 Good morning and welcome to this teacher's training workshop for two weeks on database management systems. Some of you will recall that we had been running teacher's training workshop for thousand teachers at a time. At the beginning of this year, we decided to scale it up to 10,000 teachers at a time and you are actually participating in second such program. First one was held in the last week of December on thermodynamics. The course was conducted by Professor Uday Gaitonde and his colleagues. Today we have the privilege of having what I call as the Indian database guru, Professor Sudarshan to guide us throughout these two weeks of heavy duty workshop. So to begin with, let me welcome Professor Sudarshan and thanks for agreeing to do this course again. As you know, data and information management and the role of database management systems in doing such management are extremely important in modern day activities and therefore the relevance of this course for your students is actually extremely important. To begin with, I would like to share some of my thoughts on the role of teachers in the days ahead in what I call the MOOC times. MOOC stands for Massive Online Open Courses. Many of you would have heard of edX and Coursera which offer courses for as many as 100,000 participants. IIT Bombay will be offering the first such program starting this August or September for the benefit of one lakh or more people. In the days of MOOC, students have access to the best material including audio, video recorded lectures and books and everything. In such circumstances one wonders what is the role of teachers. In my opinion, the teachers actually have an extremely critical role to play even in the times of online courses. However, that role changes slightly instead of spending a lot of time in preparing for lectures and giving lectures which is actually the largest time occupying activity for all teachers. We can now rely more and more on availability of expert lectures and therefore, can concentrate on solving problems, holding discussion sessions and mentoring and advising students in discussion sessions in the class rather than the conventional lectures. The methodology of teaching might change, but it will become more intense and you will be able to pay more attention to individual students in the process. Now, this change in the style of teaching is something that all of us need to adapt in coming years. It may not become apparent immediately, but over next to 3 to 5 years I expect significant changes in the teaching methodology. One of the objectives in using this distance mechanism is to indicate that while lectures by experts can be delivered from distance and which can later on be viewed by students on internet, the teachers still remain critical because for the participants that you have in your own class, you are the teacher. You will continue to be the teacher guiding them, telling them the nuances of the technology and the problem solving that you are handling in a particular subject. One of the important aspects that all of us as teachers must acquire if we already do not possess them is a very good articulation. You might wonder why I stress this because all of us as teachers are required to articulate ourselves meaning we need to talk about things that we teach and therefore, we need to talk correctly. However, talking alone is not adequate, verbal articulation is important, but equally important is the written articulation because the subjects that we teach, the hard problems that we ask our students to solve, all these solutions, all these discussions, all the ideas that come to people's mind need to be written down and communicated in written form. We all teachers are aware of the written articulation requirement because we have to write research papers, we have to set question papers even the simple thing as setting a question paper. I do not know how many of you are actually aware that to set a good question paper takes as much as two to three days of full time work in spite of the fact that you and I may be an expert in that particular subject and that is because we not only need to set the questions to test the knowledge properly, but we need to articulate in written form every question properly. That means we have to examine every sentence that we write, it should be grammatically correct, it should actually convey exactly what we wish we wish to convey to our students and therefore, written articulation is important. I will use this opportunity to also emphasize a sad fact that prevails in our education system and that sad fact is the possibility or the temptation to plagiarize material. Those of you are not familiar with this English word plagiarism, it means copying portions of text from somebody else's work, putting it together in one's own submission and claiming it as one's own. You would have heard gory stories of how sadly some research papers are sent for publications which actually contain paragraphs or paragraphs copied from somebody else. Copying in an exam is a punishable act. Copying paragraphs from somebody else's work for any kind of submission, particularly claiming it to be your own is actually worse than a criminal action because that is being done by people who are senior and mature enough and therefore, if it goes unnoticed and unpunished it could set an extremely bad example to our young students. I stress this point because all of you teachers who have come together here are required to do two things. One during the course you will be required to submit your assignments, you will have to do your tutorials and there will be some online quizzes. Then you will be forming yourself into teams of four people and doing a two week assignment after the workshop which you will submit to the coordinator on the moodle. As you all know, we expect such large scale submission of important problems and their solutions as open source material for all other teachers and students who are not benefiting directly from this course. This is how we add to the knowledge. However, it is of utmost importance that when you submit those assignments or when you solve problems in the quizzes that are given during the workshop or when you do an assignment and submit it on moodle, as I said it is of utmost importance