 Good morning everybody. I am Deepak Patak. I have been a teacher here in IIT for last 40 years. And this particular initiative of engaging teachers in specific subjects on a very large scale in the country was conceived by us about 5 years ago. We started this distance education activities about 10 years ago in IIT and we believed that it is not just the creation of e-contents which are meaningful. They could at best be supplementary to our teaching learning efforts, but since the major teaching learning would happen, continue to happen on a model of a classroom, we thought we could emulate the classroom model for scaling up our interaction with teachers. And that is how we perceived of this particular model where we have 30, 40 remote centers and we request participating teachers to come at each one of the remote centers and interact with us. As you would have seen in the last two weeks, the model involves expert faculty members giving talks from one place which happens today to be IIT Bombay. It could be any other place in fact in future and the participants attend these lectures from various remote centers, but they are engaged again in some kind of a classroom group environment in the afternoons doing their labs, doing their assignments, doing their tutorials because at the end of the day teaching and learning is people's game. It is not just an electronic game to be handled by ICT. Technology has to be subservient to our own methodology and our own practices which is what we have attempted to do. And I hope you have all benefited from this particular course. I would like to use this opportunity to share some of my thoughts on the general teaching learning environment in our professional institutions. And you would endorse this because you would be seeing this in actual happening every day of your life when you teach courses to your students in different colleges. First of all, you would all agree that in the last 20 years, the number of colleges in the country have increased exponentially and they continue to increase exponentially. In most standard and conventional academic infrastructure, the faculty members are generally expected to have a PhD degree even though they are teaching a first year B or a B Tech student. Why? Because we believe that research and teaching have to go hand in hand. Any person who is familiar with the advanced concepts and have worked on some research problem, we believe is better place to engage even first year students in clarifying basic concepts. Unfortunately, because of the unprecedented growth of the number of colleges and the inability of the nation to build an equivalent infrastructure to provide PhD and M Tech level courses for prospective teachers, we have a serious situation where a large number of our faculty members teaching in engineering colleges do not have a PhD or many do not even have a master's degree. The fault is not theirs, the fault is the inability of the nation to provide opportunities. For this reason that we decided to scale up our efforts in engaging teachers, we are beginning with introductory courses which are taught at the core engineering level, but we will certainly carry forward this initiative and engage teachers in advanced courses and even in research courses in coming years. Only yesterday I had attended a meeting, attended a meeting at ministry. The ministry is aware of the advantages of this kind of scaled engagement and they have asked us to prepare plans for more advanced courses in future years to come. I would still suggest that the large number of faculty colleagues who are participating in this particular program should continue vigorously to do their own research work in whatever little fashion that they could at their own place of work. Research is not done only in while you are doing PhD. PhD is merely a mindset indicator which you attend after spending a few years on solving some research problem, but that mindset attainment is a difficult task that has to be pursued by every individual. And I hope, I hold in fact the opinion that good research can be carried out at any place of course, the infrastructure, the environment etcetera, etcetera have to be conducive, but the most important thing is the commitment of an individual to say that no matter how hectic my life is, no matter how many courses I have to teach, no matter how many students mark sheet, answer books I have to evaluate, I will always find sometime every week, maybe two hours, maybe four hours to do some hardcore thinking on some hard problem and come up with my research ideas. I will do some reading of research papers. I may not have research journals available in my college, but I will use internet to access the recent research work that I can see published. I will tell you that I have found even Wikipedia to be a great source of technical information on absolutely the state of art and current technical subjects. I would submit that our teacher colleagues would do very well to occasionally look at the technical contents on Wikipedia and enrich themselves. I will also suggest that we have broken the academics into various fields. Let us consider the engineering discipline. We have in engineering civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, metallurgical engineering and so on. Within mechanical engineering, we now have separate fields of studies because of the growing body of the knowledge. What we forget is that these nomenclatures that we have created and the corresponding division of students into different branches, teachers into different branches that we have done. We have done this primarily to address a very fast growing body of knowledge in everything. It is not humanly possible for everybody to know everything in everything, but I would also submit that knowledge per se cannot be bound or cannot be broken into such siloed. You have seen, I have noticed that in the interaction the last half an hour that I have witnessed, I