 So, firstly to introduce me myself again I am Deepak Phatak, I am a teacher here, I have been here for almost 40 years. I also happen to be principal investigator of the project for empowering 1000 teachers which is being conducted under the national mission for education and using ICT. You may have briefly seen me during the inaugural function, but I am getting this opportunity to share my thoughts on some wider perspective with you. I am sure you are enjoying the workshop and I am sure you are benefitting from it. I by the way although I have not seen by you, but I keep track of happenings through the Moodle, the same Moodle that all of you use and I am actually thrilled to see several observations, comments, questions part of the ambition of this project is to nurture and enhance collaborative communities in future and I am happy that that activity is also kicked off by all the participants here. Let me go back and talk to you about some teaching learning activities. All of us are familiar with those, but I will go back a long way to comment on the notion of a teacher. You have seen all kinds of animal species living in this world, but take some other species, take birds for example, who teaches them to build a nest. They do not have teachers, so presumably the knowledge of building a nest passes from generation to generation genetically and partly by the young learning the art by looking at their own peers, parents and others who build nests, but essentially the passage of knowledge is genetic. Human knowledge grows extensively and much faster, almost exponential and it is not possible for nature to consolidate that knowledge and create a genetic transfer mechanism. We realized this long time ago and therefore, decided that to train the young of the species they would require different institutions and that is the reason why humans created an institution called a teacher and this is not new, almost all the recorded history of 4000 years of humanity you will find mentions of teachers to support these teachers, they were support structures that humanity created initially the support structures were in the form of temples, mosques, churches, you even today see that these places of religious worship also double as support structures for some kind of teaching learning that is happening. Of course, over the years the support structures took different forms, in India for example, we had ashrams, today most of these structures assume the form of schools, colleges, universities which is what we are all familiar with. Unfortunately, what has happened over the years is that these support structures which as I said today are colleges and universities and schools have actually become institutions. So, we have Indian Institute of Technology, we have national Institute of Technology, whatever what and we teachers have become paid employees of these institutions, there is a subtle but very important difference between the stature of a teacher when a teacher assumes the role of an institution versus when a teacher is a paid employee. When we work as paid employees sure we have a commitment to our work, but that is almost always proportional to the kind of compensation that we are paid, because that is how we measure ourselves that is how the world measures us. Whereas, a teacher is an institution would work with a completely different level of commitment, with a completely different level of zeal, a teacher who is an institution will not at all be worried about how he or she is being evaluated by rest of the world. He or she would be concerned mostly about ensuring that the students under his or her charge get the best of the knowledge, get the best of the learning and become capable of solving real life problems, no matter what the word says. Unfortunately, such is not the ethos which prevails today. It is my contention that amongst us there are several who actually imbibe this philosophy of teacher as an institution. Unfortunately, most of us instead of looking towards such teachers who are institutions in themselves, we look towards the other dimensions of our teaching profession largely governed by issues such as compensation and so on. Why I say all this is that when we call ourselves teachers, we should always remember that implicitly society has given us an honorous task, an honorous responsibility and we are accountable therefore, to the larger society no matter what we teach, where we teach and whether how much we are paid more or less. It is this philosophy that I would like all of you to adopt and nurture further. Going back to engineering education, which is what is our primary domain of activities, we notice certain changes that have occurred in last may be 25 years. First of all, a five year program was converted into a four year program. Most of you must be much younger and therefore, you would not be familiar with the five year program, but in those days in engineering courses of any discipline, whether electrical, civil, mechanical, aeronautics, whatever there used to be a basic minimum coverage of fundamental engineering topics for the first two and half years and that sort of made every passing out engineer a fairly well rounded personality in understanding fundamentals of engineering, no matter what particular branch one studied later on. Sadly, the conversion to a four year program and the first year primarily being occupied by fundamental courses in physics, chemistry and math, which are of course essential. This emphasis on basic engineering has dwindled a bit. Consequently, most of our students tend to study their branch as the main objective and perhaps in the process forget the basic engineering principles. This dichotomy is accentuated further because more and more knowledge keeps getting added to each branch and every branch attempts to try and put all of that knowledge into the slot available, which is four year slot or three year slot once the students come to the department. We fail to appreciate that this division of engineering into electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, aerospace engineering, etcetera has been primarily done to address the growing body of knowledge well, so that people become well versed when