 Welcome back to the last session, this is the eStudio lab with Sajjan here, where our lectures are being recorded and post recording editing facilities are there. And the other is a mini cloud hardware, it is a very small lab, there is nothing much to see, there are racks and some hardware, but that is the kind of infrastructure that we have created. Or perhaps what we could do is, Sajjan we could take photographs and make a small video of these lab facilities, those of you are interested are still welcome to visit them, but those are primarily important from the point of view of creating MOOCs and from the point of view of running MOOCs on a hardware infrastructure, the software is IIT Bombay as I said. Last year, when our project for developing Indian open source platform was approved and we had said about this Section 8 company and other thing, there is a time when we were asked to start working on Swayam. At that time I had suggested to the ministry that if you want multiple universities and institutions to prepare design MOOCs and operate them, then all of them should be given this facility and infrastructure, a small video editing studio and a small server to run these things as an experiment in their own institutions. I had suggested a grant of a crore of rupees for equipment to each of the institutions and a similar amount for three years for personnel and so on. At that point in time, the ministry appeared very positive. So, we actually conducted training sessions for about 20 teachers, sorry teachers from multiple central university on how to create such MOOCs courses and run them. We also ran that workshop for school teachers later. Somehow the decision about Swayam, its launch, its operations has been taken out of the ambit and now there are government committees which are working on it. I hope some solution will come, there is a costing committee, there are the multiple committees. Actually, if you ask me personally I get a bit worried, I call it the commitology. That means, if you commit an issue to committees, the resolution may not come earlier, but we wait for that. However, as prime institutions, I would think that each one of your institutions should eventually try to develop such infrastructure and facility at your own institutions, where at least a few teachers can create these MOOCs, can run these MOOCs locally for some experiment and eventually contribute to the national effort. But, that is a long term activity, it is not included in this agenda. We come back to our agenda, although now it says only the formation of advisory board for the consortium and action agenda, but I would like to use this opportunity to clarify some of the points which are probably only partially answered during our long discussion. First and foremost, I would like to tell you that MOOCs is completely online activity and is asynchronous activity. There is nothing synchronous about MOOCs. When I release a MOOCs course, participants are welcome to do that course at their own free time at their own pace. Since, we impose a limitation of week by week schedule or a topic by topic schedule, generally we expect people to spend time in that week on that particular topic. But, in that week, when an individual learner studies first videos, attempts these practice problems, etcetera is entirely left to these individuals, there is no synchronization. The only synchronizing is if I am studying a MOOC course and if I get a doubt. In the discussion forum, I can raise that doubt immediately. When I raise that doubt immediately, the MOOCs operating team at IIT Bombay, which has these faculty members and a team of 8 to 10 teaching assistants, who are employed for that purpose. And by the way, the discussion forum is practically watched 24 by 7. So, at night 12 o'clock, somebody asks a question, there is someone who watches that question. Need not necessarily answer it immediately. If there is a simple question, the TA answers it. The method is that TA drafts an answer, then it is discussed by the teachers. The wording is changed. The wording is very, very important of everything, of the discussion forum posts, questions, explanations, etcetera and thorough checking is done. But, the answer is posted immediately. One advantage of MOOCs, which is not found at all in conventional learning is that some student asks a question and some other students respond. That is definitely permitted. Our TA has categorized that response immediately along with that. And sometimes, the teachers endorse that response saying, it is better than what I could have actually. Now, that is the power of collaboration. And when you have thousands of people, such collaboration produces excellent material. So, the discussion forum becomes the only interactive thing during that period. Now, in this context, I think you will feel the importance of this T10KT workshop. The T10KT workshop that we will conduct, as I said, simultaneously to this subject are not only meaningful for our teachers. Since they offer synchronous audio-video interaction, and that is the reason why I wanted you to see what was happening in the environmental course. You will notice that we interacted with four or five centers. There are hundreds of centers. But, every person at every center is actually participating in that interaction. So, anybody asks a question, anybody answers it. That is how we run our T10KT workshop. The idea is that for these 52 institutions, we would like to make this T10KT workshop as an extended arm of our joint efforts to permit even students to attend these discussions. Now, when I said whether you will permit students to attend these sessions or not, some of you have said yes, some of you have said only teachers, some of you have said selected students, and then we had a discussion on that topic. We realized that my worry, suppose I am in a remote center, my worry will be as follows. It is primarily a workshop meant for teacher-to-teacher interaction. Now, in that interaction, I might ask a question. I might have to admit that I do not understand how this particular problem is solved. I would be a bit worried about my students seeing this interaction. So, therefore, I may not be very open about doing. So, one suggestion which I vaguely mentioned in the morning, but which I extend now further is that why cannot we consider to have AVU sessions in two parts. In one short part, we will have interaction with the teachers. That is to ensure that the T10KT fundamental requirement of participation is satisfied. And of course, such questions are asked. Now, these question answers happen during which time the local teachers can also advise that in my classes, people are asking this question or people are facing this problem, etcetera. And immediately following that, we could have a classroom session where the students can participate, where the local teacher can be present as a coordinator and the students can interact with the MOOCs teachers here, giving the benefit of an audiovisual interconnect with 52 institutions. The only restriction will be whether you will have classrooms to accommodate if the number of students are more. But the AVU facility, we have seen that in some remote center today also if there are 150 participants, we generally create two centers notionally in the same place in neighboring classroom. And there could be students assembled in one classroom, students assembled in second classroom, they are all interact. Now, if you think this facilitation is useful, then we will modify our thing to say that A, the T10KT workshops will happen and there will be a fortnightly discussion session between the all the teachers. But we will add now that immediately subsequent to such a discussion session, which may be of one hour duration. There would be a two hour duration interaction with the students doing that subject from each engineering course. Do you think it will make sense? That came up earlier also and is that perhaps, this may not be the right time to start it, there could be on certain days, like we have teacher hours. So, and different teachers could take this up. We could say from every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, three to five, five to seven, some TA teacher or TA will be there, any student can log in from any institute and they can ask any questions. That way, we can keep ABU open on those days or some We can keep ABU open 24 by seven because the ABU runs on our server here. That's not the point. The criticality is not the ABU availability. The criticality is availability of the faculty member in a synchronized fashion across 52 institutions and availability of our faculty members of that subject during that time. Please do not forget that teachers there as well as teachers here have other responsibilities allocated and associated. So, they can't be free at any point in time. Correct. Only some teachers need to be there. Oh, absolutely. If I even suggest this, Raitunde will ask me to jump into Pavillek. Okay. You are saying, he says, Professor Padak, let me understand. You want me to attend to such interaction three times a week at the salary which is being paid by IIT Bombay to me to teach IIT Bombay students? The hard question. By the way, this is something that we all need to worry about. For the continuity, we all presume that while we continue to teach our courses, such MOOCs will be available perpetually. It is not guaranteed. When I offer a MOOC, today I am offering it as my personal interest and at the request of the institute. My primary responsibility is to teach courses which my head assigns. This work is not considered as part of my institute duty. Till such time that it happens, there is no future for MOOCs on a large scale. I have suggested to