 Sir we are live now, please start. Yeah, very good morning to all of you. I am Balraju and part of the industrial relations team at NPTEL in IIT Madras and today I am very happy to invite all of you. Very good morning to all of you. I am Balraju and part of the industrial relations team at IIT Madras and today I am very happy to invite all of you for the launch of Gate Portal and I am very happy to invite faculty from IIT Madras. We have Professor Pratap Haridas, Dean, Academic Courses from IIT Madras. We have Professor Ramakrishna, Coordinator of NPTEL at IIT Madras and I am very happy to invite all the students, faculty and well wishers of NPTEL who are very interested to know about the Gate Portal and I am very happy to note that this portal is going to be very, very unique and we have been thinking about this from the last two years around September 19. I believe we were thinking of the Gate Portal and we were writing a proposal and internally NPTEL team was thinking how we can launch the Gate Portal and help the student community and NPTEL has always been offering something new to the students community and we thought Gate Portal is something unique that can help a lot of learners who are part of NPTEL platform and we thought it can add great value to the learners and we were also thinking of getting CSR support for this initiative and luckily we got support from MDS Labs, Bengaluru for this I would say development and development of Gate Portal and we want to thank them as well for their unconditional support through the CSR initiative and with this initial thoughts I would like to invite Professor Ramakrishna to share more thoughts about the Gate Portal and the features of the Gate Portal. Ramakrishna, I think you are muted. So good morning everybody. Thanks for being here. It's a pleasure for us to add this new feature to NPTEL which will enable learners across the country and even the globe to assist in preparing for Gate exam. So I'll quickly run you through the salient features of this before we declare the portal open. So a bit of statistics here that approximately 9 lakh candidates appear for the Gate exam each year and a good Gate score can get you several things including admissions to graduate programs across IIT, IIC, NITs and so on. Gate is also a requirement for certain GRF and SRF programs and not long ago even PSU recruitments use the Gate score as some kind of a qualifier for their recruitment process. So in this portal so what are our objectives here? So since we have come a long way at NPTEL since offering three courses on the MOOCs platform in 2014 to over 500 courses which are running this semester and one demand or suggestion from a lot of learners has been to add a feature or you know there would be questions on the forum is the score 11 for Gate or when will the Gate preparation start or can you give some tips on Gate and so on. So we thought it would be a good feature to add given that we almost cover all the core courses that are relevant for Gate exam across all subjects. So the objective here is to build a one-stop platform to enable the preparation for Gate where you have high quality lectures from faculty across IITs and IIC and in addition to that what we also added now is to provide detailed video solutions of previous year Gate exams. What we also envisage is to have an online assessment platform via a very comprehensive question bank where people can take their tests they can personalize their tests and also have a personalized feedback in the form of highlighting strengths and weaknesses or suggesting areas of improvement for the candidates appearing for Gate exam. So in the first version of the features of the first version of the portal we have the following features we start by linking Gate topics to the relevant NPTEL content. I will show you a demo of that soon and we also provide video solutions to previous Gate questions. The video solutions are designed in such a way that these are self-contained that each solution will start with highlighting the basic concepts that are required to solve those questions. It also goes on to provide detailed solutions worked out by our research scholars and lastly it also provides you if there are any tips to solve such problems to correct the Gate exam. What is coming soon and this is what we are also excited about is to provide an assessment platform in addition to providing customized feedback for the learners. So with this I invite Professor Pratap to declare the portal open and say a few words to the listeners. Thank you Professor Ramakrishna. Thank you Bal Raju for this great initiative. It's my pleasure and privilege to declare the NPTEL Gate portal open and available for service of all the learners. It's truly been a pleasure. I thank you all for the opportunity and I'm really happy that it is now open. So thank you for that. From my side I wanted to add some comments. As was mentioned this has been an initiative NPTEL has been very interested in. At the core of NPTEL's activity is the idea that we should make education truly accessible to all our students across the country so that economic constraints do not get in the way of a student who is keen on getting a good education. And so generally there has been a lot of emphasis on various ways of doing learning for Gate exam given the number of places where the Gate exam becomes useful as was pointed out by Professor Ramakrishna. So it is necessary that more students have the ability to prepare for Gate exam without having to spend huge amounts of money and resources. And so this portal will help you prepare a fair bit. I mean you have to decide for yourself what else you would like to do for your preparation. But this will give you a pretty good level of preparation from the comfort of your home. You just need a good internet connection and then you can prepare to your heart's content using various resources that have been made available here. Students who are regular users of NPTEL content will share with you. I mean if you ever get to meet them or maybe perhaps you yourselves are a regular user of NPTEL content you already know how useful it is. We receive so much feedback on so many places that students have gone for interviews, for jobs and so on where their preparation using NPTEL content has given them a huge boost of confidence and professional competence, feeling of professional competence that they have done well in various settings. So we believe that this has the body of information and knowledge that will help the students with their Gate preparation as well. And therefore this portal has been put together to bring this into a