have seen for example, people truly being concerned about differences and similarities or differences and interactive effects between say nuclear radiation and the heat transfer. This was just one example, but I would like to say that because the siloed that we have built, the kind of teaching that we do itself is getting affected and we are increasingly becoming victims of our own divisions. For example, today I find that students of electrical engineering are rarely convinced that they must understand the basics of thermodynamics and heat transfer because they think they have nothing to do with it. The worst lot is probably my own discipline, the computer science students, they do genuinely believe that they will have nothing to do with heat transfer because they are unlikely to encounter it in their lives. This is very sad. In the old days, when the engine courses used to be of 5 years duration, I remember when I did my engineering, I was to become an electrical engineer, but there was no solace. I had to do a course in surveying, I had to do a course in heat engines because it was believed that the fundamental engineering principles have to be understood by every engineer no matter what brand or what branch one qualifies it. We were told time and again that whatever with the nomenclature you might give, mechanical engineering is mother of all engineering. I think that spirit is now completely lost. I see it increasingly in engineering colleges when I visit that not only students of other disciplines, but even teachers of other disciplines have started maintaining a respectful distance from these basic concepts in engineering. I think this is very contraindicated for a proper holistic development of engineering education in the country. While of course the teachers and students of other disciplines are responsible for this, but I would submit that the initiative has to be taken by our colleagues in the mechanical engineering department who are perhaps busy teaching the core courses in mechanical engineering to all the students and some courses only to mechanical engineering students. It is there that I will request my colleague teachers to constantly keep coming up with examples which will perhaps be of interest to students who are pursuing other disciplines. I will give you one example. This happened in my own lab in the software lab about 25, 30 years or 25 years ago. Early 80s when the personal computer had come out in the world for the first time and the personal computer model that was given to us for evaluation was a vertical model instead of a horizontal model. In that particular PC, I was staggering to see when it was opened up that the power supply unit which is a very heavy portion of the entire PC was sitting on the top rather than at the bottom and the way the horizontal layout was converted into a vertical layout by simply resetting the physical shape. The fan which was supposed to take out the heat was kept at the bottom and the cards the electronic cards were actually obstructing the flow of that heat and I asked the students who were working on that PC saying do not you think there is something wrong with this PC. They moved around it one circle and they said no sir it has been working fine for last three days and that was because it was in an air conditioned environment and I said what about the center of gravity. Some smart student at least picked that up and said yes sir the power supply unit should be at the bottom and not at the top. Then I said and what about exchange of heat then they were completely flabbergasted. They were computerized students of IIT Bombay they said what about heat sir. I said how is the heat transfer being affected by changing the geometry of your entire configuration and then one fellow thought for 10 seconds and gave a very bright answer. He said oh that is a mechanical engineering problem. What he was basically telling me is that as a computer science student he will have nothing to do with the heat transfer problem because that is a mechanical engineering problem. I was very upset with this I shared this with my colleague Professor Gayathonde who actually put together an experimental setup for an m tech project where he put the entire PC in some kind of prospect cover put about 14 or 15 sensors and started measuring the temperature at each point in that PC configuration. Why I recite this example is to suggest that there is nothing like heat transfer or for that matter any particular topic being completely isolated from rest of the world. And every practicing engineer has to be familiar with fundamental aspects of engineering be that in any case. Even to the mechanical engineers I would submit that many times we miss out on the associated activities because either we have not studied them or they are not considered part of our standard syllabus. Let me give you a couple of examples you would all have seen these fireflies flying around fireflies generate very nice sparks of light. The standard mechanism of generating light in our engineering is known to be transfer heat into light that is how we see the normal bulk. If fireflies were to generate light from such intensive heat generation they would burn and yet they would not burn why they use something called bioluminescence. Consider another aspect consider manufacturing of ammonia we do that routinely in chemical processes these are all high temperature high pressure processes. And yet the nitrogen acquisition by plants is done at normal temperatures and pressures we call this nitrogen fixing. Do we study any one of these phenomena we do not because they are traditionally considered to be part of biology or life sciences. And since life sciences and biology is not part of our syllabus we do not bother about. I would like to comment on the notion of a syllabus that is because almost all teaching seems to be governed by our syllabi and all learning seems to be governed by examination pattern. I