they get training in a particular cell. However, this division is completely artificial because as all of us know knowledge is boundary layers, knowledge is all encompassed. So, what has happened is for our convenience we have broken the knowledge into these divisions and then somehow we have created an impression amongst our students that as long as they know this part or this part that is good enough. This has created a problem that the real problems in the world which incidentally do not specifically come from any one branch or the other. On a lighter side have you come across any problem in real life which comes to you and says I am a electrical engineering problem or I am a mechanical engineering problem. I have not seen one. The real world says I am a problem solve me. Now, if the problem has to be solved it will require application of knowledge from different fields and given the paucity of time during which we train our students. It is quite possible that all of us students may not be well versed with all the dimensions of the solution of the problem. In such a situation what is important is to stress to our students that while they might know well a certain topic or in a certain field there would be other dimensions which they will have to learn while solving real life problems and if necessary they will have to take help from other people who are perhaps experts in those fields. That is the reason why increasingly you find that the real world problems need to be solved by team shopping. It is not just one person or one expert in one field who can solve the problem. Take the example of this workshop itself. We have two colleagues conducting this workshop. One colleague comes from mechanical engineering department. The other colleague comes from electrical engineering department, but both of them are together attempting to solve a real life problem which incidentally is extremely critical for the nation as all of you know. In exactly the same fashion all the participants who are attending this workshop independent of the field from which they come they will have to either learn something of the other field or they will have to collaborate after going back to their own institution with people from the other field and let me tell you that it is not just the electronics and mechanical which is relevant. They are n number of other things. Take for example the structures that you will have to build in order to capture the solar radiation. Neither mechanical engineers nor electronic engineers are absolutely well versed with the final aspects of structure building. So, you might want to take somebody from civil engineering department to help you who might have that kind of expertise. In general then it is my contention and I hope you agree that almost all real life problems will require expertise from multiple dimension to be applied to solve the problem and particularly the more critical problems will require more of such diverse expertise to come. I hope that all of you have appreciated this particular aspect during this course itself and you would carry this back with you and you would try to imbibe this in your students when you teach them that they should look beyond just the particular field or subject that they are studying. I will also now touch upon a topic which will be close to your hearts namely the quality of learning that our students do in our colleges and universities. It has been commented I am not familiar with the mechanical and electronics engineering quality as much as I am with my own field namely computer science and IT and the leading industry organization NASCOM has been commenting often that not more than 25 percent of our engineers are employable. What they actually mean is that the current problems which the industry is grappling with, which the industry has to solve for the clients all across the world requires certain skills, certain pieces of knowledge and certain attitude and aptitude which they do not find in majority of our students. I try to tell them to counter their thing that there was a time when there was no computer science in this country. There was only electronics which was closest to computers and there used to be just about 5000 annual admissions across about 80 or 100 colleges in the country that is it. There were 5000 electronics engineers many of whom converted to computer science or IT later there was no word like computer science and IT assuming that all 5000 of them were 100 percent employable which cannot be true because there would always be some people who would not be very good in their study but still assuming that the nation produced at most 5000 competent IT engineers formally. Of course, in those days as it continues even today the IT companies proliferated recruitment across different fields. There are large number of mechanical engineers, metallurgical engineers, aerospace engineers who learn programming and became successful IT professionals late. As opposed to that there are more than 4 lakh students being admitted to IT CS electronics field today. So, even if you assume that only 25 percent are employable the number of employable engineers being produced by the nation to feed into this industry is multiple times larger. Now, this is the kind of scale that the nation has achieved in basic engineering education. Of course, the way it has achieved the scale is by establishment of a large number of institutions mostly in private sector. Today, we have more than 5000 engineering colleges many of you come from different colleges not all of them may be most up to date in infrastructure not all of them may get the best of the students who have prepared very well in higher secondary or something. They are relatively better than others who do not get admission to engineering but still you would agree that a lot would be desired in terms of the basic preparation of the students who come to you. And then it is your task to somehow grill the basic engineering into them and then give them a degree concerned with this particular dilemma that when the nation enhances the scale quality suffers. I wanted to understand myself what are the problems that are faced by the institutions teachers and students