focused activity. And therefore it's really something that I believe students can benefit from. So once again I thank Balrajoo and of course Ramakrishna for this opportunity to share in this beautiful occasion which is the launch of this portal which I am confident will be very useful to a very large number of students. Thank you. Thank you Professor Pratap. So I will just spend some time on quickly introducing the portal. I think much of the content here is self-explanatory if you go through this. What is an important feature from our point of view is to use this feedback which is on the bottom right here. So please provide feedback, suggestions, criticisms or things that you would want to see on this portal and we would be happy to add those features in whatever way possible. Okay so now about the content. So first thing that we do here is we map the Gate syllabus across subjects. So for now we are the first version here covers computer science, EC, civil engineering, Tripoli as it is called and mechanical engineering. There have been lots of questions of what happens to ocean engineering or humanities and economics. All those are slowly being added up and we would keep on updating the portal as and when we have content. The content is being added regularly even as we speak. I am sure there are a few videos that have been added to the portal. Okay so the way we link syllabus is to very specific videos of a particular topic just say for example if I want to go to digital circuits I can go to these are the several sub topics in the Gate syllabus. You can go to say computer organization and this will direct you to the exact video of the NPTEL. So it's all embedded into this platform here. So this is this is a pretty neat because you don't really have to search through all the entire 30 or 40 hours of videos to go to the to the particular video that is of interest to you. So these are these go across subjects similarly for mechanical engineering there are also a lot of a lot of content there are some things like field mechanics if you want to just say you know I want to quickly learn about Bernoulli's equation and I just go to the appropriate video. Of course all this is under the assumption that you would have gone through your basic undergrad courses so that this might be like a quick refresher by just a click of a button for that specific topic. So this is this is a pretty neat in in in more than one base of getting you direct access to the to the videos. So the reason this also helps you know while we were advertising this across our social media platform there was a lot of interest and one question which I would like to read out is some some some of our SPOCs our local chapter said that they I read from the from the message it said that I'm sure that the NPTEL team may launch a gate cluster courses with poctored examinations. Of course that's the idea we would definitely love to do a gate cluster courses exactly targeting the gate syllabus as it is may not be certified exams but you can have no self-assessment through our through our portal over here. The another exciting feature is to have video solutions. Again we are targeting these four subjects as a movement and civil engineering will be shortly added. So just say for example I just take electronics and communication engineering I can sort questions either by year I can go to say 2020 and I can just get all questions you know based on the particular topic of interest. So I can just go to the question on say route service stability or analog electronics and just pay the pay the solution here. So again the the unique feature is that this this the solutions are self-contained that it will have a quick recap of the basic concepts theorems or proofs or formulas or any any other thing that is useful in solving that particular problem that solutions are worked out in great amount of detail and then it will end with a quick things on whether there are any tricks to solve such problems which are essentially required in a competitive exam. You could also sort this by by this topic just say you know I just want to look at all the questions which say occurred and you know which were asked in say electromagnetic theory for example. So I get all the questions from from the year 2021 backwards till 2016 and all the way till 2008. Some of the content as I said is still being being added so in a few weeks time we would have question papers of at least 7 to 10 years and of course this will keep updating as we progress in time. So this is about the video solutions so we have solutions going from CES till mechanical engineering everything is sorted either by the year of the gate paper or even a relevant topic. So this is in brief of what the portal can do now. We are adding a lot of features as we as we go through so in the next six to eight months you could see a lot more lot more content being added here in terms of the material and also in terms of specific features like self-assessment portals or practice tests or modules where you can maybe just take one topic and then just practice some 50 questions in that particular module. All that all that is coming up we are excited about this I hope the students also benefit and then please make sure you suggest us appropriate things that you would like to see via our feedback form. So that is in brief of the portal I'll pass on to Bararaju to say some concluding words and also a few things about our sponsor on this project. Thank you professor Ramakrishna. I'm very happy that demo is very clear to the students and I'm also very keen that we take few questions from the students before we take questions. I also want to share the message from our sponsor Mr. Mani Ganeshan. He is head of APEC for MDS labs R&D and MDS labs is based in Bangalore and we have Mr. Mani Ganeshan giving his message for us and we want to thank you Mr. Mani and your team for giving us this wonderful support through your CSR initiative and we requested to share a few words from you Mr. Mani. Hello everyone. Amidus is happy to be partnering with IIT Madras on this important CSR initiative. Amidus we are the largest technology provider in travel. We take our corporate social responsibility fairly seriously. It's anchored on four key pillars which is environment sustainability, women and government, education and tech for good. When IIT Madras approached us with this NPTEL initiative it fitted two of the four pillars quite nicely. So we jumped at it saying let's partner with one of the premier institutes in India. The last 18 months have been quite interesting journey for us partnering with IIT Madras and creating this gate portal. The