think these two have been detrimental to the growth of proper quality in our engineering education. Sadly we may not be able to do much about it. We keep saying that in IIT Bombay there is a syllabus written and approved by the senate. But when my colleague teachers teach their courses I do not think they bound themselves by that syllabus. Why because they understand that syllabus is a reflection of what knowledge has been accumulated in the past by experts working in that field. They are aware that knowledge will continue to grow. They are also aware that the challenges and problems faced by the students when they pass out of the college and go out in the field will be completely new and different and which will require probably new knowledge or new approach to be generated by them on the field when they approach that problem. And therefore they properly understand that syllabus is at best a guideline to reflect on what knowledge has been accumulated. But when we teach we are preparing our students for the future and therefore if any learning specially the ability to think through problems is limited only by what has been achieved in the past which is what syllabus represented syllabus represents we would not be able to train our students to solve real life problems. And that is the reason when at least in the IIT system we routinely take pangas with syllabus. That is the reason why every teacher when he or she teaches a course whatever he or she teaches becomes the syllabus. That facility and freedom may not be available to a large number of our teacher colleagues because of the university system where the syllabus itself has been defined several years ago and is very rarely changed. However and this is my submission I would suggest that my teacher colleagues who are attending this course should attempt to do two things. One to try and influence their universities and boards to keep changing the syllabus more frequently. And second this is more important in their own teaching could they not find out avenues where they could exceed the syllabus. Where they could excite the students by telling them about the recent happening which have not been captured by the syllabus. But which are related to some basic concepts and therefore they are relevant to the thinking of the students even if they are doing some basic course. You will have to teach as per the syllabus and the exam pattern because that unfortunately is what the students will gobble up. But I would submit that there would be a few students in your class and every class there will be such few students who are willing to think differently, who are willing to think beyond the boundaries of the syllabus. Can you not for example announce in a semester that look you will hold let us say every Sunday morning a two hour session for discussing only the recent advances in the field. I am aware that not all the students of your class will be interested in coming to such Sunday morning session. But I have seen several amongst you doing similar initiatives across the country in different places and I have seen that out of a class of 60 to 100 students at least 10 to 15 students will come forward and attend this. Those 10 to 15 students are important because they are like you willing to look at things beyond the syllabus. They are the ones who are likely to make a difference to themselves to the field of studies to the field of their activities and ultimately to the nation. I would submit that there is a lot of merit in attempting to do this. Set up a group called problem solvers group. This problem solvers group does not look at normal problem. It looks at hard problem which are never asked in an examination, but attempting to solve them would create a whole lot of new thinking in the minds of students and who knows even amongst you. I have seen I have been a teacher here for 40 years. Believe me when I say this every year when I teach a course even though I have taught that course multiple time even though the country recognizes me to be an expert in that course every year without fail. Some observation or the other by some student will give me new idea something which I have not thought of. Why do you think that this should not happen in every college where students are there? Out of 100 students I can tell you that you will find in every college at least 20 students who think differently unfortunately because of our responsibility to take all 100 students and get them at least to pass the course we sometimes miss out on these 20 or 10 or 4 students. I would submit that just as it is important to take care of very weak students in the class. It is equally or perhaps more important to take care of those 4, 5, 8, 10 students who are different, who are the leaders and who are the possible thinkers to excite them to think, to excite them to solve hard problems is also a responsibility that each of us as a teacher should fulfill. Here is my submission that while we attempt to create this kind of environment and this kind of empowerment to all teachers let this empowerment to go further than just doing the mundane teaching for the course which are required to do as per your university syllabus and go beyond that and create such groups. You may have initially a group within your own college, but as a part of this project itself we are trying to create a open source site based on JUMLA this portal would probably launch in few months time, but all the material that you contribute all the material that my colleague teachers have created for this course the entire teaching learning material in terms of slides, the complete video recorded lectures plus the assignment, the tutorials, the labs etcetera etcetera that you have gone through will be kept on that open source portal. That idea is that lakhs of students and thousands of other teacher colleagues who have not benefited from this live interaction could at least see what all happened and excess the