particularly at smaller places. In the year 2002, I took a one year sabbatical leave and went around the country. I visited about I think more than 65 colleges and I particularly chose smaller places and what I found was very interesting. Of course, the visits confirm my suspicion as you would all know that there is a lot to be desired both in terms of infrastructure in terms of number of teachers available in terms of the qualification and experience of those teachers. There was a time you know when we were young students our teachers would mostly be holding a PhD degree or at least a masters degree. In my own college from Indore where I passed in 1969, I remember in 1964 to 69, there would hardly be one or two students who would have finished their B with fantastic results would be admitted as young teachers. They would be sort of trainee teachers and while teaching they would pursue their ME or MTEK, but those would be very few. Today unfortunately a large number of our teachers did not have an opportunity to complete their ME or MTEK even ME or MTEK before joining the teaching fraternity, forget me and that is a burning problem that most of us many of you in fact would have only a first degree would be wanting to do a masters, but may not have had opportunities would be wanting to do a PhD, but may not have had opportunity. This is a dilemma which the nation has to solve. However, what captured my thoughts during these visits was that in every college where I would by the way give a talk to the students, talk to the teachers and then interact typically with the final year students doing their projects. You know all final year students are required to do a project while sadly many of those projects were very rudimentary attempts at couple of places I even found that students who are explaining to me their project had no clue on what that project was. Clearly they had borrowed that project idea and perhaps even the entire project report from someone else and they are trying to submit it as their own. These things unfortunately are happening on an increasing scale and we should be concerned about it, but that is not the main point that I wanted to share with you. The main point is that every small place absolutely without exception, I found one or two or three batches of students. So, may be four students may be twelve, fifteen students at every place who had done their project with a difference. They had applied their mind, they had done a lot of work, they had a lot of original ideas. They were not perhaps able to explain all their ideas in good English, because English was not their native language as is true with most of us, but you could see their sincerity, you could see their application of mind and you could see the talent in them. Additionally, what I was most pleased to observe is that in every institution again without exception, there were a few teachers who were taking the task of teacher far more seriously than what a ordinary paid employee would. In my opinion, they were institutions in themselves and these people I found at every small place without exception. 65 engineering colleges may not be a very large number, but I submit that statistically that number is significant. And if I found invariably at 65 places, very good top class talent, the kind of students that I would love to have with me in IIT and very good teachers, then it should be true that each of the 5000 colleges would have such people. I would like to presume because the interest that you have shown in learning new technologies that each one of you is like that. And I hope you will agree that in each of your colleges, you would have found such students every year, there may be 4, 5, 10, whatever. That is when by the way when I came back I started the Eklavya project, because I thought these students and teachers across the country were like Eklavyas wanting to get some direction, some mentoring, some help, because they wanted to excel. That is how we started this project. Under this project, we first attempted providing some guidance or finally a project to compress our students through web. Subsequently, I merged the distance education program which I had started in 2000 in the school of IIT here to a larger level. And finally, we said to make a real impact. It is not the students that we should directly address, but it is the teachers that we should directly address. Initially, there was a lot of skepticism that without collecting people physically at one place, will you be able to make a difference? My contention was that yes, any interaction always makes a difference whether it is an interaction across a distance or interaction personally. But I came up with this model of what I call a blended system of teaching learning where people still physically assemble at one place, but not only at one place, they assemble at multiple places which we call remote centers. And that is how we engage 1000 people at 30, 35 remote centers. Each of the remote centers where you are participating, you will appreciate that there is a center coordinator, there is a workshop coordinator, there is a team of other expert faculty and technical assistants who are handling the afternoon labs, lectures, tutorials, assignments, etc. Lectures are given by the expert faculty from IIT. The preparation work that we do under this project is enormous. All the center coordinators, workshop coordinators are called physically to IIT Bombay. So, all these 35 senior colleagues assemble at IIT Bombay, they interact with the faculty members of a workshop and they then decide together what should be the syllabus, what should be the experiments, what should be the labs, etc., etc. This is done quite early. Afterwards, these coordinators go back and then they start preparation for this course in their own institution. In this particular workshop, I remember that when professor Solanke requested that since this is a new topic, not normally taught, experimental facilities are not available in colleges and they were deciding to design and fabricate some of the expert faculty themselves. So, as an exception for this workshop, we conducted an additional coordinators workshop where all these people came and they