I am let us say sitting in Coimbatore for example. Attending this course is being co-ordinated by our Amrita Vishu and lectures are being given from here. I am sitting and attending all that but suppose I am asked by the teachers that look you have to contribute to some examples, some slides, some questions and I require to do that. When I do that would you not agree that I will have a greater ownership in the whole thing and therefore chances of my proudly going back to my college in Salem and saying look we have created this matter, we not they, that is the ambition. You will now realize that while we talk about the distance education the distance has to diminish because this conversion from they to we will happen through people interaction. Just as it happens when people come to IIT and we interact with them we see that they go back with slightly greater amount of self-confidence whatever, whatever you have to do exactly the same thing for those teachers who assemble at your places. So I will say that enthusing individual teachers who come to your remote centers is the fundamentally most important objective of this whole program not technology, not course contents, not subject, not questions they are important but far more important is to engage persons one to one and that is why we should not have more than 30 or 40 people at a remote center because the coordinators both the technical coordinators of the ISRO setup and the subject coordinators should be able to relate one or one to each of those 40 people at the end of whatever two weeks of engagement or something. So this is the main objective all other things are subsequent. The methodology of conducting IST workshops. So this is the engagement that we are talking about. Incidentally I want a collaboration that teachers in smaller colleges would be normally interested in participating in IST workshop because I believe those certificates count for something in their career. See please understand I again put myself in place of a small teacher in a small college and let's say I am interested in teaching career but how do I build work? So I need promotions in my career. I need to show that I have done something better and therefore if they just get a certificate from the CEP program for IIT Bombay which only they can feel happy about but nobody has cares they are not going to be very much entusiasm. So either QIP or IST I believe they are counted in whatever way. So I have had detailed discussions with IST president and others this course for example is only day for yesterday I got formal approval from IST this is now a formal IST program and the course that we wish to conduct for this subject will also be a formal IST program. So what we are planning? We are planning a novel program. It's a four week IST workshop. So what do we mean by a four week workshop? This four week workshop will be conducted in two phases. There is a two week contact program. During these two weeks here two weeks will not be 10 days. It will be 15 days. Remember I said you have to do 1.5 times the effort. So it will be a hard core two weeks. This contact program is not directly contact in IIT but contact through remote centers. So 35 teachers will come at each of your places and what we will do there? There we will give the lectures as if we are teaching computer program. If computer program is the subject subsequent next subject is likely to be I think thermodynamics. My colleague professor Uday Gaitonde has agreed to create a subject portal for that subject and engage that. That may happen later. This way we want to conduct 15 engineering courses core and elective over the next three years. So these thousand not teachers or 500 teachers whatever is this is the pilot we are running. So for this whatever teachers come they will attend lectures in the morning delivered from IIT. Not necessarily by IIT faculty alone there could be other experts and I hope eventually people from other colleges also come and contribute to giving these lectures. And they will give lectures and the labs and tutorials and quizzes etcetera will be conducted in the remote centers coordinated by UP. So for every subject there will be workshops like this. There we will decide what exactly is to be done and so on how it is to be done. So now you can see the effectiveness. They are getting the best of the lectures from supposedly whosoever are the experts in that. The experts are not talking through the hat because the experts would have interacted with coordinators like you before had to decide on the syllabus and the contents and everything. So first collaboration has started already there. For these two weeks these teachers see the effect of that collaboration. They get the best of the teaching for the complete spectrum best of tutorials best of labs in the remote center. And what is the purpose? At each remote center the coordinator like you will keep on telling them that look you have to go back and do all this in your college. You have to set up the lab environment like this. You have to teach like this. You have to examine like this. Evaluate like this. Whatever. So this is the two week engagement. The next two weeks immediately after the two week contact program is what I call content contribution. So I have given a whole lot of content contribution in item number 6 at the bottom of that methodology page 5 where I have said that they can augment the audio visual contents. You see these thousand teachers you go back to the respective colleges after this. But before they forget the whole thing for two more weeks they are supposed to work at home and they are supposed to make contributions to the large question band. They may set up tutorial questions. They may set up lab assignments. They may set up project assignments. But for every question they write they will have to write an answer. I even suggested that this happens by the way to first year courses. I don't know what is your experience but in my Bharat Yatra I found that whenever I am teaching a first year course say in Andhra Pradesh the medium instruction is English. But the first year student typically asks questions in Telugu. In Madhya Pradesh that fellow asks questions in Hindi. In Maharashtra that fellow asks questions in Marathi. And the answers are also given in Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Tamil etc. And nobody finds there is anything wrong because the learning process is helpful. So I am saying that even such thing we encourage. Suppose some teachers as a traditional thing want to take one of the lectures and ask some students as a sample to ask questions in their mother tongue. Answers those questions in their mother tongue. Record that audio visual thing using a webcam. But gives it along with the English transcript. There is no reason why I cannot accommodate that as useful digital contents. Suppose there is some good Telugu question answers. All colleges in Andhra Pradesh might benefit from that after we are releasing everything. So I am saying we are willing to experiment. We are willing to go to any extent. The more