knowledge that was created. Please remember knowledge is not created only by the slides and the problem set that you do, knowledge is actually learnt by observing the interaction that happens. That is the reason why I did not interrupt the interaction that was happening sometime ago. I am sure that every day there would have been an interaction of this type. I firmly believe that it is that interaction which creates additional thinking in the minds of people who observe that interaction. So, as you will notice from some centers some one person was asking a question and one person was answering it, but the activity of asking that question and the activity of that question getting answered creates an equivalent thermal conduction, convection and radiation in the minds of all others who are attending. Why I could feel that I was benefiting tremendously from the interaction that was happening there. It is this interaction which we propose to capture in this audio visual recording and also keep that interaction available on the model so that other people could benefit. It is towards this end that I suggest that whatever submissions that you will make after the workshop that will also be made part of the open source contents here. If at all you succeed in building such problem solver group in your own area, in your own college, the interactive portal that will be setting up two months later will permit any such creation of knowledge, any such discussion in the problem solving group that you have in individual colleges could very well become part of the larger portal and that portal could create eventually larger collaborative groups which will attempt thinking solving larger problems, difficult problems and that would eventually see into the learning and teaching at every college that happens in everything that is the larger ambition. Innovative thinking is not the property of only those people who are experts in that field. I will give you one example of how innovative thinking changed something since it is related to heat transfer. You will recall early days of steam engines. The steam engines and the early boilers used to be very conventional boilers. Those of you have seen in old days there used to be a bomba for heating water in every house. So, there will be a large vessel and there will be a single tube through which the flue gases will flow, you will have some fire below and that would heat the water. That was actually the model used in the earliest boilers even those which were employed in steam engines. The leading steam engine company had a person who used to always wonder whether that is the best and the most efficient way of heating water and generating steam. So, he for the first time suggested why do not you attempt instead of letting the hot gases flow only through a single central pipe. Why do not you push it through multiple pipes so that they will heat a larger amount of water and you would have perhaps more efficient steam generation. This was in fact attempted for the first time by the British company which led to the first design of multi-tubular boilers. Till then there used to be a single tube. Do you know who was the person who suggested this? He was not an engineer. He was not an expert even in those days on heat transfer and steam engines. He was the company secretary of that company who used to handle accounts for that company. It so happened that that was a small company and any design activities etcetera etcetera used to happen in the same physical premises where the accounting people will also say. He was just interested and curious. Why I recite this example is because please do not believe that innovations for solving problems will necessarily come only from the experts in that field. Innovations could come from anybody anywhere because innovation is nothing to do with a specific where it has to do much more with the ability to think differently to solve a problem. I would like to suggest that it is because of this reason that you should not only inculcate ability to do innovative thinking amongst your students but try to do the same in students of other disciplines and colleague teachers of other disciplines as well. I would only say that in this 21st century where clearly the economic developments all across the world suggest that the fulcrum of development is moving from the western world to the Asian world again. We have seen that in spite of the turbulence that you see elsewhere India and China are growing at rates which are not imaginable by the previous standards and the next 10, 20, 30 years we will see unprecedented growth in both the large India and China the two countries but as well in other Asian markets. Now when the growth happens when the economic growth happens it has to be matched by the growth in creation of intellectual wealth because that is what will further fire and fuel this growth and this has to happen primarily to our through our professional courses primarily through our engineering courses. You will see product companies you will see service companies coming up in this country but you still have to see a whole lot of original ideas coming and getting into the future products. That is where I would suggest that out of 100 students that you have while you do pay attention to all 100 you do help the weak students to learn as much they could to pass the courses at least but please pay special attention to those 5, 8, 10 students that you will find who think differently who think much beyond the syllabus and try to help them and in the process create an environment in every college such that the college gets known for its ability to solve harder problems. The college gets known to become a higher quality educational institution I would think that is the joint responsibility that all of us have. There are many things that I would like to share some day perhaps I will write again on the portal a block spot where I will keep exchanging my ideas