discussed with our professors, the experimental facilities and so on. If you feel that you are benefiting from the kits and from the experiments that you are conducting, please remember that there is an enormous effort not only by my colleagues here at IIT, but by the representatives of each remote center at each of the places and I would like to take this opportunity to thank all my colleague center coordinators and their associate staff. Now, this is about this workshop, but coming back to my theme, the idea was that I need to empower larger and larger number of teachers so that they can do their job of teaching better. The government and many people like to call it teachers training, some people even called this program as enhancement of teachers. I dislike both these words. Why I dislike is when you say enhancement or when you say training, you presume that there is something missing in these teachers which you have to supplement. I do not agree with that. I think every teacher is individually and independently capable. I would rather call this as empowerment and that is the term I like to use because the more we are empowered using whatever external facilities and support we get, more we will be useful to transfer that knowledge, to add to that knowledge and to create students who are top grade quality. When we come to students, there is an unfortunate thought that prevails mostly amongst the minds of our students and that thought is somehow they should get a degree as long as they get a good score, first class 70 percent marks, 80 percent marks, they believe they will get good jobs and that is their small time ambition. Most of our students have not thought through the entire career path spanning 40 years after they graduate. So, for them the short term mind store of getting a job, later three years later getting a promotion, which are actually mind stones have actually become their dreams and they do not think beyond that. Further, they firmly believe that the only criteria which is meaningful for fulfilling their dream is to get good marks in the exam. Consequently, their entire study, their entire learning is marks oriented. As a consequence, the entire teaching has also become syllabus oriented and exam oriented. I am making a generic statement. There would be many exceptions amongst us here, who do not follow that philosophy, but by and large that is the mentality of the students. So, there is a rat race for marks and I would not blame students. You see, in the competitive world today, for everything that the students do from the day the student steps into the school is marks, marks and marks. If you get 90 percent marks, you are a genius. If I get 40 percent marks, I am an idiot. Now, this is told to me in fourth standard, this is told to me in eighth standard, this is told to me in ninth standard and by the time I graduate, I have convinced myself that I am an idiot and therefore, I actually start behaving like an idiot becoming completely useless. This dichotomy has to be broken. A rat race for marks by the way results in a few winning rats and a large number of losing rats. All of us have gone through that dilemma by the way. All of us were students. Some of us won, some of us lost and each one of us won somewhere and lost somewhere. So, each one of us is simultaneously a winning rat and a losing rat, a winning rat in some sense and a winning rat in multiple sense. What happens to a winner rat? The winner gets over confidence and very often that over confidence morphs into arrogance. Oh, I know everything in the world. So, I do not need to learn anything. This arrogance needs to be bad. You would have seen such students, the toppers in your college and so on. Sometimes they behave arrogant. I get to see them for last 40 years every year because the joint entrance exam entrance or the get toppers etcetera who come here. We have to spend quite some time telling them that look, you are good, you have done well, but everybody around you is exactly same including the teachers who also come from the same rigmola. So, please behave yourself, come down to the earth. While you may know a lot, there is a lot more to be learned. It takes us three months, four months, first full semester to bash their arrogance because arrogance is useless. Arrogance will mean that I will stop learning because I have assumed already that I know everything. Take on the other hand the case of a large number of losers. Losers acquire diffidence. They start believing that there is something not good in me and sometimes this diffidence morphs into despondence. As I said, if I get 40 percent marks consistently, I start believing that I am an idiot and actually I start behaving like that. Now, this despondence is also contraindicated to the healthy growth of that human. Here is my submission. Independent of what marks say, good, bad, you got 90 percent, you are great, I got 40 percent, I am an idiot. Independent of this, I submit that every human being has sufficient intellectual capability to solve the reasonably complex problems in life. The example that I like to quote often is learning a foreign language. Some of you might have tried this. I know people, for example, who try to learn German. They attend a one-year course in elementary German language. They learn something, lots of books, exam certificates later. Some of them do a one-year advanced course. So, they supposedly become better. I have seen some of them wanting to further brush up and refine their knowledge of German language. They go to Maxmular Bhavan in Pune, spend six months talking to people, conversing with them, etcetera, etcetera. And at the end of all these exam certificates, etcetera, etcetera, when they come back, they can speak German reasonably well, not as fluently as a German word, but they can speak, they can understand, they can read and translate and so on. And what do we call such people? Very smart people, must be very intelligent. He is mastered a foreign language. So, you would agree that learning a foreign language is a reasonably complex logical problem. And that people who perfect that solution to that problem must be intellectually of great capacity. If that is so, then I would like