 Good morning everybody, I am Mukta Atre, I am senior project manager for the T10KT program which is being run at IIT Bombay. I am really grateful to Amal Jyoti and Reverend Father Jho's for inviting me here for this workshop on research. I am afraid I do not have anything to add to the research discussions that are going on here. But I do have something to tell you about the projects that are going on in IIT Bombay and especially the ones that are connected to training teachers. I personally, I am connected to the trained 10,000 teachers but there are other programs as well which in some way or the other do benefit teacher colleagues across the country. So I have titled my talk, Bridging Distances Across India and you will understand why I have said so. This is because sitting in IIT Bombay we have been connecting people from Jammu Kashmir to Kerala to from say Tripura to Gujarat across the country. So we are really building bridges across the country and through our program and I will explain now how we do this. So I will start from the beginning absolutely of the project. It was a situation when there was a huge increase in the number of engineering colleges and the students opting for engineering colleges across the country was growing phenomenally and as you know there is a lack of access of good quality education and there is a scarcity of opportunities for teachers as well as students from smaller institutes to gain any kind of closeness to any kind of good learning material. And so this was the problem and there was also a problem of synchronous delivery to a large number of teachers across the country. We could have workshops but at a time a workshop could have only about 30 to 35 teachers in IIT Bombay and that we thought was a huge problem. So the project Talk to a Teacher was initiated and it was initiated in December 2009 under the National Mission on Education through ICT by Professor Fatak. And at the beginning we had a limited number of institutes as a remote centers. We had, we used to communicate only through the EDUSAT and the EDUSAT infrastructure as you all know is extremely expensive and also very bulky and it was not always possible for institutes to have this facility in their college. And therefore to gain a wider view and also to have more number of participants we opted for A-view. A-view as you know we are in fact at the moment communicating through A-view. It is a learning, it is a virtual classroom environment which has been developed by Amrita University again under the National Mission. So we partnered with them and our number of remote centers grew across the country. So much so that when the first phase finished in 2012 we were asked by the Ministry for Human Resources and Development to go into a second phase, a much, much larger phase with a larger amount of funds available to us. We partnered with Kharagpur, IIT Kharagpur in the second phase and I mean this is part of our second phase and second phase is going to continue till 2015. So what do we do? I have been talking about training teachers but exactly how do we do it? That is exactly what I am going to be trying to explain to you all. Now we conduct two-week ISD workshops on core engineering subjects for teachers across the country to sort of enhance their teaching skills to brush up their knowledge to enhance their skills as such. And how do we go about doing it? We collect a sort of a common syllabus on a particular topic. For example, let us take a topic like computer programming. Professor Phytak has taught that topic from here for almost, he has taught it for three times from IIT Bombay. The faculty is almost always from IIT Bombay but now since we partnered with IIT Kharagpur we also have courses which are conducted by them. Our workshops are a combination of asynchronous and synchronous delivery. The synchronous part comes where the workshop is transmitted through a view from IIT Bombay and it is received at various centres across the country which we call the remote centres. Teachers gather at these remote centres to listen to the workshops to participate in the workshops. And there is also an asynchronous element in it and that is where you have the lab sessions or you also have the assignments and various group activities that we encourage the teachers to do. And our absolute ultra-special selling point I would call here is the content which is generated. The lectures are recorded, the assignments that the participants submit and the various lab sessions etc. All these are also recorded and these are later on after editing. They are released in the open source for free download. We encourage teachers to use this content in their own classrooms and add to the already existing repository of learning. We use and encourage several innovative teaching methods like the flip class room or the blended mode of having a virtual classroom. I will be talking about that a little later. And also learning management systems like the Moodle. Again, I will be talking about this a little later but these are some of the learning aids that we use in our workshops. Now what are these workshops? The workshops as I have already said before these are workshops for teachers on core engineering topics. So far we have conducted 21 workshops. I am including all the workshops since 2009 and also those conducted by IIT Kharagpur. We have been fortunate enough to include some unusual courses like a course on free and open software where the participants had attended five weekend workshop and that I think worked very well for people who are otherwise busy during the weeks. We also had a very successful program on solar photovoltaics which is being introduced in university curriculum as a regular subject and for writing effective conference papers as well as another successful program on research methods in educational technology. In fact it was this program which had a phenomenal attendance of almost 8 to 9000 teachers across the country which led the government to ask us to go into a second phase and that is where the nomenclature trained 10,000 teachers came up. Now our goal is to target almost 10,000 teachers at a time in a single workshop. So we have almost 330 remote centers now across the country where participants attend these workshops. So those are the statistics 85,000 participants and I am sorry not 330 but 342 remote centers across the country. Now what is the methodology that we use to conduct these workshops? For one thing we identify institutes across the country. We have reached a certain number 342 already and these remote centers have been, I am really grateful to them, they have been partnering us steadfastly