the ministry that each institution should be advised that just as they appoint teachers and allocate normal work, if any group of teachers work on an approved MOOCs to running the MOOCs, then that should be considered part and parcel of that institutional responsibility. Unless this happens, there is no incentive for a teacher because enthusiasm can go for one year, for two years. For mad people like me, it can go for ten years. But ultimately, all of us will take Nirwada and do what is required to be done. So, that is a larger problem. I am mentioning it. Now, everybody is doing according to that formula. What gives how many points? This gives so many points. If teaching or attending MOOCs gives so many points. Well, if you are suggesting that I should ask my director that while evaluating IIT Bombay faculty members, they should give marks for the MOOCs. Unfortunately, Professor Gayathondey does not need any marks because like me, he is also a professor in the world of retirement. But IIT Bombay are professors here and there. But actually... Jai in general. No. Okay. But we digress. I agree with you. But since all senior leaders are assembled here, I would strongly suggest that just like Dr. Nasa mentioned that there will be a recognition of such innovations in the accreditation business. Similarly, can you consider while evaluating performance of your faculty to give a weightage to such innovative experiments in which people participate? I think that will go a long way in encouraging people. So, I will go one step forward. Designing a MOOC and running a MOOC is a long term thing and a big thing. But even participating in a blended MOOC program, please understand that if I am a teacher in your college, I have to actually spend extra time. First, I have to attend this additional workshop. Second, I have to understand how Gayathondey or others teach that course and blend my subject accordingly. Third, I have to supervise online examination, which I normally do not do. And I have to still continue teaching whatever I do. So, there is an extra work that. Now, if the directors and vice-chancellors could consider giving operation of a blended MOOC as some kind of a recognition, implicit or explicit, I think that will be useful going forward. You can tell about that NIT system. So, there is one two components. One is desirable. Another is eligibility. So, that desirable component that is already there, that learning any initiatives you have taken. So, that will be considered as that point. My dear friend, such rules are very nice. They look very nice on paper, but they need to be implemented. And in order to implement, I actually do not need existing rules. We can make those rules. All that I am suggesting is all of us should be aware of some positive contribution in this kind of recognition. IIT Madras. So, our faculty, they attend the class, as you have suggested. And IIT faculty conduct for the students. And it is directly communicated. But we are considering that load also as a part of their work. Very good. But, I mean, enthusiasm is not maintained because it is not lucrative. They are not getting anything. So, if there is some kind of incentive, if we conduct this IITB remote center workshop, but in QTRIP, absolutely, there is no such incentive, the faculty are not that much enthusiastic. I do not know whether you are aware, but in a meeting with the RC coordinators for the TITNKT workshop, we have said that we have to get out of the government funded model. And the self-funding model was discussed, where the participants will pay the fees for attending this. In a way, if your teacher is participating in blended mode and we are running a TITNKT workshop, that participant should be paying a fees to IIT Bombay to attend that workshop. So, it is a minus negative incentive. For the time being, we are saying no cost to you, no cost to us. We will run it as a collaborative effort. Everybody takes care of one's cost. But let me tell you, this is another mindset change that we have to do things. How long will our young teachers continue to work only if there is an incentive? There is a human tendency alright, but shouldn't teachers be taught or requested to think slightly above? And what is a better incentive if the students who learn like this, ten years later remember for you for actually helping them to understand something better? I think teacher ultimately lives on that incentive. But that is hypothetical for the practicality. Right, but we are taking it just like a blessing from Phadak sir. Right now, which is available. Right now, what we ought to do is ensure that the blended MOOC experiment succeeds. Ensure that a non-trivial component of the MOOC's marks are accorded recognition in your grade. As long as we achieve that for different proportions in different ways, whatever, whatever. So, in that context, I will come back to this question. Number one, MOOC's is completely online, completely asynchronous. The only synchronization that we said we will do is that when we open a quiz, the quiz is open to all participants including your students. But we will announce the opening time to you ahead. And if you wish, you can supervise the conduct of the online exam for those students. If that can give you better credibility, you may then say that if four quizzes are such conducted in a supervised fashion, then I will get those marks and may be allocate 30 percent weightage or 40 percent weightage because these are like supervised exam. Instead of me setting the paper, somebody else has sent it. That is perfectly fine. I would very much love to see that over this year itself, we slowly get a grip of what is happening and decide to enhance the weightage of the MOOC's marks that we give. Number one, number two, I will like to see that more and more participating teachers in these subjects actually start adopting the flip classroom pedagogy and participate in active learning and introduction of more thinking to the students. This is what will benefit the students ultimately. Now, having said that is there any very specific problem which you think is a showstopper for running this experiment. Hello. Before this, I would like to add something as far as this blended MOOC courses that we are going to run. You are taking lot of efforts and even the most of the autonomous institute has started the credit transfer system that the students are going from one institute to other institute where the institute is paying the tuition fees also. This is already it has been started and the institutions are charging 15,000, 20,000 rupees. But I am suggesting that if you are starting this blended MOOC, you ask for registration for a student and the institute will pay for that particular registration. You charge minimum whatever you feel, make 200 rupees, 500 rupees, whatever it may be. But this is going to have some recovery of the investment, what you are going to do it. If you give it free, people will not have it. I cannot agree more with you with the observation that anything given free does not have a value. I agree with you. I also agree with you that eventually somebody will have to pay. There is no free lunch as the Americans say. The point is in our model consider I offer this blended MOOC. And I say the university should pay because university need not waste its time for conducting that exam. Equivalent of examination fees they should pay. I say college should pay. The college says I am still required to teach that course. I am still required to pay the salary of that teacher. Why should I pay? The student should pay. The student says I have paid you the fees. When I joined the program, you said this is the fees during which you will teach me for one semester. Now who is this study? Suddenly blended MOOCs has come from here. I do not want it. You teach me normally. Of course, if you do not charge me, I will do that. No, no, no. Please understand that charging is not an option which can be exercised by the decision in two hours by such a group. Charging is a decision which has to be taken after lot of deliberations locally, publicly, etcetera, etcetera. What I said in the morning you may. I said we have to move to a self-sustaining model. And from next year, there will have to be cost involved in this. But there is a chicken and egg story. If I do not start this experiment, if students and teachers do not find it beneficial, then they will hesitate in starting. So, that is why my suggestion was and I think that is more or less endorsed by everybody that for the first year, we will not charge anybody anything. But in the first year, we establish the methods. We establish the procedures. We establish the usefulness of this model. Let students also evaluate and see, oh, last year passing percentage in thermodynamics of my college was 55 percent. Now, it has become 60 percent. Passing percentage is of course in your and my hands. In CS 101 course, I decide what is the passing mark. I announce 40 percent marks will pass. But do I fail? Everybody who gets less than 40, no. I evaluate percentage at 39, percentage at 38, percentage at 35. I evaluate after mid-sum. I tell all the people who score less than 40 percent marks up to mid-sum that you will be given a chance to appear for extra exam. Even if you score 100 percent there, your marks will be added to 40 percent. Now, don't we do all such things? We should do such things. We should be encouraged to do something because passing and failing a student is not the main objective. In fact, our main objective is every student must pass. But in the context of blended moves, it is our joint effort which will decide whether the blended book experiment succeeds or not. One of the parameters I would like all of you to remember and