 So, we will quickly start with a small exercise which we will do now and which will give you a feeling of how we communicate now. So, there are two key aspects of technical communication which we will try to discover as we do this exercise. So, technical communication is essentially any message related to science, engineering, technology and so on. So, messages could be written like in articles or graphical representations or video lectures such as this. So, the purpose of technical communication is slightly different from other forms of communication. It is for others to know what you are communicating so that they can use it for something else and also for others to reproduce. So, reproduction is a very important thing in technical communication. We just do not communicate as a general knowledge. We want people to be able to reproduce certain things. So, that makes it slightly different from other forms of communication that what we communicate has to be precise. So, as an example it could be a research thesis or any project that you do. You come up with a detailed project report or it could be even as small as a laboratory experiment that all of us have done in our high school. Even there we write a detailed procedure. This is all a form of some elementary form of technical communication or it could be some how tos, how to do a particular thing. It could be a video tutorial, how to use a particular application or how to assemble certain things and so on. So, what we will do now as I said is a very small exercise. Let us say you are in your university and you come across somebody from another department. Somebody who is not in your department but is a colleague in your university or a college whom you meet on the way or maybe for a in a cafe or something. And you are now required to explain to that person some technical project you have been doing. It could be some one month small project, summer project or something or it could be some year long or a few years or long project that you have been doing with your students. So I would like you to take just about few minutes now and write down what you will convey. I mean we do not have lot of time, just 3 minutes to speak to that. So maybe 4 or 5 sentences. So please write down in 4 or 5 sentences something about any project that you have done that you want to explain. So now by that process we will learn what is it that you are communicating now and what is it that could be communicated that is generally expected of such communications. So please take about 5 minutes time and write down any project, it could be a short project or research project or some project that you did with your students. So we will go ahead now. In this few sentences that you wrote you would have written some of these things. It could be background, it could be motivation, it could be aim or methodology or implication, novelty, significance, applications and so on. Now what I would like you to do is just underline like how many people had written the background. Just write down that you have made a background there. So underline those few words if you had written background so underline those few words and write this is a background. And then if it was aim so underline those few words or those sentences and label it as aim and so on or if it was results or novelty so just underline those particular words and label them. You can cover all these points within 3 to 4 persons. Yeah very good. Not possible. Thank you. We will show that it is not possible. It is not possible. I agree. You cannot cover all these things. That is why I asked you to find out what aspects you thought you could cover in this few minutes. 11 concepts we like. Sorry? 11 concepts. No, no, no. See you would have written only background. I know. So my question, I am trying to say this. You thought that background and motivation, aim are important. Somebody else would have written application and industrial use. I am not saying everybody has written everything. But these are the typical things people write. I just want you to identify what you have written. That's all. In fact I have followed the sequence IDs by aim only after that I cannot cover them. No, no. That's perfectly fine. I am just, that's perfectly fine. Not possible to write all of these things otherwise it will be a whole big thesis. So that was 3 minutes. In 3 minutes maybe you wrote some 4-5 sentences and you covered 1 or 2 or 3 aspects of this or 4 aspects, whatever. As he rightly pointed out 11, I didn't count it how much myself. So 11 aspects, fine. Now let's say you had to do the same thing but you just had 1 minute. So now among those lines that you had written what is the thing that you would have said is important? Aim. How many of you think it would be? How many of you would think you would say background? How many would say it's motivation? I am sorry? Yeah. Yeah, so see background is a very, it's a one line introduction to what area it is. Motivation is for that particular problem that something has not been solved. Background is like a very large, the largest thing that you can see is a background like I am working in electrical engineering communications. That is background. How many backgrounds are standing up in aim, it is very much required to start from background and motivation. Perfect. I mean that is your point of view. Many people might think that no I just have 1 minute, I will just convey something else. So there are different points of view and I am not saying one is right and one is wrong. But just that sometimes we are, suppose you are considering, suppose you are going to Delhi and it's a very standard example, you are going to Delhi ministry and suddenly the minister comes with you in the lift. You just have one minute to go from first floor to fourth floor and she asks you what are you