 Good morning and welcome to this synchronous session for the faculty development program on online and blended learning. We have been with you for the past two weeks and today and tomorrow is when we will have plenty of interaction, activities, revisions and so on. I am Sahana Murthy, a faculty member in the interdisciplinary program in educational technology at IIT Bombay and with me is Jay Krishnan here. He is also from educational technology at IIT Bombay and before we begin today's activities, I would like to do a floor transfer to Professor Fatak who is in Trivandrum right now and he will join us live from Trivandrum. Good morning Professor Fatak. Good morning. First of all, thank you IIT Bombay. Thank you to Sahana Murthy and Jay Krishnan for permitting me to address all the participants in Trivandrum. I would also like to thank Mr. Biju Varghese and Professor Rajesh Babu from Mar-Basilyas College for facilitating this. I can physically see so many participants which rarely happens when I am in Mumbai sitting alone. I am sure that there are thousands across the country and that is what excites me. In this brief inaugural address, I would like to re-emphasize a few points which have been stated time and again on many occasions. When we talk of technology and what it permits, it actually permits us to do two things. One is to scale up our efforts so that as teachers instead of engaging 50, 60 or 100 people, we can actually engage thousands of learners. The second, it permits us to use our time more effectively and therefore if you can call productivity of a teacher as measured by the number of learners whose learning is positively affected, then ICT is a great facilitator. A good example is what we are doing today. We started this from IIT Bombay many years ago. Today we have over 300 remote centers out of which 120 are so participating in this. They are more than 4,100 enrollment. Frankly, when I started on designing and offering this FDP, I was not sure that in a self-funded model how many participants will be interested in joining. I would have been happy if there were more than 1000 people. I wrote to ICT chairman yesterday that there are 4,000 enrollments and more than 3,300 active participants. Of course, we will know for sure at the end of the day today when the attendance, information, tickle, syndrome, all these things. Coming back to the use of technology, you will find that more and more information, more and more knowledge is becoming available on internet in the form of various digital assets. Earlier there used to be text tutorials, interactive quizzes, books. Now you have video lectures recorded. In fact, the amount of information available on the net is way beyond what any one person can ever completely comprehend. Coming back to individual subjects which we teach for each subject, the amount of information and knowledge available and not only proprietary but even open source is so phenomenal that no single teacher, no single batch of students can assimilate all of it. In fact, knowledge has always been extraordinarily large as compared to what we try to teach and learn in a particular course. The purpose of the system of education which defines the syllabus, defines subjects to be studied, defines timetables is to ensure that the basic minimum components of knowledge for that subject are covered properly by all learners. And that is how all of our degree programs are designed. However, conventional education where we engage our students in classrooms is not proving adequate given the first increasing number of learners and relatively less increase in the number of teachers available. I will touch upon a corresponding point. What should be the ideal size of a class? When we were in school, 25 students was considered a good number for a batch. And we came to college, we had 40 students. I remember my engineering college days in 1964 and in that particular year, the university increased the enrollment to 60 and many teachers were shouting at the system and at each other, how can we handle 60 schools at a time? I think today it is routine to have a batch of 100 or even 125 people and we don't crib anymore. In IIT Bombay, I teach some core courses where I have 250 to 300 students at what point in time the number of students become impossible to handle. According to me, the best teaching learning happens when there is one guru and one disciple and there are two learners who are already a crowd. Three onwards is the attention of the teacher gets divided. 100, 200, etc. are not numbers where teacher can meaningfully attend to every individual. However, is teacher meaningless than not at all? The teacher actually provides a facilitation or a mechanism for a large number of people to listen to a coherent lecture, think about that lecture and then discuss problems or do some homework, do some practice, give examples. That has been our model. But when information including lectures are available on the net, students would increasingly believe that the teachers should engage them differently. We have sessions on flip classroom. All of you are aware probably of what a flip classroom is. Not many amongst us have practiced flip classroom. In IIT Bombay, there are more than 50 faculty members who routinely now give courses using the flip classroom technique. And what is that flip classroom technique? We are saying that there will be no lectures. Our lectures are prerecorded. Listen to the lectures at home, but come to the classroom to discuss problems. And essentially we run our class sessions as tutorials. We have found time and again, as many people in the world, that this engagement model is far more productive from a learning point of view. Everywhere it has been proven statistically by all surveys, by all counts, that students' engagement increases at least 100 percent more and students' learning improves 60 percent more. The same topic that we deal with. Unfortunately, this requires some extra preparation and a different style of handling on our path