with you but at this juncture I will only submit that the feedback tells me from for so far that most of you have enjoyed and benefited from this course. Please pass on this message to all your other colleagues in your own colleges. I will just mention a future workshop that we are planning this workshop will not be for 1000 teachers but this will be for 10,000 teachers and we wish to conduct this workshop from 200 remote centers. This will be a shorter workshop of 5 days duration and this workshop will be on what we call research methodology. This is not related to any particular branch like mechanical civil or something any teacher doing either a masters program or pursuing a PhD or learning to pursue any one of these would benefit from this workshop because here we will discuss what is research what motivates one to do research including the desire to acquire a PhD so that I can get promotion. What is the methodology that needs to be followed? There is a professor in mechanical in IIT Madras professor Karmalkar who had given a talk on the research methodology to our research scholars of few years ago our colleague professor Patra Dhan head of the chemical engine department had facilitated that and he had put all those lecture contents in open source. We are trying to fashion this course unfortunately we do not have a budget to conduct a one week program for 10,000 teachers. This program will therefore be conducted in a very peculiar way in so far as budgeting is concerned in the first time we will be attempting to run this program but we believe that such a program would be important and very useful for the teaching fraternity. We would like to know there is a question that my colleague Kalpana has put in your feedback whether you would be interested in attending such a course. If you would be then this would be the first time that this country will show to itself and to the world that we the teachers believe that learning these kind of things are important for us and we are willing to do this at our own cost if it is necessary. So, that is my ambition that all of us would contribute to the better and higher quality of learning and teaching that should happen in our engineering institutions because with all said and done it is the engineering institutions which will produce the tomorrows wealth creators who are all going to depend upon technology and the engineering to generate wealth tomorrow. With this I will conclude my talk. I must use this opportunity to thank a set of people who have helped in the proper conduct and the fruitful conclusion of this two week workshop. To begin with I would like to thank my colleagues here. Let me tell you that the interaction that you had with them for two weeks is what you have seen but what I have seen is the enormous amount of effort that they have taken for past several months to work out on the contents and the learning material for this course. So, thank you very much and I really appreciate your activities. Let me honor them by giving them a token of our love and affection and thanks without them this course would not have been possible. So, thank you for everything that you did. I am sure that they have with them very capable teaching assistants as we call them to help them create this. Equally importantly I would like to thank the coordinators from all the remote centers. This again may not be very well known to all the participating teachers but these coordinators at the respective center have spent a good one full week physically coming over to IIT, finding time from their regular schedule and they spent that one week together with my colleagues here. They decided what should be the most meaningful syllabus for this course, how it can be doubted into the existing syllabi and the examination patterns of the universities and yet should attempt to address the style of teaching, the style of solving hard problems that is practiced in IIT's and some of the better institutions. So, this there has been a lot of work my thanks to the remote center coordinators, my thanks also to a large number of supporting staff and faculty colleagues at the remote centers without whom I am sure that the remote centers would not have been able to arrange everything that they did for the workshop participants. In exactly the similar fashion at IIT Bombay itself we have a large team. We have some of them present here, could we have our senior managers here Dr. Mukta Atre Jaya who is our finance minister who handles all the finance related thing and Kalpana who handles our contents. We have Sajjan who handles the entire audio visual setup you can see some of his team members here. I take this opportunity to thank all of them. I must also thank people who are absent, but who have provided the basic technology and that is the A-view product that we use which was developed by Amruta. I can see Mahendra Parmar and there are so many people here actually my colleague managers have a team of about 50 people doing the technology development and the administration that they handle. So I take this opportunity to thank them profusely. I also would like to take the opportunity to thank the issued administration without an active support primarily by the office of DNRND and equally importantly the departments which participate in teaching of these courses in this particular case the mechanical engineering department which has taken a lead by the way I must say that apart from electrical engineering and mechanical engineering we are yet trying to convince other colleagues in other disciplines to come forward and give courses. So my thanks to these department colleagues as well. With this I would declare this course formally closed informally of course it will close after you finish your quiz and after you listen to the assignment that is stored for you for the post workshop. Thank you one and all and all the best for your future endeavors in better quality teaching. God bless you.