doing? Now will you tell all the sentences, you just have one minute. What will you pick? Right, but usually title is very specific technical, so you probably, I mean it depends on the audience. So, okay, see we have so many points of view and unfortunately minister has to listen to all these things. All right, so fine. Now I have a picture, I am not going to ask you who is this, so there will be very trivial question to ask. Now how is this related to technical communication? I have got some art here. How is this related to technical communication? Focused? It's the small thing, it gives everything actually. The small thing which gives everything, yes? Why is it simple lines to show that you are in the public? Exactly, so use the graphics, okay, so that is one thing, but the point that I am trying to make is like I said by some of you is a complicated picture of Gandhiji has been explained by just three strokes, one, two and three, okay, three strokes, right, it's been made simple and this is what probably you would convey to a minister or to somebody who is not in your department, not necessarily minister, but somebody who is not in your department, this is what you would have conveyed. So once you are able to extract this essence, this is what we are calling as an essence of technical communication, if you are able to extract this essence just as this artist has expressed the essence of Gandhiji in just three strokes, whatever those few strokes or few lines that you would say of your project, okay, so once you are able to extract this and then you can go ahead, once you are able to isolate the sentences and then you can go and decorate it and you get a full picture. The full picture is probably like a detailed report or a detailed presentation which you give for one hour, okay, but the essence of having isolated those few strokes or those few sentences is what we will try and see what it is. So what are those three strokes or the essence that we talk of technical communication? What is it? So if you see all technical communication, okay, as I said it could be a research project, a small summer project or a development project, okay, or even laboratory experiment, okay, is all solving a problem. Engineering, science and technology all are solving a problem. So solving a problem essentially means like that there is a question and there is an answer. It is like a textbook problem, right. You have a question at the end of the chapter and you have to work out an answer. So if you think about it, all of us are solving some problem or the other. You are developing some small electric car or something like that, some small development project. So everywhere we are trying to address the problem and solve it. So which essentially means there is a question and there is an answer, okay. So just as those three strokes represented Gandhiji, the question and an answer defines a key of a technical communication. So a question could also be stated as an aim or objective. So it should essentially be a question. It should be an interrogative statement in English if you want to say. You should have words such as what, where, when, why, how and so on. You should be able to state your problem in terms of a question like this. How is this done or why does this happen? So it should be a clear interrogative statement in English or whatever language you speak. The answer must be an answer as though you are answering that question. Like an answer in a, there is a textbook problem, you write a question and you have an answer. So the answer must clearly be answering exactly that question. Sometimes you might find that your question is different and answer you are not able to fit in there. In that case, you just reformulate the question because many times when you start off with a problem with a question and you tend to deviate and try to solve something else and you find some other answer. So then you have to actually reformulate a question which matches the answer. That is not, you are not doing anything wrong or unethical except that you are trying to convey whatever you have done in a compact form that this is the answer I found and this is the corresponding question. But when you present it, of course you say it as this is the question and this is the answer. So these are those two sentences that form the essence of technical communication. So I will give a very quick example. So let us take a small example that many of us probably would have done with your students. So question is what you wanted to find out. So we could state it like this. We worked on a telecommunication project because we wanted to find out how people in remote villages can be warned of an impending calamity. So basically this is one sentence but the essential question is just here. How people in remote villages can be warned? All stated in very simple English. Remember that only in your department you could have given all the details of the technicalities of the work. But suppose you are explaining to somebody from another department, you are from electrical, you are meeting somebody from mechanical. You cannot use your terminologies of signal processing and all those things to explain to a mechanical engineer. You have to convey in simple English but simple plain technical English or if it is you are comfortable with any other language in simple words in that language not the full technical words in that language. So this is the question. Second sentence answer, the answer must be an exact answer to this question. What is it that you found out? We found that automated short message voice call, short message voice call. This is the how to communicate short message voice call over question answer. We found that an automated short message voice call received the best attention which is supported by our result from a cute