discreetly tell your teachers that watch out for the passing percentage of the students in that subject. Believe me, students will in the long term make their judgment on whether this is useful or not for this single statistical parameter. Implicitly, if they actually passing percentage improves, it will also mean that the learning has improved. That is how the passing percentage is believed. So, we will go by this. We will not charge any money right now. Right now, there is a cost involved. Our decision which we had arrived earlier was that each institution bears the cost of conducting this experiment as far as that institution is concerned. Neither that institution bears anything to IIT Bombay nor IIT Bombay is in a position to offer any support for that activity. So, I suppose that is okay this understanding is okay. To what extent we would be able to flip it? Otherwise, as a student, why should I take additional tax for the same three credits? Correct. Because why student will have to take five courses? Because for him a course is a three credit. Correct. So, I would suggest the following. In that context, there is some discussion during the time in earlier that suppose I am teaching thermodynamic, but I find that the overlap of my syllabus and IIT syllabus is 25 percent. So, I will say these are the topics which are overlap. I will of course ask all students to register for the move, but I will tell them that as far as this portion of the syllabus is concerned whenever it is being taught in that sequence pay attention to it during that time I will run a flip classroom and discuss problems pertaining to that particular portion give all the quizzes in that particular portion may be two out of four quizzes or whatever and other portion of the MOOCs you may or may not take seriously that is your choice. As far as my institute is concerned I will give weightage to the marks that you obtain in this. Now, when the course ends of course the students would have scored some marks on the MOOC. We will give you all these performance including other performance in other thing. You may decide to choose to only these two quizzes and take their marks for your counting. It is not as if MOOCs will give you 100 marks total and you are forced to take either 20 out of this or 10 out of this. That problem of evaluation is appears to be rather simple. Correct. We can simply say that all internal evaluation is from MOOCs and the external end same evaluation is the regular evaluation. But there may be a speaker like this if there is truly only 25 percent overlap then you may want to take only 25 percent of the internal marks from this. It is all up to you I mean it is entirely up to you. But considering the importance of flip classroom that we have observed which Professor Sridharayar has been focusing always. Do you think that in our tentative workshop that we conduct we actually conduct a couple of early sessions on how to do this flip classroom and share our experiences. One, second would it be advisable for me to tell all my faculty colleagues of these three subjects to spend some time in every discussion session with the teachers that in your flip classroom engagement on this topic we suggest that you discuss these problems and these problems we have put up putting up on moodle or wherever. We are also putting up the discussion that happened in our experience and prepare teachers for conducting such an experiment. Do you think that will be meaningful. So, let us say explicit training on the flip classroom methodology and for every course if flip classroom sessions are to be conducted then what example should we discuss and what should be the solution suggested etc etc should be made part of the tentative workshop for that subject agreed. That is a very good suggestion it will improve the quality of teaching in that. More number of students are there it will be a problem. No, no problem. This is exactly the question which was asked to me more number of teachers are there how do you run teacher training program. We are running it for ten thousand students. Suppose you have five hundred students and you have five classrooms of hundred students each all that you need to invest is a projector, a pc and an avu client running there you need internet bandwidth if you have these five hundred students can simultaneously participate in the student session that we have planned for actual interactive life session. I can say that with fifty two institutions if there are five hundred Kamal will have to do some more work with larger team to enhance the avu band but supervising exams is another problem online exam how do you supervise we also had that problem. In the first time we had only limited number of machines. So, we used to divide people in batches and do that one possibility which I have seen at least two institutions trying they are not here but they have hundred pcs in one compressions lab hundred in IT some fifteen mechanical and so on. So, what they do is if they want to conduct the synchronized online test for programming they will command here all these machines all these labs on a Sunday morning or on a Saturday morning when it is a holiday non and there will be a set of teachers and teaching associates who will supervise that online test during that time. If you wish to solve this problem it is solvable but I will tell you what happens many times if it happens even in IIT because logistics is very for bearing I generally avoid taking that approach altogether. So, I decide that I cannot conduct supervised online exam. Exams we are doing into a model. So, even on a mobile platform they can just do our students are so rich I mean all the students are so rich when it comes to gadgets. I would like to love to touch in such a teaching such an institution. My own students are unfortunately not all that rich I will tell you one experience last year when professor Kavyaariya taught that course he asked about five hundred students in that class he asked how many students do not have their own machines fifty students raise their hands. So, what we did is a professor Karnan Mokgal has worked on the next version of Akash that net book kind of thing. So, he give them fifty of those machines they are very lullu machines that way five thousand rupees what do you get no hard days no nothing but it runs Ubuntu it runs GCC compiler. So, they were all happy compiling programs and learning from those machines. In fact, we had a case of reverse discrimination three students came to us and they said sir we have high end Apple computers they run iOS but they do not run GCC compiler. So, we are being discriminated against we cannot use these machines to learn this course. So, they were given these three cheaper computers. Now, ideally all our students if they have computers but please note if you want to conduct an online test you have to have internet available. If you run it from Moodle you need only local area network whereas, for this you will require internet management. In five years time every college every lab will have a people with their own machines and internet we are talking about today. But, these are decisions my dear friends which individual institutions can take based on their logistics and based on their requirement and based on what they feel is best. I would still strongly suggest that if you can succeed in conducting supervised online examination then nothing like it because that is going to be the order of the day in coming years whether we may be the early starter. So, wherever we can we should do it. There are multiple variations possible if a quiz and now going back to what Dr. Moghera had mentioned we had said four quizzes. Now, what prevents us from saying that we will actually run eight quizzes. But, we will take the best four marks of whichever are the best four and then for supervised exam I will say students appear for eight quizzes. Alternate quizzes will be supervised for some batches alternate quizzes for some other batches. That is all I mean so many tricks you can do you take home assignments are they supervised no, but we give them marks no. If they copy we batch them how can copying be caught in quizzes. How can copying be caught in programming assignments what we propose to do I am not guaranteeing it but this is one of the requirement specification that we are given for the MIS report. If from the submission of students of your batch which you send us say under students if there are identical answers to quizzes we will flag that to you. Please remember I am not saying correct answer because I am a duffer and my friend is also a duffer. So, both of us will identically give wrong answers because I am copying from him. But, as long as the answers are identical there is a problem that is how you catch copying isn't it. So, we can make such provisions for additional information. But, I am saying that for such exceptional cases let us not make general rules which will prevent us from exploiting this class. We should deal with individual cases in them. You have implemented these three courses in IIT Bombay. What is the weightage for MOOC you have given number one number two is per week how many class hours and how many MOOCs hours. First of all there is nothing like how many MOOCs hours or how many class hours. Class hours are defined by the time table typically we have a two hour or three hour per week classes. But, wherever we have used MOOCs we have not delivered lectures in any one of those classes. So, I ran that course myself Sridharayya ran CS 111's like that. Professor Bhandarkar had run thermodynamics like that in a blended MOOC. In a blended MOOC mode all learning or attending lectures is done online only. There is nothing like a MOOC hour. Students are supposed to see the lecture. Professor Kannan Mukhalaya has been running the blended MOOCs for five years. He found that initially people were coming to the class without watching the video lecture. So, he started conducting a quiz at the beginning of every class and that quiz simply tested whether you have watched that video or not. But, initially he said quiz will be conducted even people did not take it very seriously. Next time he said there will be one mark for quiz in every lecture. Then everybody started watching in the middle. So, the trick is you have to incentivize them to do that. So, one there is nothing like a MOOC lecture. There are lecture hours and all lecture hours are spent in flip mode classrooms. All assessments I had done online. So, what is the weightage of MOOCs grades? 