to ask you a simple question. Each human child learns a foreign language between the age of three years and six years. That foreign language subsequently is called the mother tongue of the child. You got 90 percent marks. You learnt your mother tongue, whether Telco or Tamil or something, when you were three, four, five years old. My mother tongue was Marathi. I got 40 percent marks, but I also learnt it during that time. And believe me when I say this, at the age of five years or six years, you were as conversant with that foreign language as I was with mine. I could understand everything that people around me told me and I could make them understand whatever I wanted to say. I could of course not converse in technical terms like engineering, but I could solve my problems and I could understand the problems posed by them. I was reasonably competent in a foreign language, which incidentally was the first foreign language. And the world of literatures will tell you that learning a second language is always easier as compared to learning the first language. What does it mean? Does it mean that all children are equal in intellectual capacity? No, I make no such claim. There are of course differences. Take singers for example. There are singers and singers and singers, but there is one Latha Mangeskar, one Muhammad Rafi. So, there would be differences. I am talking about the basic capability. And I am suggesting that the basic capabilities, God has given each one of us adequate capability to solve the problem. The question is what is it that happens in the life of these children? All these children, including all of us, who learnt a foreign language at the age of five years subsequently become useless in the eyes of larger world. According to me, there are some very fundamental characteristics of a human, which are best seen in the childhood, but which later on get curved because of various things, including sadly the impact that we teachers make. Let me list the four qualities, which I consider to be exceptionally important and to be innately present in every human child. These are one curiosity. Every child is immensely curious about everything that the child sees. The second is boldness. A child asks questions without fear to anybody and on anything. In fact, sometimes children ask embarrassing questions and we do not know how to answer them, but we humor them. It is this boldness which prompts the child to ask a question on anything of concern to the child. What happens when the child grows up and comes to the school? Let us say in fifth standard, I am a bold child. I am asking questions again and again. Some teacher like me and you will say please do not disturb the class. Please do not ask too many questions. What happens when we go to the ninth standard? Emphatically said do not disturb the class. Do not face classes. When I come to engineering, sometimes a teacher who thinks that he has explained something well, but I am not understood. I raise my hand and ask it, which says do not ask idiotic questions. What is the system doing to me? It is killing my boldness and in the process it is killing my curiosity. Please remember that the boldness is nothing but a manifestation of curiosity. When a child asks a question, it is not asking you the question really. It is asking itself. It is only articulating that question to you. The child is articulating its curiosity to you. When you kill that questioning, you kill the curiosity and sadly the learning stops. It is my humble contention that 11, 12 years of schooling and 4 years of graduation is a process while we try to ram a whole lot of knowledge in the minds of people, but at the cost of these fundamental beautiful characteristics called curiosity and boldness. There is a third important characteristic. That characteristic is perseverance. Every child, once he decides to do something, it will never give up. Have you seen any child who gives up anything that it comes to his mind? It does not matter what it is, particularly naughty things. Consider for example, there is a bottle kept on the desk here and a child looks at it and wants to somehow throw that bottle down. All children love to mess around with it. What will the child do? It will try to come around, try to climb up on this table. It will not succeed. Of course, the table is very tall. The child will fall down. He will try again. Again, he will fall down. Maybe third time, it will hurt itself. He will start crying. Fifth time when he tries, the mother will catch the child. Mother will shout at the child. Ask the child to stand in a corner for 5 minutes. The child will stand in the corner crying, weeping. After 5 minutes, the child will look here. The child will look there and again go to the same table, again pursuing the same agenda of taking the bottle and throwing it down. Maybe tenth time, eleventh time, it will ultimately find some chair, some stool, stand on it, go on the table and take this bottle and throw this down. When the bottle breaks, the child will dance with joy. That joy, I think all of us miss. When did you last dance with such joy? I am not suggesting that as grown up teachers, we start climbing on tables and throwing glasses around. But the point I am trying to make is that we have forgotten this beautiful, important characteristic of perseverance, of not giving up, no matter how many failures. And our school and college teaching and learning system is at least partly responsible for it. Look at it. When I go to the fifth standard, I am still attempting to solve difficult problems. But slowly I learn that in the examinations, I am asked simple problems. So, there will be no motivation for me to attempt harder problems. Slowly, I will take a simple problem. I will attempt it once. I will attempt it twice. After sometime, if I do not get it in the first attempt, I just give up. I do not try second time. So, forget the harder problems. In simple problems, I would not try. Why? Because they are not important from an examination point of view. You know, I have been teaching in IIT system. Some of you are lucky to be teaching in institutions where you are given a lot of autonomy. But in most colleges, we do not have this kind of