throughout these 3 years and have been our very, very strong partners I would call them in this entire workshop. So we have identified remote centers across the country which are good institutes which have good academics, good faculty and most importantly a good infrastructure. We appoint a remote center coordinator at the remote center who normally takes care of all the logistics that is necessary for conducting such a kind of a workshop and we also ask for a workshop coordinator during every workshop who is a subject expert. Now this person will be helping the participants at the remote center during the workshop. So these two are the key figures at the remote centers. Now the main workshop is held during the vacations and we hope that it benefits a large number of teachers and another important thing that I would like to tell you is that the T10KD project under the NMEICD also funds the conduct of the workshop at the remote center. So there is no burden upon the institute to conduct these workshops. After the 2 week workshop is transmitted from IIT Bombay we expect the participants to take part in some final assignments, some kind of team activity and it is only then that we issue them an IST certificate of participation. IST here stands for the Indian Society for Technical Education and they are also our partners in this venture. And as I have said before we publish all the contents like the slides that are used by the faculty, the assignments that have been submitted by the participants, the lecture videos and also the quizzes and other things on our portal. And these contents are completely free. You can download them, you can use them in your classroom teaching. In fact, we encourage that. I have already talked about AVU before. This is one of our key features in our entire project. If AVU was not there, I wonder how we could have really reached out to so many teachers at a time. Another key feature in our project is the Moodle. This is the free source e-learning software platform. It is easily available on the internet. You can download it and start using it in your own institute. Now this is our interface for our synchronous, sorry asynchronous kind of interaction. There are forums, this is the place where the faculty poses all kinds of questions to the participants. The participants themselves can ask questions. They can interact with each other and also all our notices like schedules or any notice regarding a change of schedule or a new quiz or feedback, etc. Everything is uploaded onto the Moodle and this is a very, very important interface for us to use, especially when the number of participants has grown so significantly. Earlier in 2009, 2010, we used to have students like, I mean, we used to have teachers at, the number used to be about 300, 400 for one workshop. After 2012, the number has grown significantly and I mean, it is not quite possible for the faculty at IIT Bombay to handle questions from the participants through A-View all the time. So this interface, we found very, very useful for interacting with our participants. Another important feature of our entire T10KTE program is the use of the clicker software. Now this software is again an open source software and it can be used in a classroom. For a variety of things that a teacher does in the classroom, this can be used for an instant quiz. It can be used to have a poll. I mean, the teacher can use a clicker to find out whether the students have understood a certain problem or a topic. The teacher can definitely indulge in paperless assessment. It is a small, it can be converted into a small handheld device. I mean, it can be ported, the software can be ported upon even a mobile phone. So the assessment, the entire interaction is totally paperless and that is something again that we encourage. And the student can virtually raise his or her hand asking the teacher a query and even if it is a large classroom and the teacher is not able to see the student, the fact that the student has pressed a button on his or her device, the signal has gone to the teacher and the teacher can easily understand that there is somebody here who needs to ask a question. So that was the clicker features and we have used it extensively on the Akash tablet. We have given out Akash tablets to almost all our remote centres and we have got very positive feedback about the tablet saying that they have been using it for the final year projects of the students as well as a clicker device. Now this is the data analysis of clicker in workshops. We have used the clicker to conduct quizzes in 9 IST workshops so far. You have the data in front of you. And at present 79 remote centres are extensively using the clicker in daily classroom interaction and there are almost 6000 students who are using the clicker in a very regular fashion. Now I come to some findings. Since we have conducted this project for almost 3 years now and we have people working on various aspects covered by these workshops, we found that very interestingly 30 to 45 percent of the participants are women. Now the fact that these workshops are conducted in their own colleges, women find it easier to attend from their own institutes instead of travelling all the way to say either IIT, Bombay or some other metro city. So our focus has been to create more and more remote centres and really remote areas where participants find it difficult to get out of their own institutes and go and attend a workshop somewhere else. So and especially women with families and children, it is always easier that the lady attends the workshop in her own institute. We have also found that during our workshops there is a lot of collaboration and interaction amongst participants of different institutes across the country. In fact, you have participants coming from other colleges to a certain remote centre and there they form teams and I have been told by people that I meet after the workshop that we are still in touch, we still exchange notes about teaching, we exchange notes about various research topics and things like that. So we are really building bridges across India through our project. These are some of the upcoming workshops in the next six months or so. We are planning the course on pedagogy in January 2015. It will be conducted by Professor Sahana Murthy and Professor Sridharayar. And IIT Kharagpur has already announced its two-week workshop on control systems. And we are also planning a new course called Engineering Mathematics or Mathematics for Engineering Students which we thought was very essential in today's educational scenario. So that is also upcoming. We are yet to finalize the details about the