100 percent. I mean there is no other exam. There is no other evaluation. Well, in our case we did conduct an end semester on a paper exam and that assessment was 30 percent weightage. So, in my case it was 70 percent. But, as I said IIT system gives complete flexibility for a teacher to decide. I would suggest that you go back and you advise your teachers to think about it and decide what they would like to think. In fact, if you are going to your academic body then I am sure you will all go to your academic body. I think you should try and get a more generic resolution approved by the thing. That the exact percentage weightage to be given to MOOCs marks should be left to the judgment of the individual teachers, the nature of the individual subject and it should be approved let us say by dean or somebody. But, essentially give that freedom. Of course, if I were your senate member I would say this is fine, but to begin with put some limit on top. So, I might say as a senator it appears to me that if you are doing this first experiment then allocate weightage anywhere between say 20 percent and 60 percent to MOOCs marks not more than that. Now, this could be one particular way of approaching this. But, individual subject I would suggest do not straight jacket everything. Computer programming course is different in philosophy than a thermodynamics course which is different from signals and system course. Different subjects will have different flavor of evaluation and assessment. To say that every course will have exactly the same evaluation pattern in my personal opinion is detrimental. Effectively that is why we have problems in the university system. Every subject has 100 marks, 20 marks are internal marks, 30 marks are mid semester, 70 marks are end semester. Now, we are working like that one and look at what it has done to us. All of us think that allocating 20 marks to MOOCs is the most straightforward because nobody will question you. The problem is not that. The problem is we are worried that somebody else will question me if I do anything with others. That philosophy has to be eradicated from our mind. I am teacher how can anybody question unless my intention is bad and unless my execution is. In fact, I would like the partnering institutions to move towards that level of autonome but to begin with in practical terms. I would strongly suggest that you go to your academic body with the explanation of this and get a generic resolution approved in your, Sir, two NIT directors are there. I would like to request them. How do they see the possibility of their academic bodies reacting to such a suggestion? It is not difficult at all. Actually, we have resolved as a senate chairman. So, we have accepted it. We will get ratified in the next senate meeting. It is as simple as that. As simple as that. Just like your experience with the OD. Correct. So, there is no issue. I think the problem will be with colleges which have academic autonomy but are affiliated to universities. And deemed universities which have for some reason adopted the conventional university structure for their evaluation. Sir, is it possible to write email and for the suggestion? So, we can show that the evidence from the experience and highly respected teacher. I will never ever do that for the simple reason that instead of taking decision on your own count you are hiding behind a letter from someone else. Never ever do that. It is exactly the problem that we had in India all throughout. Unless MIT and Oxford and Stanford does something we do not consider it useful. Why? It is not necessary. Each one of us can think of something good, something useful and we should have the power and authority to say we believe this is good. I would much like you to go and say I do not care for FATAC or IIT or anything. I believe this is a good idea. And I have this much of paperwork, thoughts and processes defined to substantiate what I am saying. Our problem is taking somebody's letter is much simpler but convincing someone with ideas will require hard work of several days and months to work out rules, regulations, processes and so on. Do not hesitate from doing that. Never ever do that. I have one to mention and in fact to help you, the letter from IIT will not help but what will help is the minutes of this discussion where 52 institutions of this country are joining in this experiment and all of them have agreed to factor a certain percentage of MOOCs assessment in their final grade for that subject. All of them have agreed to experiment with this blended MOOC. All of them have agreed that their teachers will interact as a group of teachers jointly with IIT Bombay people to experiment new pedagogy such as flip class too. I hope you have agreed that if I write these things in a minute and circulate to that to everyone. Do not you think that letter is far more powerful than one institution or one FATAC writing please. I will tell you I was so amazed. I mean nowhere else in the world I have found 52 independent institutions coming together and joining has to do this experiment. We are creating history sir. Do not keep yourself aloof by letting someone dictate how you will create history. You be pardoned. Sir, I would say there were more than 100 or a joint but lack of the awareness of this. Yes. There were definitely more than 100 or a joint. Sir, I have only 100 autonomous institutions among my 350 remote centers. I have written only 200. There are 400 autonomously. But Dr. Moghera is very right. 52 people are starting this experiment. I will tell you all the 100, 400 will be watching. AICT will be watching. Everybody will be watching what is happening. And that is the reason why more important than just defining rules and regulations which we ought to do. Far more important is actually conduct these programs for the benefit of our teachers and students. I would like in the month of November if a TV channel goes to your college and interview students and ask them you are doing normal courses like this. If you have done these courses in blended mode, how you think it is different? It is your student who should say we enjoyed these discussion sessions. We believe we will learn something more. We find this more exciting. Something like that. You get my point. NASA talked about outcome. That is the outcome that we want. Similarly if the TV channel interviews your teacher, he is not present here. Technically he is not a decision making person. We are making decisions on his behalf. Now suppose I am such a teacher. I will give you two independent different reactions to such a TV channel question. I will say I have a teacher in Agartala. One possible answer is, I went there, he agreed for something and he came and suddenly said you are doing so much work for teaching this subject. Now you have to do double work. You have to attend this workshop, you have to do this, you have to do flip classroom, whatever. That is one reaction. The other reaction could be, I am so thrilled to have got this opportunity. I am so happy my director went and agreed for this. Not only my students, I also learned something new. We have discovered so many different new ways of teaching our students. Our students are more excited. The attendance in classroom has improved. Which of these reactions would we like to see? And that implementing that my dear friends is our joint responsibility. Nothing else. Sir, in NIT structure we can introduce the MOOCs performance in their grade card also. Very good. In NIT it is possible. He is providing additional incentive without doing anything else so he can do that. But my dear friend, the problem with IITs and NITs is that they have so much freedom which can be utilized to do so many good things without bothering about anything else. But I am worried about several of our colleagues here. I think deemed universities also would not have much problem. Could some friend of ours from a deemed university tell us? Yeah. Sir, we have a problem. We can say whatever the syllabus we want. We have a problem. Sir, we do not have any problem in implementing it. Nothing. Sir, we are autonomous of Kuna University. We just resolved that we left it only to the faculty advisor. Faculty advisor can allow any course anywhere and we accept it. I am worried about only the following possibility. I am an affiliated college although I am autonomous. I take this decision and I go ahead. Technically I may still have to inform the university that this is how I am conducting. No, no, your autonomy is different. There are grades of autonomy in India. There are some institutions which are so autonomous that every rule that they change has to be endorsed by the university. Now, if I have a vice chancellor in that university and let us say I have some kunnas against your institute. I say, this drama will not work. Regular exam. That is my worry. So, but luckily, I do not think these 52 institutions have any problem. I mean, mother