that those assignment submissions, those team report submissions at the end, all of them must be your and your work alone. Please be warned that at IIT Bombay, we do not at all tolerate any attempt of copying or using somebody else's material giving it as one's own. Even when you submit the larger assignment, the team assignment in which you might be required to prepare a project report, you may be referring to some problem or some part of the solution which has been solved by someone else. Like in all research papers, you would cite the source appropriately giving reference and giving you credit that is what is expected of everyone and that is more expected from teachers. So, please remember that whatever you do, you might, I might score even zero marks in an assignment, but I would rather attempt the assignment on my own than copying somebody else's work. This is exactly what we try to emphasize to our students and what better place to start practicing than our own courses. I am sorry for emphasizing this, but we have seen time and again temptations overtaking the natural expectation of doing one's work by oneself. Please avoid such temptations at all costs in all submissions made in this course. So, it is a place to add if any such attempt is ever detected, not only the person would not be given a certificate at the end, but latest would be written to appropriate authorities to take further action. This is to be emphasized that if we permit tolerance of such activities amongst our mates, we will have no moral right to claim otherwise when we deal with our students. So, let us start with ourselves and ensure that there is a complete no-no to plagiarism. Having said that, let me emphasize one more point. I already mentioned that in the days ahead, the role of a teacher will come down or will change substantially from just giving lectures to actually giving explanations, solving problems in the class and having discussion sessions. When you solve problems, the typical emphasize is to solve problems which are important from an examination perspective because that is what students are looking for. I have been told in fact that in most university systems, the books which are maximally read are not text books, but guide books which help students to prepare specifically for problems which are likely to be asked in examining. While that may be correct for the preparation of examinations towards the end of the semester, but during the period when the subject is being taught, it is important that general problem solving is discussed and emphasized. And I would like to suggest that while you discuss problems, you also discuss some hard problems, even problems which may not ever appear in any examination. There are two reasons to do that. First, to the general class comprising of 60 students who might have different capabilities of absorption. So some will be very slow learners, some will be very fast learners, but you have to address the average of the class in order to maintain a pace which is digestible by the entire class. But while you do so, choosing some hard problems for discussions helps both the lower end people to understand that there are tougher issues which need to be addressed. More importantly, it helps the top performers in your class to be adequately challenged so that they can bring out the best in them and be prepared to solve even tougher problems in real life. Our assignments will reflect this. The assignments that you will be doing will take various forms during this two week workshop. As I said, you will be solving some tutorial problems. We have a great emphasis on hands-on experimentation. Please remember that there is a very strong theory behind the relational database management systems and which will be adequately uncovered by Professor Sudarshan. However, what is most important is to apply that theory to construct meaningful applications. In fact, the team assignment that you will be doing will actually have such an assignment to build an end-to-end application. However, during the workshop, please do your assignments and tutorials seriously and diligently and spend as much time on computers as possible. The workshop coordinators at each of these places have spent a very valuable time from their lives. One full week, they had all come here to IIT Bombay. They interacted personally with Professor Sudarshan and his team. All of them have actually participated in doing tutorials, solving problems and giving quizzes so that they are absolutely ready to help you in doing precisely these things, albeit with greater vigor. Please spend your time meaningfully. These are very precious times because you will never be able to interact with Professor Sudarshan and the workshop coordinators at each of these places and be with your own peers, some 30, 40, 50, 60 of whom have assembled at each remote center. Please utilize this opportunity to have group discussions, have discussions among yourselves and please go beyond the specific dimensions of the coverage of a specific subject which is database management system. And therefore, I urge you to discuss among yourselves issues which appear in teaching in various places. The problems that you face, the problems that your students face, who know through such discussions with your peers, you might discover some indicative solutions to some problems which have been vexing you for quite some time. That is the power of working in groups or knowing from each other. Needless to say once again, I will emphasize, do things on your own. You know, this is something which we learned very early in IIT system. This is something which we learned to learn from others very early in IIT system. I will take two minutes to recall some of the very nostalgic moments when I started as a teacher here in 1971. Those were the days when computer science was not recognized as an independent field of study. It used to be part of electrical engineering department in IIT. Although we were a few young faculty members in the then computer center offering computer science electives. Computer science electives were being developed then and our then head, Professor Isaac, told a few teachers, we are all young teachers then, about four or five of us, and he said the number of teachers are too few and