important point is these two weeks content contribution by them will further seal their ownership feeling on the whole effort. They would actually contribute. We would actually collect. This material has to flow. This has to flow through the coordinators. The coordinating center will also be busy for two more weeks. But not for both two weeks. At the end of two weeks they will submit these contents. The coordinators should then carefully go through all the contents said by these 30-35 people. That will be almost one week's work. Consolidate it. Edit it. If necessary send it back for correction. And then send the whole thing to IIT Bomb. And if I get such feedback from all 30 centers we will in the meanwhile be busy doing post-production editing of the audiovisual recording lectures. We will add to it all of this. And then all of this we will release in open source. So you can see when the open source contents are made available every teacher of these 1000 will feel that yes I have contribution here, contribution there and I find it is useful because this covers the syllabus this covers the examination part. We want to treat this entire four-week thing as a single four-week IST workshop. We are negotiating with IST to recognize these teachers as if they have participated in the four-week workshop. And we want them to recognize that the coordinators who also have spent four weeks how they have done let us look at the coordinators now. Coordinators would have done one week of preparatory workshop like this two weeks of actual contact program when you conduct this workshop for those 40 people and one more week of what I call content consolidation and editing. The contents that are given by those teachers the two weeks subsequent to that course these contents will have to be consolidated and the coordinators there might in fact even require an assistance of some ME student or another colleague or whatever. So therefore this entire thing is to be recognized as if these coordinators have coordinated a four-week IST workshop. The credit for conducting a four-week IST workshop must belong to every coordinator. Do you agree because that's the amount of work required. Unfortunately the work does not stop there but the rest of the work is voluntary. What is that work? The next work is launching of what I call the subject portal. Take for example the computer programming course. The computer programming course and I would like you to endorse or negate it is taught to first year students of every branch in every engineering college is that correct? That means if 6 lakh students are being admitted every year 6 lakh students every year are doing computer programming course. How many teachers are involved? At least one teacher teaching a class of 80, 100 or whatever may be two teachers and a couple of teachers to support the labs and other things. You may not call them teachers. They may be technical assistants or whatever. Generally every college would have 2 to 3 teachers engaged in this. If there are 3000 colleges there are 9000 teachers and even at the best of the scale we can reach only 1000 teachers. In our first pilot we are likely to reach 500 teachers. What happens to the other 6000 teachers? Should they not benefit? Should their students not benefit? So what we propose is at the end of all this effort while these contents are available and we will figure out a way to give the DVDs to all the remote centers. I am trying to contact Mosser Bayer. You remember Mosser Bayer is a company which buys IPR of old entertainment thing and they make CDs and DVDs available at amazingly inexpensively. So I am trying to say here there is no IPR. We are releasing the IPR in open source but can you give your technology and can you be the distributor? So imagine now these CDs and DVDs are available in shops in every small town, every place, easily. So we take care of the distribution framework at cost. Additionally of course these heavyweight contents will also be made available for the local storage, whatever. Now this subject portal is an idea of building a collaborative home for all students and teachers in the country who wish to participate A for benefiting from these contents and B for constantly adding to these contents. Some of you would have seen the connection side at Rice University. The spelling is slightly different. It is like the MIT's open courseware but the MIT open courseware, the courseware is created by MIT teachers and some teachers. In the connection side of the Rice University the contents are contributed by individuals and you can choose any contents and actually edit a book and there is in fact a publisher to whom you give those contents. There are tools that fellow can publish a book and print it for you. It will say edited by Professor D. B. Fatak but authors will be those 20 authors whose modules are picked up. They are all in open source. So people can add contents and people can have discussion forums. You have seen the power of the web through which people benefit. Why not we use that power for subsequent interaction and I propose that the 25-30 coordinators of the subject plus the 1000 teachers who participate should be taking the initial responsibility to contribute to this site for one year. This is voluntary so this cannot be compelled but I think you will agree if I say that suppose I am a teacher from Sangli who is participating in this and I already have some contribution made. I think I may be a triple extra inclined to continue further contribution and someday other people will take over. The power of open source is not just the openness and freedom of access to contents. It is also creation of collaborative communities which solve large problems. We propose to exploit that. And the hope is that this subject portal shall become the ultimate in quality and quantity of all educational contents in that subject not only in the country but everywhere in the world. Let it take 10 years. If it succeeds it succeeds. Some portals will die, some portals will go forward the question that I wanted to ask you is do you think first question would you be interested in participating in that dream because it is a lot of hard work. The recognition will be limited to the whatever you call the four week co-ordinators and we shall discuss this in details with IST expert who comes here tomorrow but it is very exciting because you will get a lot of sense of contribution to your colleagues who are at lesser places or who don't have these facilities and if they can benefit that would be a good idea. So this in general is the activity. Just to conclude in last five minutes there are two other dimensions that I would like you to remember in this. That dimension is ultimately the benefit to the teachers will come only when they are able to enhance their own competence significantly. This subject is one matter but again I put myself into the shoes of a teacher in Solaapuram Sangly and I feel that I am just me I would like to do my ME, I would like to do my PhD. Where from will I do that? I believe that the initial germs of these ideas