engineering college is endorsing. In fact, RGPB himself said that there are no problem with the issues which are autonomous. So, I think we can go ahead. In fact, for all you know, this experiment will also help one more thing. It will help other institutions to become autonomous faster. I do not know that you are aware of this, but there is a committee to review AICT. Under the chairmanship of I had they had called me for interaction and I had said this fancy affiliation system has killed the initiative that a teacher can take. So, I was told a very funny statistics. I did not know of it at all. My friend Dr. Uday Desai, director of IIT Hyderabad, a member of that committee told me he says Professor Fatah, the affiliated college system which have no autonomy is practiced in only four great countries of the world. One is India, second is Pakistan, third is Bangladesh and fourth is Sri Lanka. The British who introduced this system corrected themselves. Now, their institutions are autonomous, but we have not only lived on that legacy, we have extended it further. If my institution was autonomous, I do not depend upon anybody else. As these people said, you go to your own senate, you go to your own academic body, get it approved and done. So, what the advisory committee is saying is this nonsense must be scrapped and they are giving ten years to all institutions to either become completely autonomous and take responsibility for what you do or wind up. That is what their suggestion is for engineering colleges. Who knows our experiment will actually strengthen that. Anyway, what I would like to show you is that we have anticipated some requirements of partnering institutions for information related to their students. So, Tushar, Mittali and I forgot your name, Aditi, these three people and I believe you have seen the summer interns working in the OSF. These are all students from colleges like yours. None of these three are from IIT Bombay. This entire system is being conceptualized and built by them. The summer interns will contribute a lot. In fact, they were very happy when I told us those students if you are from any one of these institutes, they said yes. So, I said when you go back to your institute after summer, if there is a problem in this MIS system, will you help your teachers? I said very proudly and happily, yes, I will do that. So, this is something. In your kit, there are two documents that we have inserted. Both are work in progress sort of. The first document is about the use of IIT Bombay X. So, the demo course that we talked about and how to use that interface. That material is also available on the side, but please use this yourselves to log into IIT Bombay X enrol it and get some glimpse of an experience of how books learning is happening. You may need to spend about an hour or two over the next week or something. Then please advise all your teachers to join in on IIT Bombay X and to get that experience of how their students will be learning books. In any case, the T10KT workshop that we will run, we will run simultaneously on the Moodle and all IIT Bombay. There will be a corresponding course there. The second document which I have given is actually a, what we call a software requirement specification, where if certain function is to be implemented by software, first we write what is the functional requirement. That document is about MIS system that is management information system for teachers of participating institutions. So, suppose I am a teacher in Agartala or COEP or something and I am a blended MOOCs course teacher, what I would like to see? If you are my dean or coordinator, program coordinator for the blended MOOCs in my college, what you would like to see and what head of the institution would like to see? This information requirement has been gathered. They still work in progress. They are working like mad. We are sure that we will implement this system by July 15. That means when the blended MOOCs start operations, you will have, your teachers will have this information available to you. So, let us see what that information is. If I am a coordinator at your place, a program coordinator in your college, I will choose this course and if I press a submit button, so CS11x is one of the courses. Once I select the course, these are the teachers who are teaching this course in my institute. So, somebody said I have 500 students. I might have 5 teachers. All these 5 teachers are teaching CS11. Each teacher has a batch of 100 students, 20 students, 30 students, whatever. If I click on any teacher, which one do you press? So, let me just choose this teacher. I click on this teacher and I get, in the coordinator's dashboard, I get the list of students who are associated with the batch of that teacher. So, I am Punit Patel. Fine. I am Punit Patel. I have a total of 8 students. Now, I have advised all those 8 students to register for IIT Bombay, I have collected their email IDs and sent it to IIT Bombay saying these are my 8 students. IIT Bombay will immediately inform him that out of these 8 students, these 5 students are enrolled on IIT Bombay X, but these 3 students are not enrolled. So, when this information, suppose I am Punit Patel, I can ask my students in my next, our lecture that, you have not enrolled for this course, because without enrollment, how they will do the quizzes there and so on. So, this is the first level interaction and in fact, this is the only input that is required by IIT Bombay from participating institute, namely a list, what we call a comma separated value list, CSB format list, which your own local system administrator or even teachers can do, a spreadsheet saying this is my user, this is my ID from this college, my RC code or whatever, this is and these are the students who are enrolled for thermodynamics or CSB. Once that list comes here and that list need not be sent by email or something, because today we are only 52 people, but tomorrow there will be 500. So, they are building an upload button. Once that person enrolls, there will be an upload button, where I will upload all the students like this. Some student may join later, some student may leave. We will have a facility to modify that list. The teacher will not directly modify a database in our IIT Bombay, but he will update that information. Once that information is updated, as I said, so this is what will be the, if I am Punit Patel or if I am a coordinator. We can see this for all teachers, all courses. If I am Punit Patel, when I login, I will see only this, because I am teaching these people. If I click on any one student's thing, so there is somebody called BM Sharma and what IIT Bombay X is doing is on my dashboard. When I click that student's name, I will see the performance of that student up to whatever quizzes have been conducted. So, this is the final, let us say, week one quiz, week two quiz, week three quiz, week three graded programming assignment. This was CS 101. So, there were total mark six. He has obtained three, six, four, six, five, whatever, whatever. These are the marks. The person has not given last three assignments. He has given only two assignments and he has scored these many marks, whatever. This is, by the way, real data from the students who enrolled for IIT Bombay X last year. And some of the remote centers had participated in this early experiment with blended MOOCs, where they sent us the students who are enrolled from their class and we had sort of worked out on it. Now, do you agree that this will be useful for a teacher? So, if only two quizzes are done, they will get two quizzes. Not only that, let us go to the, this is, if I am a teacher, then I will get the performance of students in CS 101 X in a graphical form and for all students. Now, the only thing that we will not be able to do is, suppose one of the participating institutes decides that we will consider the marks of quiz three and quiz four. Another decides all quizzes. Third decides all hundred marks. We will not be able to separate out these components and give, but we will give you marks for as many assignments or quizzes that students have worked online and got marks. And we will give them progressively, not only at the end. Week after week, you can get the progress. I hope that will be useful because then, yeah. Here, only the email address will be the, Yes. In the model, we had a difficulty. The first name has an odd number. Yeah. That is the second name. Okay. Then the advantage is when I have to map the, this marks I may have to map to my grade, no? Right. So, there I need the roll number and the name. First name is roll number, second name. Now, this is where some of you are not related to computer science or information systems may not appreciate it, but I think it is common sense. I store my information as roll number, name and marks, whereas this stupid system is storing information based on the email ID. And there is some problem. Now, this is the additional software development work that somebody in each institute will have to be done. I will tell you the difficulty in making a comprehensive software. First of all, the roll numbering scheme is different in every institute. Some places you have the last name first or first name first. Some places you have the name and roll number. Some places you have roll number and name. Some places you have roll number, name, hostel residence, room number, phone number, mother's name, father's name, whatever. These are different independent information. For the purpose of blended MOOCs, I suggest a simple mechanism. Depending upon whatever is your primary key of accessing that student's information, let us say roll number. You please ask all teachers to prepare first a simple table, roll number