as teachers. And if we are not used to it, then we will never attempt it because we are all very comfortable doing the same thing again and again for which we are used to model. Since we at IIT Bombay and many others have benefited from these practices, we thought that this message must reach out to all our college teachers in the country. When I talked to the AICD chairman, he felt that it is so important that this kind of faculty development program should not only be designed and run once, but it should be run 100 times. His ambition is all 500,000 teachers of all professional institutions in the country should be trained in using ICT more effectively in this fashion. And he wants to get it done in three years. What you are attending, friends, is actually a history-making event. This is the first faculty development program of this kind. All of you would be apprehensive on what this FDP is. Some of you have participated in some earlier faculty development workshops related to pedagogy and effective technical communication. In fact, my colleagues Prasanna Murthy, Prasiddhar Iyer and of course the young faculty have been working on that. Based on whatever our learnings were, they have further modified the content to suit the spirit of this FDP. Namely, how do we empower our college teachers to use ICT effectively in a flipped classroom setting, where the lectures are not necessarily delivered by me, but they might be delivered by somebody else. All are prerecorded and I have to now expand on those lectures in a classroom engagement through my tutorial. Now, the easy thing to do, all of us who have done that earlier understand that first time when you do it, the effort required is about three times the effort required for preparing for one particular set. But once you do that, subsequent offering, the effort is less. More importantly, one can handle more effectively larger number of students in exactly the same given time. That's the advantage. Now, this FDP is not a conventional FDP of two weeks, which is all face-to-face interaction. That is how the workshop that we have conducted in the past. We also tried one week online portion and one week face-to-face portion. But this is a longer faculty development program. It's a four-week program of which we are saying almost three weeks equivalent is online, out of which two weeks are to be completed in ten physical weeks. And then there is to be a team effort, which is to be concluded after the ten weeks are over. The physical interaction we have planned over three weekends and I am aware that many people are uncomfortable spending their weekends attending these workshops. We have got several observations that can we change this Saturday Sunday to something else? We have frozen these Saturday Sundays so they are not changing it. There are a few people who may, because of circumstances, not be able to attend a particular day or a particular session. My request to them and to the corresponding workshop coordinators is that they should ensure that such people complete the tasks which are supposed to be done during face-to-face interaction immediately after the session ends. Suppose I am unable to attend, let's say at Mal Basis College today, but I should connect with my workshop coordinator, find out what transpired during those two days and do the exercises which I was supposed to do. Of course I will be alone and I should possibly connect with two or three other faculty colleagues from the same remote center who have attended that class and request them to help me understand what has happened. There is no shortcut to hard work if we have to empower ourselves in using technology proper. Of course there will be exchanges, but this is the mechanism that we have thought of. Another thing is this is the first time we are running a faculty development program directly under the ages of AIC. So far we used to run the programs under ISD, this is also the first time AIC is approving an FDP which is largely being run as most. All of us are watching therefore with rapidity as to what will be the outcome. The outcome depends on all of you. All the participants will decide how useful and effective this whole course is. I would also like to tell you one more thing. In all the previous workshops that we have conducted whether they were in thermodynamics or analog electronics or algorithms or whatever the people who conducted lecture sessions from IIT Bombay or IIT Kharagpur were truly great experts in their own field as well-known giants and therefore all of us could draw upon their expertise and their expertise. In this particular FDP people like us who are conducting this FDP are also learners like you. There are no experts. We have the advantage of having attempted to do things for maybe five years. Taksana Murthy has the advantage of having actually studied this formally and implementing it maybe for 10 years but other than that every one of us is actually just learning to climb this address and this journey has to be undertaken together. This is why you will notice that in this FDP I have designed last two weeks specifically to discuss collaboration and building collaborative communities. Earlier the collaboration did happen. How does collaboration happen within an institution? Suppose there are four teachers teaching computer programming, three teachers teaching thermodynamics. They will invariably discuss with each other, share notes, share slides, share question mark questions. That is the kind of collaboration that happens. Among the students collaboration happens when they discuss particular common problems. Of course there is also a slightly unwanted collaboration that occasionally happens during exam time where I look at my neighbor's answer book and give my answer but we are not talking of that collaboration. We are talking of meaningful collaboration. The future collaboration will be changed in two major respects. Number one, there will hardly be any difference between students and teachers. All will work together as