will come out of the interaction. There is no reason why somebody from Nasek should not feel enthused to do a PhD in COEP Pune because the coordinator and the other teachers who are interacting with that Nasek teacher when he is there for 15 days or whatever may probably encourage some kind of research mindset development. Research is actually a mindset. So let me share just for two minutes my opinion about you know PhD is considered a degree traditionally. BE, ME, PhD. According to me PhD is not just a degree but it's more like a mindset. So I have written down a few things of what that mindset is about. I will circulate this list to you later. What does PhD represent as a mindset? Broad perspective of a problem. That's where some of you would be doing research, some of you would have done research. First thing you start with is understanding the problem perspective. The most important thing you need is spirit of enquiry. You must be curious about what has been done, what is there, what is not there, etc. Curiosity is fundamental in any deep learning. Critical in-depth analysis. What do we mean by literature survey which you will ask your BE students also to do? What do ME students do? Same thing to a greater rigor. What do PLG students do? Far broader, far more critical, far more in-depth. Problem solving ability and some innovative thinking because you have to continue to the knowledge at the PhD level so you have to innovatively think, solve a problem differently, take up some new thing, whatever. Metaculous hard work. There is no substitute for that. Rigor and discipline is something which people actually in India spend most time in acquiring. They are not very rigorous. Sometimes we make statements just like that without examining everything and the discipline that is required. I will quote one example which my friend Dr. Karnatkar once pointed out to me in 1970. In maths, many times when there are symbols A, B, C and we want to indicate that they are distinct, we say A not equal to B not equal to C. You agree? Unfortunately, this is not strictly correct. If you want them to be distinct, you have to say A not equal to B not equal to C not equal to A because A not equal to B not equal to C does not necessarily imply that C is not equal to A. What is this? This is rigor. Developing that rigorous mindset, developing that discipline is also an important attribute of a PhD mind. Succint articulation. Again, this is one aspect in which we fail. Do we articulate our ideas, our solutions, our analysis as succinctly, that means as clearly and as precisely as is required to be done, often not. Many of our teacher colleagues quote that English is not my mother tongue, therefore my writing is bad. That is nonsense. English is not my mother tongue either. In English is not the mother tongue of majority of India and yet you will find the top researchers are very good articulators because they take pains to articulate it properly. I used to conduct some tests for the M.Tech admissions when we used to take M.Tech students for the school of IT through entrance. So, I will give a second test to the people. I will ask them to write 10 sentences about their family and the next question will say, rewrite your family description in your mother tongue. People who made mistakes in English did not write in their mother tongue correctly either. Absolutely 95% correlation. What it means is people have not disciplined their mind to articulate clearly or correctly. That means they do not think it is important. But when you are doing PhD, you are publishing papers, you are presenting papers, you are presenting ideas, you are discussing ideas, this is important. And last of course is perseverance, ability not to give up, not to crack under pressure because you will fail many times. You will agree that when you do PhD, you actually acquire this mindset. Actually, when I go back and think a PhD guide generally sees that the student has acquired this mindset and says, okay, you go and submit your thesis. We wrongly assume that because we have submitted our thesis, we got a PhD. Now, here is the question, why I consider education and research between sides. If this is the mindset that we are looking forward to, is that not the expectation of every parent that this mindset should be inculcated in my word right in the school education, right in the college education everywhere? Do I not require exactly the same thing from a 10 standard student? So, what is PhD then? PhD is merely the culmination and a social recognition that you have reached probably the ultimate in that mindset. But according to me, this mindset should be developed amongst our students right from first standard but certainly in the engineering curriculum time when they are covering. So, here is my humble request. You should take this back to the teaching community that please do not regard research and teaching as two completely independent things as if they are nothing to do with each other. As a matter of fact, why the best research institutions are also good teaching institutions is because they get the research of findings of their work into the teaching while they teach maybe advanced courses or whatever even simple course. So, this is something that I would like you to get to and through that you say that look whatever you learn, whatever mindset you develop through these efforts please continue and do a formal PhD later, do a formal emulator for which we can find some other. So, you see the dream friends here is not just to train people in a subject called computer program. That is incidental. As I said we are going to do 15 courses over the next three years or four years. God willing because for two years I have been struggling. MSRD did not find it worth funding it. Then finally I said if you are not giving money I am starting it on my own. In fact I asked my computer society president and others I am starting this program and I want to see whether teachers will participate by spending money from their own pocket because there is cost to everything. So, I asked them I want to know whether teachers are interested in improving themselves because somebody else is paying money or because they want to improve them. And they all said yes we will. The fact of life is made away. Teachers would like to spend money but as we saw earlier they are not being paid extraordinarily well that they can afford to spend and frankly everybody would like to minimize expenditure from personal. So, colleges, teachers, etc. We will talk about the financial aspects tomorrow when we discuss the ISD program but to conclude I will tell you that MSRD has approved funds for running a pilot and this is the pilot we are running. If we do this pilot successfully, if there are visible what should I say achievements on the field I am sure MSRD because they have in principle approved the larger project. So, in this project we are trying to figure out how much it cost to do something well and how we can go about. Technically we are going to discuss computer programming, teaching and learning effectiveness.