and email ID. IIT Bombay X recognizes people by email ID and I will tell you what I mentioned briefly. We respect privacy. Roll number is a very private information pertaining to you and your institution. It should not be made public. Even my name Deepak Phatar, I may not like to be exposed to people. So, on IIT Bombay X, when I register, I will give my email ID as dbp at it.itb.ac.in and I will give my some public name which I chose. Suppose I choose Abraka Dabra. Nobody will ever, ever in life will see my email ID of IIT Bombay, nor Deepak Phatar. They will see only Abraka Dabra. They won't know how old I am, what my profile is. This is respecting my pride. If I ask a stupid question, I don't want to laugh at Deepak Phatar. Let them laugh at Abraka Dabra. Now, given this, how do we map it now to our requirement where student has to be identified? We are saying that this email ID is the only ID that by which we map people. So, in each of your institution, you have a table for all the students, roll number and email ID. Now, whenever we send you this file, you can load it in a simple database table and ask your CIS admin or anybody, even your third year computer science students will be able to write a program for you. Take this table and convert all the marks, et cetera for that role number. You have your readyment. That is an extra work that will have to be done and unfortunately there is no financial assistance for that. That is your only suit you will have. Yeah, but it's a good point that you mentioned. But you will agree that such a information will be useful. Now, look at this dashboard. This just says enrol students and unenrolled students. Means, the following students are not say unenrolled, nonenrolled, whatever. Anyway, now what will happen is seeing this on a screen, whether for the coordinator at your place for all courses or for individual teacher is one thing. But eventually what I will have to do, I will have to announce these things in class. Now, can I use a piece of paper or take this print out or something? So, for all such pertinent information, we are providing a download option. That means on the teacher's machine, the teacher can download these tables. Now, the SRS document that we have given to you, it is not meant for you of course, because it's some sort of technical thing. But I would request you to discuss that document or share that document. A, with the teachers who are teaching this course. And B, with the software professionals in your own respective institutions to see what kind of additional software may be required to patch this information with let's say, Moodle or whatever. Or to build an independent. And if you can give us feedback in next 10 or 15 days that in your opinion, this additional download facility or this format or this piece of information will be useful. We will be very happy to do. Of course, it is not something like frozen. But once we start operation, we would not like to change software till the semester is over. So, this is just in a nutshell. So, this is the login prompt. All the teachers must be registered on IIT Bombay X as I said. This one. This is the screen for sort of selecting a particular course when you submit that. This is what I told you. But last time what we saw was the co-ordinators dashboard. Remember that your director or head of the institution will nominate either the dean or some person as the program co-ordinate. Because you have two or three courses. For each course, you might have multiple teachers. While we will be interacting with individual teachers based on subject to subject thing. But as an institution, there has to be one nominated person who will be responsible for this. That person we are calling the blended books coordinator in your institute. We will also have a similar person from our. And these blended book coordinators will resolve institutional issues. But the same information is available to individual teachers. So, when I login, I will get let us say this information. This is the student performance which is week by week performance that I see. For visualization, I can click on a student and I can also get a graphical representation of the performance. I can also get overall performance as I just indicated. I can get a bar chart of what has been the performance of marks, etcetera. Usually, as an individual teacher, I would like to follow the statistics to find out how my students are doing. This of course is reflecting only the MOOCs performance. Now, this system we would be launching along with our tentative workshops and the blended books. So, do you think this will be useful? That download, upload, etc. There are no transactional thing. People will have only read only access. There are exactly two places where writing will occur. I mean transaction will occur. One, when you submit the list of students who are registered and any update there too. And second, when you download any information at your… And this should be sufficient for you to… Only thing is your teachers jointly with some software professionals might have to build some spreadsheets or model or something like that to calculate your final grade. And final grade, as we have all agreed, is entirely left to individual institution, individual teacher, what percent of marks of which particular thing we have to give. Only thing that remains now is that if the institutions are… I would not say if because there are several institutions who have said that that they would be interested in conducting supervised online examinations for at least some quizzes and something, for which the mechanism that we will follow is as I mentioned, we will instruct all the course instructors that when they announce their timetable, they will announce the quiz starting time as this, which has been agreed upon by everybody. And that the participating teachers will actually conduct the supervised examinations. We will not be able to maintain any information about supervised. When we give you the marks of these students, there may be for example, I am a student in a course and I actually decide to cheat. So, I do not appear during that supervised exam. I go home and then work on the answers and get better marks. IIT Bombay X will give you my performance in those marks. It is for your teacher to say, you got these marks but you were not here in that lab when that online exam was conducted. So, these marks cannot be considered. Now, this is a disciplinary matter that your institutions can take. Is this good enough to begin with for all of us? Great. So, now we come to the final part. The final part is to request for what should I say, nominations for being part of the advisory board. Of course, I have not taken a formal opinion but let me formally move this resolution and let me see whether all of us accept it. Do you all agree that these 53 institutions, 52 people present here in IIT Bombay, form a consortium for doing this blended book experiment? Yes sir. Good. So, we will record it somewhere. Of course, we are recording the proceedings. So, I will write the minutes later that we agreed to do this. Do you agree that the primary understanding of this consortium is to experiment with this blended MOOCs model to achieve two important objectives. First, significant improvement in the teaching learning process using modern technology and complementing our face-to-face teaching with MOOCs included. That is the first objective. Is that agreeable? Yes sir. The second objective is to ensure that the blended MOOC is taken seriously by teachers and students. The participating institutions agree that a certain percentage of the performance of online evaluation will be taken as part of the final grade for the subject of that student. Yes sir. Let us agree. Yes sir. So, these are the fundamental things that we will write. Then, we will of course in my minutes I will list that these three subjects are beginning with this. We should also agree. Each institution agrees to nominate a program coordinator for the blended MOOCs. Because director would be too busy a person. Director has to run the institution. I would suggest even the dean could be too busy a person. But if a dean is willing to take this additional responsibility there are only three subjects, it is perfectly fine. I would suggest that such a person should be a person with let us say substantial experience in running academic system, some experience or something. But of course it is left to everyone. So, in the minutes if we write simply that each participating institution agrees to appoint a blended MOOC program coordinator who will interact with the corresponding co-ordinators of all other institutions to resolve any issues arising in the implementation. Is that? Can the same person the RCC? It does not matter. See I will tell you if I am director of my institute then I would not like a body to decide that I should appoint such and such person. I would if I am a director of an institute I would like the body to tell me that institution should appoint a co-ordinate. Now that decision is to be taken by the head of that institution. I do not think we are competent to enforce that. I hope you agree with that. That is the privilege of the institution. Can you program for institution? It is entirely left to that institution. See when the institution head does it the institution head may want to look at various angles. How busy that person is. How passionate that person is about these things. So, let us not get into that. It is an administrative privilege of the participating institution. I think the joint body has no role to play in that. We can only say that there should be a program co-ordinate. Now, one second. Now we will say every program co-ordinator will take the