autonomy. You are not encouraged to set difficult problems. In fact, many of you may not be able to set question papers yourselves. In IIT system, that is an extraordinary privilege that we get. What I teach is the syllabus and what I set is the question paper. What I evaluate and award is the grade. That is an extraordinary responsibility. But that also means that I can always get the latest in the literature into my course. That I can always challenge students with the toughest of the problems. I am encouraged to give you one more example, which happened here from a colleague. These are the senior colleagues from whom we learned. There was a colleague late, Professor K. C. Mukherjee used to teach electrical engineering and he used to teach electrical fields. I had just become a young teacher then and I was still close to some of the students who used to play chess with me in the issued chess team earlier. And one student one day came with a terminal exam paper and gave it to me and said, Father, how do we solve this question three? I looked at it to the electrical fields paper. Of course, I could not solve that problem, but I hotly told him I have now a computer science professor. So, it is not my field. He said no, you have an electrical engineering degree. You should be able to solve it. We looked at it for another 10 minutes. We could not solve it. We both went to Professor K. C. Mukherjee. When he saw the paper in our hand, he immediately realized something and he started smiling. We went to him and he says, so far the question three. I said, yes sir. So, he did not say anything. Then I asked him sir, what is the solution? He says, I do not know. And both of us were shocked. We asked him sir, what do you mean you do not know? He says, this is part of an unsolved research problem which is pending for last 10 years. But you know this batch is so smart. I thought somebody in this batch will solve the problem. So, I put this in the question paper. Imagine what would have happened in most of the universities. Back home even 40 years ago in my college there would have been a dharma at the vice chancellor's office, syllabus ka bahar ka sabhal pucha, throw away that teaching. That is the difference. The students accepted it and not only accepted it, the best part of the story is the later part. In that evening in hostel 4, where majority of those students were there, they were having a milkshake party in the evening. A milkshake party those days used to be given by the students who would win. For example, an inter hostel football match or somebody wins a cultural trophy or something major event. So, the general secretary of the hostel was passing by. He came say, why are you having a milkshake party? What great thing has happened? And one should say, oh you do not know? The great professor Mukherjee thinks that we can solve unsolved research problem. So, we are celebrating. But that is the ethos. Here is my submission. While majority of your students may not easily imbibe this ethos. But in every institution, there would be 5, 10, 12 students who think differently, who are willing to work differently, who are willing to be challenged by a harder problem. Isn't it our responsibility to do so as teachers? Of course, as teachers we have to look after the entire class and we are naturally expected to spend more time with the weaker students. But here is my submission. Unless we are able to do something special for the better performing students of the class, we are not doing our duty fully. Why? Because the better performing students of the class, when they learn that challenging problems can be attempted and failures is no problem, they will get more vigorous in their problem solving ability and they are the people who are likely to make a greater difference to the world to the nation. So, here is my request. Please go back and spend more time with such students. In fact, one of the objectives of these workshops is to imbibe. I would not say IIT style teaching, but I would say a different method of teaching and learning, where emphasis on hard problem solving is perpetual and constant. And that is where that is what the challenging problem makes my mind think, makes my mind apply itself to a larger extent and that is how we learn. So, this is my request from this workshop and from other workshops. Try to imbibe this philosophy. There is something else that is happening here, which I really like. You know, we use Moodle very extensively in our courses. We also use our own website for variety of access to the learning sources. And we many of us believe that good learning sources, learning material, teaching material should be in open source access. One of the objectives of these workshops is that all the contributions made by teachers and not only the teachers who are teaching this course, their slides, their video audio lectures, all of these are getting recorded and they will be released in open source for open access to anybody in exactly the same fashion. Contributions made by the participating teachers will also be converted into readily accessible material on a web portal and all of that will be released. It is for this reason that I had requested all my teacher colleagues who are conducting these workshops to tell participants to do some exercises after the conclusion of this workshop. May be they spend one or two weeks, may be they spend this time in teams or individually and they could do absolutely anything which will add to the value of the content. They could add, for example, questions and answers. They could add lab experiments. They could develop in a course like this. They could perhaps develop a small hardware or a small system which could work in conjunction with these experimental kit or which could work independently. I have suggested to professor Solanki that he should consider releasing the design and fabrication details of this experimental kit in open source so that some industry will come forward and start manufacturing and start supporting such things. All the material that you so develop could also be added to the open source. One of the main objectives of these workshops is to create and nurture collaborative communities. We do