learners with teachers knowing a little bit more than the learner. Exactly the situation that I am describing for this particular topic where we teachers are also learners. Second and most important the collaboration will not necessarily happen between students and teachers who are physically together in an institution. The collaboration will happen across the globe certainly for us across India and that collaboration is actually very very important because the people who are enthusiastic to respond to queries by others need not necessarily be part of the same physical enclave. They could be anywhere. When we enhance the number of participants in the community the number of collaborative sub teams also increases and the few people who are enthusiastic to respond to queries to come up with new ideas are heard and seen by all the people in that group. That's a great advantage. If some new experiment happens in Mar-Basilias College for example tomorrow ordinarily I at IIT Bombay will have no clue on what is being done here. However through collaboration using technology it is possible for all of us to know good things that are happening everywhere. There is one danger of such scaling up. Take our case for example there are four thousand participants. The most important component for such collaboration is discussion forum. I hope you have all seen the discussion forum. What happens is the first impulse of a new person who joins the discussion forum is to make a post. Hi I am Deepak Patel and hello good morning or welcome something like that. Now you suddenly get four thousand posts. Everybody saying hi hello how are you? Very nice but does it add value? Now suppose there are exactly 10 people who are raising some specific important points about the FDP itself. Those 10 voices are likely to be lost in a plethora of four thousand emails or four thousand posts. That means we all have to learn the proper discipline of using the discussion forum. Of course we should be able to say hello hi and so on but then we have to learn to add discussion forum threads differently so that people who wish to look at a particular aspect can directly go to that topic which probably may have 20, 30, 50 or 100 posts all related to that topic. I am just trying to mention a few important things which will be elaborating further when we discuss the collaboration and this collaboration will be discussed in multiple places and in multiple classes. In fact you already started practicing collaboration where all of you are actually participating in this endeavor using technology. Unfortunately not all participants have registered themselves for the IIT Bombay X platform. I notice as of today morning there are only 3,350 participants who had enrolled on IIT Bombay X. IIT Bombay X is the MOOCs platform which is scalable. That is where we propose to run all our multiple choice quizzes that they can be attempted without any problems on scaling. We used Moodle earlier but whenever large number of people start answering quizzes on Moodle you have a serious issue of concurrency problems and the Moodle crash. Moodle will of course be used for all your assignments and peer assessment as we have expected. But those of you who have not yet enrolled on IIT Bombay X I request you to kindly do so as quickly as possible because both platforms are required to be used for doing different aspects of this. As I have already said in my opening lecture earlier which has been recorded is that this FDP is not about enhancing your knowledge of information and communication technology although that will happen. The primary purpose is to learn how to use ICT effectively to enhance my value as a teacher in online and blended and that is the reason why the weekly schedule that you see is different from just the topics that were listed in the original list. We will of course be covering all those topics but the sequence in which we will cover them will emphasize right from day one the main objective of empowering ourselves with these actual activities. As I said there are several activities and several sessions. You should at the end of the FDP be able to be more comfortably handled Moodle as a teacher. You should be aware of what the MOOCs platform features are. More importantly you should be aware how to create and use an open educational resource in your own classes in your own purpose, how to handle live classroom. Unfortunately this FDP is happening when it's a vacation time that means you won't get an opportunity to practice what you're learning here but I will urge you to plan such practice in the immediately oncoming semester and new academic year. You may not do it with a flip classroom by teaching for the entire class for the entire duration but please do pick up one or two topics during the summer vacation where you believe that you can effectively use the flip classroom. Use either the prerecorded lectures on that topic from any experts anywhere on YouTube or you yourself can record your lecture. We'll have mechanisms which will explain to you how you can record your lectures, how you can record just the voice and slide through spoken tutorial methodology. It is possible to use variety of these techniques. I would like to mention a few facts even about this FDP as regards collaboration. I did mention that while all of us are eager to participate in forums such as discussion forum there are a few of us who are enthusiastic enough to go beyond just making a post which raises a question or making a post which answers one question. Such enthusiastic people look at what everybody is posting and if people are posting questions they themselves start answering. Ordinarily the answers should come from the backend faculty team at IIT Bombay but as you know the backend team consists not only of the faculty members but also of a large number of teaching assistants. Teaching assistants who are all research scholars and impact schools are supposed to monitor the discussion forum and answer all the polls. Sadly the TA team is