calling application which we developed. So you have conveyed enough technical things saying that what I, people in the technical field can understand that you developed some cute calling application. And others we just need to, everybody understands what is the voice call, short message voice call everybody understands. And this is a question, this is an answer. So is it possible for you to do this? Is it possible for you to inculcate your students to do this? For every project that they do? Which is what we will try to reinforce at various points in this course. So the question and answer is like the crux. It should be there in all forms of this communication, be it a short form or a very long form. Question answer is just like these three strokes. It is there in the short summary, a two line summary or a two stroke art or it is there the same thing is also there in the detail form. Can we do this? We will try and see if we can do this over this course. So I will briefly introduce you to the contents of this course. So as we said technical communications are messages related to science, engineering or technology. The messages can be articles, written articles, reports, Wikipedia, blog, all of them are technical communication. Graphics. It could be simple user guides that you see. So when you open a cell phone or open an appliance, how to operate? These are user guides nicely explained through graphics. All those require not just an artist's point of view but also a technical person's input is required. Of course artists will convert it but a technical input is required and how to present it best. Or it could be an oral, it could be a classroom, seminar, interview and so on or video lectures. So you will be seeing that you will be exposed to lot of video lectures throughout this course. So again to reiterate the purpose is for others to know and reproduce. It's very important which is not there in other forms of, it's not necessarily there in other forms of communication where it is mostly just consumption for some entertainment. Somebody is giving a lecture on some philosophical, you probably don't use them, it's nice to listen to them and go. So then, no, why? Because in science engineering technology we know, we get to know of some facts and use them in other places. It may not be exactly doing the same thing but I'll use the some fact from here to use it in some of my project. So that is one aspect. Second thing is just reproduce it. So I tell you how to use this pointer and you also reproduce it. So I need to be very precise in my statements of how I convey these things that you can exactly reproduce. So knowing and reproduction are very important. And technical communication is not culture and language dependent. It is completely independent of this. We just use, it's based on certain universal principles, like question and answer is there in every language. It's not, so although we are going to use English in this course, it's not about English language communication at all. We will not be discussing how to write better English, no. It is how to write or communicate better what content it is. So we are talking about the content part. So it's language independent. If you are able to understand what is being conveyed in English, you will be very well able to write it the same thing in your own language of comfort. So these are the various broad topics that will be taking through the course. So the core of all these scientific communication is the scientific method. We will tell you why we need to understand what is the backbone or the skeleton behind all of things, the scientific method. It tells you what to communicate. Why is it we communicate in a particular way? We need to know that. And we need your students to know why people communicate in a particular way. And then comes ethics, while it's like a complementary thing to the scientific method. While scientific method tells you what to communicate, ethic kinds of tells you what not to communicate. So we will see some of those things. And then we will see something of reading and listening. So first as part of our profession as communicators, we are consumers of knowledge. We need to consume what is there. We need to hear from others. We need to read what others have written. So first we play a role of a consumer. And then we become the creators where we have done some work. We want others to know about it. We want others to reproduce it. So then comes writing and presentation. So in presentation again, we need to know more about who we are, whom we are communicating and so on. And we will also have some topics in interviews and group discussion. So this whole set of, there are a lot more details to this. I'm just putting only the background thing. Many things related to this which will be dealt with. So this course, it will be, I'll go into the more details of how this course will be done after a while. But there will be quick self-assessment. So as soon as you hear some lecture, we'll ask you to do some quick self-assessment. We'll show you an example. So that could be in terms of just recollecting what you learned in the last 10 minutes. Or it could be understanding of several facts. Some message is presented and you interpret it. And there would be home assignments and peer, which will be evaluated by other people in this one. And basically this helps in identifying common pitfalls, like you evaluate four other people and your thing will be evaluated by four other people. Something like that. And we'll go into that detail. And there'll be tutorials where we'll do one-on-one interaction live. So some of them will be conducted online, some of them will be conducted live. So which is an instructor-guided activity. Now I'll hand over the stage to Viren Seti who will also introduce to some portions of the course.