not have such collaboration. When we go back to our colleges, I am a lone teacher teaching one subject and I have so much load that I do not have time to think and time to interact with others except perhaps with my own colleagues in my own institute. Here is a chance. The extraordinary electronic network that is being created, the extraordinary facilities that you have today will permit us to access knowledge. After all, we all benefit from accessing Wikipedia, accessing other sites. We are trying to set up a portal under this scheme that portal will be released sometime in January or February which will have the contents and the contributions from all the teachers for all the workshops that we have conducted. Additionally, this portal will be open not only for access but for continued contribution. I would expect many of you in fact to come forward and become editors for those contents because sadly people do not write those contents either properly or sometimes they when they make contributions they forget to mention that this material is from such and such site or this material is from such and such. Please understand that when we release the material in open source, it is our responsibility to ensure that the intellectual property is either ours which we are gladly giving away for releasing in open source or if it belongs to somebody else then we take proper permission from that person or that source before sending the material for release. This is a precaution that I would like all of you to take. I will conclude by saying that if you think this workshop has benefited, we propose to conduct these workshops continue to conduct these workshops in coming years. I have suggested to the ministry that there has been an increasing clamour for participating teachers that apart from the introductory courses, there could be some advanced courses and even some research courses because that is exactly what most of the teachers will benefit directly from. The ministry has agreed but has suggested that the funding model has to be re-looked at. The ministry cannot continue to fund endlessly the complete conduct of the workshop and that is the reason we are collecting a feedback from participating teachers whether they would be willing to attend these workshops even if they are not funded. Will they be willing to spend money from their own pockets for at least their travels, stay and food and some of you might even be interested in paying the fees for a course. Workshops, additional workshop that I was mentioning, I will mention two workshops which might interest you because these are independent of the field of studies that you are engaged in. The first workshop is on technical writing. It is expected to be at the most at today workshop. We are proposing to hold it on the 4th Saturday Sunday of January. This was primarily initiated to permit those teachers who want to submit technical papers in the upcoming conference on educational technology because in the past few years we found that the submissions were not up to the mark even the language use was not correct, the papers were shoddily written. So, we thought that we will conduct a workshop for such teachers. I suggested that this could be a common problem faced by most of our teachers. So, I am trying to call this a technical writing workshop for two days where people who are willing, who want to submit whatever little research work or survey work they have done in the form of a paper or they want to write a report then they should be helped in this. So, this we are trying to conduct. This model will be a different model because this will not be a fully funded course. We will fund all our remote centers in conduct of these workshops, but the participating teachers will have to spend their own money to come for a day or two and attend these workshops at their own cost. I am sure that many of you would be interested in doing so. More importantly, another workshop which we have planned in next May or June is on research methodology. This workshop is an outcome of a course which was conducted by Professor Karmalkar of IIT Madras in IIT Bombay a year and half ago jointly with Professor Patrothan of Chemical Engineering and this was meant for our research scholars and this was an amazing workshop. In fact, the lecture slides of lecture material for those workshops for that small engagement has already been released by us in open source, but I have requested Professor Karmalkar to construct a full one week program. He talks not only about the general nature of pursuing research, but he talks of all lots of attendant problem including motivation, including hard failures that one may face, including the problems in finding a guy, including the problems if I have a fight with my guy. When you pursue a PhD, there are a whole lot of issues. How to conduct formal experiments properly, how to record those experiments, how to analyze the results of those experiments, what I tell you. Believe me, when I tell you this, it is an absolutely top class workshop, a top class material which I have asked him to convert into a full one week IST workshop. Whether it is one week or two week, we will find out mostly a one week workshop and this workshop will again run on a model where it will be partly funded by the MHRD project, but partly you will have to fund yourself. Since it cuts across disciplines, I am sure that out of about 2 lakh teachers that we have in this country, may be at least 10000 teachers would attend. We propose to run this workshop from 200 remote centers and we will be augmenting our remote centers in a short while. The reason I bring up this topic is currently we have about 70 odd remote centers which have helped us in conducting these workshops at large places. Any one workshop might be using 30, 40 remote centers, but we have these larger. But those of you who work in an institution which might have such facilities as you would have seen in a remote center and would be willing to consider becoming a remote center in turn, please do visit our website. There is a form which says that if you or your institute is interested in becoming a remote center, you give us this information. Some of our representatives