faculty and the dates etc. But you will be hearing from us soon. Now so after 2009, after the second phase, I would like to tell you a little bit more about what is our status quo. We are in the second phase which started in 2012. The mandate from MHRD is that we hold 15 workshops in three years and that we reach out to 150,000 teachers in these three years. We have also tied up with IIT Kharagpur and so far IIT Kharagpur has conducted three workshops and IIT Bombay has conducted seven. And the very logical movement for our workshop, for our project, the workshop project now is to turn towards MOOCs where from teaching say 10,000 teachers or 150,000 teachers or whatever from a number that seems unreal when we are talking about teaching in a real classroom. We are now moving even further on this particular journey and we are going into something called the MOOCs. I am sure most of you have heard about MOOCs here. So let me tell you something more about MOOCs. MOOCs the full form is massive open online courses and these are courses which are offered on the internet and these are offered by faculty from very reputed institutes. And this is a fairly recent concept in the field it is barely I think two years or three years since the whole thing has started. In the world the most prominent MOOC providers are the edX, the company edX which was founded by MIT and Howard and then there is Coursera which was founded by professors from Stanford and Udacity which was founded again by professors from Stanford. These are the three major MOOC providers in the world. Now in 2013 IIT Bombay has collaborated with edX. We have joined them as a chartered member. So this year we are offering two courses on edX which are called CS101X and ME209X. These are actual courses which are held in IIT Bombay. CS101 is being offered by professors Fatak and Suprati Chakrabarti in IIT as well simultaneously and they are also being offered on the edX platform for a worldwide global kind of an audience and there are about I think 80,000 participants already for CS101X. And ME209X is another very popular course we had also already offered it in the T10KT project that is the Thermodynamics Workshop. Now Thermodynamics is taught in IIT Bombay, the course title is ME209X and that is what is being taught simultaneously on edX as well by Professor Gayathondi. Now about the edX platform, it is again an open source platform and it is in IIT Bombay there is a lot of work that is going on to modify it to suit the Indian education system. edX has been gracious enough to give us their source code so that we can modify it for our own system. As I said development work on the open edX is in process then the platform is being localized to suit the Indian university system. We hope that there will be a lot of courses not just in engineering but in other faculties as well like the art, science and management especially from reputed universities which will be offered on this Indianized platform to Indian students. And we are also hoping that various universities across the country will join us and maybe there will be a situation where the student takes the course on say I mean for the lack of a name right now we call it the Indian MOOCs. He or she takes a course in Indian MOOCs, fulfills all the requirements, gets a certified certificate and sorry a verified certificate and that certificate can be used as a replacement for a particular course taught in a particular university. We are hoping that such a development will definitely take place in the future. This Indian MOOCs is also focusing upon as I said Indianization and here Indianization means that these courses will be available in regional languages. Now this is something that requires a lot of work and a lot of innovation so we are hoping that we would be able to do something at least immediately in at least Hindi and another regional language. So these are our future plans for the MOOCs activity. We have also been working on something called the blended MOOCs. Now the MOOCs is an entirely online internet kind of an activity but when we are talking about blended MOOCs we are hoping to sort of make a composition of online as well as offline activity. So there will be some sort of a online face to face interaction between the teacher and the student and there will be an offline activity where the student looks at videos, listens to lecture and then only asks doubts or clarifications in the face to face session. Now that is something again that we are working on. We did try something like this in our teacher training workshop. We tried a combination of face to face interaction and online activities for training a large number of teachers in a short time and we tried that with our computer programming and computer networking workshops under the T10KT. I am not yet very sure about how successful they were but it was an experiment that will need a lot of refinement still in the future and we are definitely working on that and I take this opportunity to ask some of you may have attended our computer programming and computer networking courses which use the blended model for T10KT. So I really appeal to them to come forward with suggestions or feedback as to how they adjusted with this blended model for the T10KT and if they have any suggestions we would definitely welcome them. Moving on, these are the other NME ICT projects at IIT Bombay. Spoken tutorial is again a huge phenomenon that has reached all over India, Amal Jyoti is I think also a spoken tutorial center. In talk to a teacher the project where you have a panel of expert faculty members from various IITs interacting with students through A-view for a particular subject and these are the resolving the doubt sessions, E-ANTHRA the embedded systems project and FOSSI of course the free and open software project. FECALPA is the design project which is run by the IDC in the industrial design center in IIT Bombay and we also have a project going on on the virtual labs. This is a project which is shared by which is divided across the IITs. So IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay are doing the virtual labs. So that brings me to the end of my presentation on the NME ICT projects at IIT Bombay and most particularly, most specifically the T10KT program that is running successfully at IIT Bombay. I would like to say a huge thank you to NME ICT for giving us this opportunity to conduct these workshops, Amrita University for the A-view of course and Indian Society for Technical Education for collaborating with us for the certification and most importantly all the remote centers which are partners in this huge venture. Thank you very much.