just getting into play and therefore Satsana Murthy and my colleague Jay Krishnan have been answering most of the polls. What is remarkable is that there are a number of faculty colleagues from amongst the participants who have taken it upon themselves to answer various. It is my privilege to read out the names of few who have put more than 10 polls all related to answers to questions that have been raised by other people. I thought I would like to publicly acknowledge this contribution from people. There are of course many more who have posted eight or nine or ten polls but I am just reading names of more than ten. It is an arbitrary number. Dr. Subangi Girgavkar from LAD and Shri Mati RP College for Women in Nagpur. Mr. Mohammad Kami Ruddin Khan from Siddhatta Group of Educational Institutions, Ranga Reddy. Professor Punjarla Gauri Kusuma from Prakati Mahavidyalaya. Professor Manik Ghosh from Birla Institute of Technology, Meshwara. Professor Jati Nambasana from VH Dharadi College of Inging and Technology Rajkot. The last two names that I am going to give have done much more than these other people. Professor Payal Rahul Dande from SVK, NMIMA School of Pharmacy and Technology Management in Dhulia has posted as many as 28 polls answering questions. Last but not the least, Professor Jack Palsing Rana from Akman Institute of Management, Greater Noida has posted 122 polls. Believe me, he is better than us teachers who are conducting this. So thank you everyone and particularly thank you Professor Jack Palsing Rana. Someday I would like to meet you in Noida and personally compliment you and thank you. The point I am making is that in times now or such that there is hardly any distinction between teachers and learners. All of us are in this game together and many times as I have seen in last 45 years in IIT Bombay, Amti Nakhejan where I have learned so much from my students. Take this topic itself. The maximum learning I have had the opportunity to get was from my younger colleagues, Professor Siddharah here and Professor Rana. We have been working for last 10 years in education as a scholar. But do you know the person from whom I have learned most in last one month is the young director. He is not yet a professor. He is a research scholar. He is just doing his PhD like many of you young teachers here. But the amount of knowledge that I have learned from him is like rose guru for me. This is what I would like to emphasize strength. Please do not distinguish between yourselves and your students. All of us are in this game together. We have to learn from each other from anyone anywhere and there is no hierarchy in this platform. In this particular FDP I would like therefore to see a much more significant and focused contribution from all of you. Not only in doing things which are prescribed, doing things well, primarily so that you empower yourself and prepare for the coming years. But more importantly, try to build collaborative communities, small communities, sub-communities in your own domain, in your own area and do not be limited by the boundaries of your physical presence. Internet is there. Network is there. You are all network. Use this networking so that when we come to actually discussion on the building and nurturing communities, we would already have built a few communities. I think that is being facilitated because all of you are supposed to identify the domain in which you are primarily interested in working so that when we get the domains we can find, we can form actually the sub-teams of culture. Let me conclude by once again reminding you of the understaffed that this nation says. I have repeated this often and all of you would be aware of this demography and statistics. In 2011, there were 370 million Indians younger than 14 years of age. That was 2011. The leading wave of that demography has already entered our institution. The whole of professional education body of engineering admits only 1.25 million students every year. An equal or double or three times that number joins other colleges. And an extraordinary large number is deprived of college education completely. The next generation of India is going to ask us teachers, what did you do for us? And that is the reason why we have to go beyond our own call of duty, which is limited to doing well our job in the college in which you are into us. Of course, that must be done. But beyond that, each one of you, these 3,500 or 4,000, I call them pioneers, have to actually spread this word and help many more teachers in coming years, not only in engineering institutions, but in other colleges and later in high school. So that is where all our system communities are empowered to handle more and more learners more effectively. These numbers are daunting, but then this nation is showing a very various kind of resilience. It is another thing which I keep mentioning again and again, that there is no other nation in this world which is faced with the kind of issues that we are faced. For example, there is no other country which has so many languages. We have what? 25 or so scheduled languages and hundreds other languages. There is no other country which has so many ethnicities. There is no other country which has so many religions. There is no other country which has so many states with complete individualistic characteristics. And as an added attraction, we Indians specialize in fighting over each and every such issue and yet we have survived as a single democratic nation for all these years. That means inherently, there is some strength among us. It is possibly the strength of being simply good humans relating to other humans and identifying with one country called India. I think this identity should give us enough courage and enough power to ensure that we do our task with greater contribution than what we could do alone. Namely, use technology and use our colleagues as communities to be more effective. That's all I will say. Thank you so much. God bless you all. Thank you, Professor Patak for your kind words.