responsibility of conveying to the program co-ordinator at IIT Bombay the names, email IDs, etcetera of the teachers who will be teaching any one of the offered courses. We are starting with three courses. So, in our minutes we will say that we all agree that we will experiment with these three courses. So, each participating programming co-ordinate program co-ordinator will convey which of the three subjects the participating institute wishes to experiment with and in which semester. So, for example, I am one of the institutes I might say computer programming both semesters thermodynamic semester too and signal and system not this time is my choice. You can decide based on your own time table. We can record that in the minutes. And then we will say that the program co-ordinator at IIT Bombay will ensure that T10KT workshops are set up for the benefit of the participants and they will be run in each of these three subjects starting before the beginning of the semester and covering the entire duration of the semester. We will just limit ourselves to that. We will also make it incumbent on the program co-ordinators to resolve any implementation issues that come within the next month or month and half related to starting time ending time online things etcetera. And I think we will keep that as simple as that. Now, if we all agree to form a consortium then it is incumbent that apart from taking these administrative decisions as per the minutes of the meeting that I will write we should also have an advisory group a group which will agree to spend slightly more time over the next year and more so in the initial four or five months to think about both the operational supervision of whatever we are doing plus long term thinking and coming up with suggestions on how this model could be improved for this. Do you agree that this advisory board I am deliberately calling it advisory because then the implementation and the decision making can still be left to the program co-ordinators and individual institutions and participants. But I think whatever will be the wording I think all of us should agree in principle that all of us whether IIT Bombay or any institution will generally go by the advice of this advisory board we do not want to create a toothless tiger right the advisory board is effectively the spokes entity for the entire consortium and I would like suggestions or what should I say volunteers or something like that my own expectation is that this group should be there is something like five to seven people with maybe two additional people from IIT Bombay IIT Bombay I have talked to my dean and director so our people will be the head of CD because he is the operational in charge of all operations here and maybe I will be there Professor Sridhar Iyer will be there but we would like seven or eight people we will record that the advisory group shall consist of heads of the institutions or their nominees of the following institutions to begin with we would request such a group to work for at least one year and then we will see how it evolves one of the task I would like to recommend to this advisory group is to formulate a multilateral memorandum of understanding once they do that we will circulate it by email or whatever and we could endorse it and if there is going to be a meeting in September or October sometime somebody volunteers then we can do that endorsement during that time meanwhile all of us can individually take legal imports, procedural imports internal validation etc so any volunteers first of all one, two, three, four, five, six, seven I have got too many of them yes let us look at the Indian geography Gwalior is North NIT yes yes we will have representatives of different things HGS-ITS that is not a good combination because both are institutions of great repute from the same state working under the same university so just because Dr. Bhadoria is not here and Dr. Jain is here personally but you do not mind Mehta if I say that we will request him to participate by the way since we do not each other for 25 years I have some other work meant for you specifically because I am going to form another group I will tell that group separately it is more of an operational responsibility so I would like you to lead that group I will come back to you Dr. Jain's one is Gwalior North, Northeast any substitute in case we will lose you from NIT I will be there for 3 years you are my chairman no no because I am your chairman I am worried God willing not but what we will do is there have to be some NIT representative so we will say NIT Agartala and NIT Raurkela Sarangi sir you have any problems and of course you do not yourself have to participate but heads of the institutions must be completely abreast with whatever is happening so I would ideally like heads of the institutions to actually consider meeting once or twice during the next 4 months you may only in the worst case send your nominee or representative it will not be your nominee your representative so let us come down C-O-I-P do you have Shastra Pudde's permission to say that because it is the head of the institution who will be representative no no no has he empowered you to nominate him to this particular because the advisory board consists of heads of these institutions fine I cannot tell you why but I am now more comfortable with both Anil Shastra Pudde and Gopal Mughera both being there because I foresee a danger of possibly losing one of them ok so C-O-I-P is there no no no the advisory board will consist of heads of these institutions in the first instance what I said nominee or representative is in case the head of the institution is not available to attend a meeting of the advisory board then that person may send the nominee but I also said that 99% it should not happen that means I would expect the head of the institution nominated to actually spend time energy and mind to help all of us see please understand that once we form this advisory group then this advisory group will actually be required to take a whole lot of decisions going forward communicating with ministry later expanding this further suppose as Gopal Mughera says there are hundred other issues that we want to join now what is the criteria we should put so many things have to be any so we have got three now let us travel geographically from India Central India Central India Y-C-C sorry Y-C-C-1-1-5-5 what is Y? Yashwantrao Chawantrao Yashwantrao Chawantrao so this is a university or a Autonomous Institution Affiliated to Nagpur University Autonomous Institution Affiliated to Nagpur University so your Nagpur University has no problem no we are complete I would have ordinarily thought of VNIT with my friend Chaudhary there but we already have two NITs third one but will Chaudhary be able to spend time last time I met him he was cribbing that after he became director he can't spend enough time on research now additionally you put this will he be able to spend time you will care no no no you are already anticipating that he will not have enough time that is not true by the way I do want I am very serious about it this is a very important business the advisory group is going to work on our behalf they represent 52 institutions and they represent the burden of these 52 institutions in this experience so are you sure that who is the head of the institution doctor doctor are you sure he is since I do not know him I would like to personally confirm with him so I will record this as a volunteer but I will keep that on hold till I cross check thank you we have come to the center east coast it is not coastal Andhra now what do you call it where are you located where are you located Hyderabad Hyderabad is not Andhra Pradesh both Mara Maree will be there okay from Telangana from Telangana which so there are multiple institutions okay okay before going further I would like to get one or two universities which are deemed university university university DAVV one of the be very careful because head of the institution of a university is vice chancellor will the vice chancellor will willing to spend time and energy on this issue I am very clear on this this is not something which can be delegated if it is difficult then I would suggest that will not involve him on this thing but will have RGPV RGPV RGPV Wow RGPV itself but will your vice chancellor have time to spend on this very good so I will say RGPV but is a center and it is a university but subject to your vice chancellor confirming that he will participate in this very good can we have one or two private universities this is a government institution I know amity is one that is in north SRM SRM SRM is straight away in the heart of Tamil Nadu JNMI will prove yeah but head of the institution for engineering and technology is director because it is a multi stream we have medical department for engineering technology higher authority is director no we have no problem our NITs are also directors but they are equivalent to vice chancellor so in so far as the entire academic activity of the engineering portion is concerned syllabus exam system grading board of management and who is the director Dr. Muthamit Chalvan Dr. Muthamit Chalvan I can't pronounce it but I will write the but are you 100 percent sure that he will agree sure you can double check as am I to double check but I would like an endorsement from him saying that he has been briefed on everything that has happened here so we will take SRM as one institution Geetam Hyderabad Geetam University Hyderabad who is the vice chancellor we have director doctor Geetam University and this is Hyderabad so SRM I am missing out on the count one second one second I will say SRM and six we said North India we have Gwalior Raurkela is you have any suggestions