the number of courses to be taught are too many. And therefore, each one of us will have to develop a course and learn a subject. I was developing digital signal and image processing along with Professor Kekre and I decided to choose data management which is the precursor to the database management systems of today as a subject that I would like to study. My guru in data management was Professor N.L. Sarada. Some of you might be familiar with that name. He had written some books on cobalt programming and data management in early years. The way I studied that subject and that was expected by Professor Isaac of all young teachers was actually to attend a full semester course offered by Professor Sarada. I sat there as a student although I was a teacher. I submitted all assignments. I did all assignments on my own. The only privilege I had was Professor Sarada did not publicly announce my marks because scoring marks was not objective. Learning was objective. Why I tell you this story is that you have now an opportunity to learn from three sets of people in this intensive two-week workshop. First and foremost, our guru in databases, Professor Sudarshan himself. The second, your workshop coordinators whom as I said who has spent a lot of time here in preparing themselves to interact with you in coming weeks. And third equally important is the group of peers with whom you are working. Please spend that time meaningfully. Please exercise your mind to the fullest and please try and understand and learn as much as you can. Equally importantly, as I briefly mentioned, learn how actual teaching is being done by your peers in other colleges and by the workshop coordinators in the remote centers itself. You will get an inkling of how the course is taught in IIT Bombay throughout these two weeks because Professor Sudarshan will be delivering the lectures. He is the one who has said all the tutorial problems and so on. Please learn the teaching approach and teaching methodology which is equally important as is the importance of the course contents that you will be going through. While we shall be awarding certificate of attendance for the ISD program to all the teachers who complete the entire course, who complete all the assignments, who complete the feedback form and who complete the team assignment to be submitted two weeks after the workshop. And please note that in this certification, there is no requirement of scoring minimum marks as our students are required to score in an exam. Of course, I expect the participating teachers to score well, but this certification is not connected with this course. That is because there may be a possibility that some teachers somewhere because of inadequate preparation earlier than attending this course may not be able to solve problems and may not get a very reasonable score in terms of mark. Does not matter. The idea here is to casual each one of us actually act as best as one can. And therefore, we are not tying up certification to the actual score in the exams or the test. However, all tests and quizzes are obligated. Now, you may wonder if there is no relevance of the marks obtained during the quizzes and assignments of this workshop, then why are we conducting them? We would like to give you an opportunity to do things on your own, but we have decided to do one more thing. This was suggested by Professor Gayathurinder last time to the top 5 percent performers of this course, which could be as many as about 500 teachers subject to their scoring minimum marks. We shall be giving certificates of excellence. So, these certificates will be given signed by Professor Siddhashthan and me and these certificates will be called certificates of excellence in the DBMS workshop. I would expect each one of you to try very hard to achieve this status because I do believe that such a recognition would go a long way to uplift your own moral and your own activities in future. I will conclude by saying that IIT Bombay is very happy to contribute to empowerment of teachers in this fashion. We will continue to do so. You may be aware that we are planning to conduct a total of 15 workshops, 9 of them by us and 6 of them by our partner institution IIT Kharagpur. Many of you would know that IIT Kharagpur will be conducting a 2 week workshop like this starting first week of June on analog electronics for which I believe Professor Somnath will be here very soon from IIT Kharagpur. And he might choose to address you for 10 minutes sometimes during the course. So, please spread this word and please let your colleagues from other disciplines and other subjects benefit from this particular endeavor of ours. In conclusion, I will once again say that our objective is not only to make useful material available in open source to all students and teachers, but our objective mainly is to empower individual teachers because even in the days of massive online open course where which will become the order of the day soon because we believe that universities and colleges will start adopting these courses offering credits in their own college and university system for the courses which are done by the students elsewhere. Even in these days the role of teachers as I mentioned earlier and I emphatically restate that again the role of teacher will remain paramount in fact it will become more critical than ever because teachers will increasingly be expected to hold discussion sessions to hold a larger number of tutorials to mentor students individually and collectively to guide them to actually solve real life problem using the knowledge that they gain in the subjects which you will teach. So, all the best to you and well I would say I will once again thank Professor Sudarshan for taking time out. Many of you may not know this. He has recently taken over as head of the computer science and engineering department at R I T Bombay. As you know we pride ourselves of being the largest and probably the best computer science department in the country and to hear that department is both an honor, a privilege and a great responsibility and much greater work. It is in spite of this extra work that Professor Sudarshan has agreed to continue with this two week workshop. I am personally grateful. Thank you Professor Sudarshan and all the best to you.