portal has shaped up quite well. It will help a lot of underprivileged students get access to premier content from the top notch institutes in India like the IITs and the IIC. Happy to see that this progress has been made and it's reaching its production release now. All the best to IIT and the NPTEL organization on the launch of this portal and best wishes to the students who benefit from it. Thank you Mr. Mani and thank you Amidus team. I want to especially thank Ms. Ribu from the CSR team of Amidus. She has been instrumental in bringing this initiative to their board and ensuring that we get continuous support from Amidus. Thank you team and I also want to thank Professor Pratap who was NPTEL coordinator then who was instrumental in proposing this platform as well as the proposal with the team and start working on this. In fact we were writing to all the faculty within IIT Madras to get support to create content for the gate portal and in fact Professor Ramakrishna was also instrumental in creating a lot of content in electrical as well as electronics departments that you see a lot of his PhD students who are part of this. So I want to thank each and every one of the faculty members as well as I would say IIT Madras's scholars who are participating in creating this I would say gate portal and making it a very good success and this is only a starting point. We have launched only phase one today. We have a lot of I would say features that are being thought of and we are looking at a very good portal that's going to benefit a lot of students across the country with respect to gate preparation. And with this I want to thank everybody who's participating in this event today and who's watching this live from comfort of your home. Before that I have few questions from the audience I thought I'd just share it with the faculty briefly to some of them so that it benefits all the learners. So most popular question I see in the chat is is this portal free of cost? Professors, do you want to answer? It is free of cost. Yeah so everything in NPTEL is basically free of cost. So we are here to share the joy of education and the process of education for you know without having cost get in the way. So most of our operations fundamentally are free of cost. There are only if you know there are certain things like we run an exam and then which is not really relevant for this portal but if we run an exam then there are specific exam related costs and only then even then on a not-for-profit basis is when we have any cost but that's not relevant to this portal. This portal is for accessing content for seeing it at your own convenience and based on your interest and so this is free. I mean this is completely free. We are delighted to offer it to you for free and delighted to share this learning process with you for free and of course learning is learning. It is not only related to GATE. I mean you can use this for learning the subject as is. I mean to see many worked examples is always a great thing. We get to understand the subject much better when we see worked examples actually being done in front of us and so I think your general learning of the subject, your confidence in the subject, your confidence to write any exam in the subject not just the GATE exam. I will go up if you use the features available in this portal. One more question that is coming up popularly is whether you are going to release physics department, some of them are asking metallurgy department. So it looks like there's a lot of interest among learners to have almost all the departments. Right now we started with 25 departments. Professor Ramakrishna, do you want to answer this? Willis, so I have been seeing these questions or comments or suggestions on our social media platforms since yesterday. So all these are coming up. We are working towards getting the content right and so all this is coming up. So this is just like the really first version and eventually you will see all the subjects being covered with a lot more exciting features that will also enable you for self-assessment and other features as I said. So just think of this as the iPhone 1 and then we may go to iPhone 13 without any extra cost. So please bear with us. We are in the process of adding all the GATE subjects. There are people who said about ocean in the morning. Now there's also people talking about humanities and economics. So all those features are on the way. So just bear with us for a while and they'll be coming soon. Professor Pratap, do you want to add anything? Yes, I think I agree with what Professor Ramakrishna said. More departments we are working on to get the world examples out and certainly they will come as soon as we get more and more of it ready. We'll have a process by which we keep uploading those. So please keep asking us so that we can also convey to the faculty the kind of demand there is for those specific subject topics and then accordingly more emphasis can be diverted in those directions. Thank you professors. Just to tell you the demand we have more than 3000 live users watching the GATE portal launch today. So that itself is a clear indication that there is a lot of interest among students to get access to good quality learning material for the GATE preparation. And we have seen a lot of queries in the chat window as well. And I have a request to all the learners who are watching this live today. I request all of you to go to the portal, start looking at various features of the portal and please share your feedback. There is a feedback in the bottom of the portal. There is a link there where you can actually share your feedback and please write to us about your experience of the GATE portal. And also share with us what you think we should add in terms of new features. In terms of new subjects, please share with us. We will definitely discuss internally and definitely plan something very soon. And we are definitely looking at making this portal very, very useful to all the learners across the country. And we are very, very happy that we are able to do this launch of phase one portal today. And at this juncture, I want to just thank all the faculty who have helped us in IT materials. And I also want to thank Professor Ram Krishna for their continuous support for this portal as well as participating in this launch. And with this, I want to conclude the launch of the portal today. And I request all of you to go and look at the portal and start sharing your feedback. And let's start the journey of the GATE portal. And let's meet in the launch of the portal for the phase two. Thank you. Thank you, all of you. Thank you, everyone.