no Jammu is one of the places there is Vaishnodevi Mata Vaishnodevi but they did not respond I think we can start with these five or six people anybody from Kerala or anybody from Karnataka all right Kerala Amruta itself Amruta has multiple no but there is only one university but your vice chancellor or chancellor is Amma herself she will never have time to participate Venkat will Venkat spend enough time yeah he is very interesting my worry is that every time he comes and attends this meeting he will remind me to collect 4.5 crore from the history and give it to him I can't do that now so is that okay we write Amruta no it's not Amruta column it's but campus is free campus you give me the exact credentials Venkat sitting in Coimbatore so let me just read out one is Gwalior second is Agartala third is Raurkela fourth is COEP fifth possibly is that vice sixth is RGPV that is Bhopal University itself seventh is SRM eighth is Geetam ninth is BMS am I missing something tenth is Amruta right good my dear friend each one of us have to continue each one of us will have to continue no no this is see you can't have a 20 member advisory group for a 50 member community it will look funny even these 10 are too many we will have 2 people from IIT Bombay so I hope it is okay with you by the way we had scheduled the first meeting of the advisory board but we need not have that advisory board meeting right now itself if you permit me I will discuss this with all the 10 people I will discuss this with my own because I have not discussed with my director I have discussed my dean of course I know he will tell me I have discussed with what because that freedom we have but if you permit me I will take these 10 names and 2 names from IIT Bombay see my director Prasad Devankakkar on Monday and I will consult him and if he feels like pruning this then I have your permission that 1 or 2 names so I can remove it if he feels there are too many otherwise we will have a 12 member advisory rather than having first meeting here I would now like volunteers from amongst these advisory board who are willing to offer conduct of the first meeting of the advisory board at their place with each individual member spending money for his or her own travel to that place sir you have no choice there is no other place for hospitality Nagar Talla except your institute if you do not take care of us we will go ahead I stayed in one of the hotels there for 2 days so I know the difference between the Agar Talla Hospitality and elsewhere BMS where Bangalore Bangalore is more centrally located but would you have at least some guest house or something for these 12 people to come and because while people will spend their own money for air travel but they should not be required to stay under a tree in the night or something like that ideally if there is an institution which has a guest house of some 12-15 people that could be helpful I see I have a suggestion it so happens that I am slated to visit Rao Kela for an event and I will be there on one day I think 4th of August now that event is in the afternoon or in the morning sir no no your choice the reason I was saying is that if it is agreeable we could have the advisory council first meeting in Rao Kela on 4th of August say morning half or something then I can also be present there if it is okay Dr. Saring it's fine so 10 or 12 people will descend on you suddenly no problem from railway station back to the railway station good so I will write down this option so first option is Rao Kela the second option is COEP COEP Pune again that same airport to airport airport to airport oh you have guest house and all is it I had never seen one in COEP we have so the second option is Pune and third option is BMS college BMS alright so if at all we decide on Rao Kela we will do it on 4th of August but my feeling is that one meeting we should have in July itself before the semester begins and the second immediate following meeting we should have in August so is it alright to say that sometime in the first or second week of July we shall have first meeting which could be either or in college of engineering Pune and the second meeting we shall have on 7th of August in Rao Kela and these two meeting should be good enough to resolve all wrinkles for us to short short alright any other point that you would like to mention I forgot to mention the second thing there is also a requirement of continuously building information systems to back this endeavor there is also a requirement to bring the blended MOOCs into the mainstream IIT Bombay X in fact Professor Avinash outed did not like our way of doing things where we are building a separate MIS system he had conceived the idea of a sister course where in IIT Bombay X itself the course is created for every partnering institution over the next two or three years somehow we will have to implement such software systems in the IIT Bombay over next two to three years each of the partnering institutions we will have to build their own software internally to support the blended MOOCs operation now for that I would like a separate technical advisory group which will be willing to study the IIT Bombay X architecture which will be willing to study sample software systems implemented in different colleges I believe Moodle is commonly used by many this is not the community which can decide on such a membership that is one of the reasons why I did not want Dr. Mehta to participate in that larger thing Dr. Mehta also happens to be head of the computer science group there he also happens to be a stalwart in variety of issues related to it so if you agree we will also minute that we decided to set up a technical committee to advise us on the issues related to software functionality hardware etcetera etcetera at the moment we will agree that we nominate Dr. Mehta to head that technical committee and I will request all participants to suggest names of individuals who are willing to contribute in terms of studying the entire software roadmap and making available their expertise to at least write something like detailed software requirement specification monitor the information system advise on what additional thing is required etcetera sorry Dr. Mehta I am taking questions on your behalf but are you ok with that wonderful so please send some names like that all of you will have good software people but they should be able to travel at least once in two months over the next one year and they should be able to spend extra time on studying these things much of the studies they will be able to do it there and they could travel to either indoor sometimes to Bombay or whatever but that work is strictly technical so whosoever already from amongst ourselves so there are enough computer science people amongst our own group I did not realize I will agree with that provided your director does not give you the responsibility of being the program coordinator there is so much of heavy work that you cannot wear multiple hats to individual but let us not force that this year now we will request that Dr. Mehta's email ID is with you so anybody who feels that such and such person can participate just write a small paragraph a brief CV of that person what that person's experience in information systems is and send it to Dr. Mehta and me and I hope you will permit us to select from I am assuming that large number of nominations will come we will select some group but these people will have to spend an equal amount of time in analyzing the information systems requirement of this group okay so we agree that the first meeting shall be in July somewhere in between middle of the middle of July or whatever will decide on the exact time and that will be held either in Pune or BMS Bangalore the second meeting will be held on third of August no fourth of August in NIT okay and our first agenda should be to get a multilateral MOU to be sort of endorsed by us so I would request the advisory committee members to start applying their mind I will initiate action in about 5 days of drafting a very very crude form of a multilateral MOU which I will circulate through all advisory council members and they may want to look at one issue is also to select the chairman of the advisory group so we do not have any chairman we have 8 or 10 names out of which so what should we do is I think we will wait for the first meeting and in the first meeting which is held in either COEP or BMS when all the members join we will ask everybody who can spend maximum time on this activity and we will unanimously volunteer him to become the chairman is that okay there is a standard method in IIT also we unanimously volunteer somebody to do the dirty work so since there is unanimous decision he cannot refuse our very good very good so thank you very much for very very meaningful participation I will again repeat that the decision that we have taken today are unique globally there is no such body which has come together at a short notice and decided to try this blended and it is now incumbent on all of us to make this successful if this blended model works I tell you history of not only this country but of the world will remember already I am getting inquiries from Korsera from EDX how are you doing this blended model the Russian university which is conducting aircraft when I told them that I am we are doing this they said will you please give a keynote and explain to us what could be the advantage so I hotly wrote to them that since your conference in September I will not be speculating I will tell you what have been the advantages by September we will know I am being over enthusiastic perhaps but I do not know let us see what happens but I think if this large group is together we can move heavens