will visit your institution and will arrange for all the training in AVU and all other things tell you about all the requirements etcetera. But my own ambition and dream is that this country should have at least 200 remote centers in the next 6 months from which we could proliferate such course. And of course, the technology being used is so simple we are preparing a documentation for it. There is no reason why any one of your own institution cannot start beaming these courses to other institutions who are interested using exactly the same technology. I have suggested to Dr. Kamal Brijilani that the AVU technology should also be open source. He told me that as far as the colleges are concerned, educational institutions are concerned, it is available to them free of cost. So, please try to utilize it to extend it further. Oh my God, I have really exceeded my time. So, sorry, I must conclude now. But I will conclude with one special request. All of you are familiar with the so called demographic advantage of this country. The number of Indians who are less than 25 years old are so large in our country that they outnumber the total population of many large country. The challenge before the nation is if we can give them the best of education and then if we can give them the best of opportunities to show their metal, they will not only become great people, but they will contribute to the wealth generation of the whole nation. And that is an advantage, but that is also a challenge. It is my humble submission that the front wave of that demographic advantage is actually students in your colleges. And depending upon how well you enable and empower them in turn after getting empowered either through such workshops or after getting empowered on your own or after getting empowered by looking at some great teachers around you, it does not matter. But I am suggesting that the responsibility that you have is extraordinarily large because these are the people who will make a difference to the future of the nation. The nation will be grateful if you can contribute in exercising this responsibility. If there are any questions on this session, we would like to take that. Is Jay Chabraja College Karnataka? Namaste, sir. Namaste. Your talk was very nice. In the beginning you said that you had a five years course, engineering course. Why can't we reintroduce that now so that we can teach the students better and all the students will become employable? I have my whole hearted support to such a suggestion. But given the competitive maramari that is going on around the world, around us, anybody suggesting increasing the course duration is likely to be lynched by the mobs. So that may not be acceptable to the students. I have been making this suggestion, but I do not think the educational administrators of the nation are interested in this. Sadly, therefore, it is our responsibility as teachers to do what was being done in a five year program to do it in four years. And that is why we have to spend extra time and we have to make students spend some extra time. Thank you so much. Let us go to some other institution. This is VPCOE Baramati. Over to you. Presently, remote centers are functioning at mostly engineering colleges. If some science institute is ready to work as a remote center, then what procedure is to be followed? Very good question. You have touched on the honourable minister, Mr. Kapil Sibal had asked me, why am I limiting these efforts only to engineering college education? And I told him that is something I understand a little better. But he has been constantly telling me and the ministry has been telling me that can we not extend the same principle to college education and even to the school education? I have agreed as an experimental basis to do something for the school education for empowering teachers of schools as a pilot over the next six months. And another empowerment as college teachers for some of the subjects. Incidentally, some of the courses which are taught in other colleges such as basic computer programming, we did permit teachers of other colleges also to join us. Your specific question about a remote center, there is only one impediment. The remote center must have facilities for the laboratory work which traditionally are available in engineering colleges. But you are right, wherever there are subjects such as a technical writing subject or a subject on research methodologies which does not require any experimental setup, we will be very glad to have engineering science colleges as also remote centers. And in those subjects where the associated experiments could be done in the science college itself, we would have no problems in doing that. So, your suggestion is well taken, I will definitely consider it and I would request you if you could send me a small mail elaborating further and perhaps suggesting some colleges in your region who might be interested in becoming a coordinating center or remote center for our project. Thank you very much. Is it possible to have two remote centers in the same city? It is definitely possible to have remote centers in the same city, but our problem we have some cities in which we have multiple remote centers. The problem is that the number of participants coming to that city, if they are limited and if they get fractionalized into multiple remote centers, then sometimes the course from a funding perspective does not become viable to be run at remote centers with capacity filled up less than the minimum. I will tell you why, please understand that while we are funding all expenses for participating teachers and which as I said we would like to shift away from that model as far as the remote centers are concerned, we fund the entire expenses and these expenses are not linearly changing as per the number of participants. There is a minimum expense even if there is one participant at a remote center. Therefore, if there are too many centers in the same city and if some centers do not as a consequence attract adequate number of participating faculty, the conduct of the course becomes unviable from the funding that is the only restriction. Otherwise my own motto has been more the merrier. Jabalpur engineering college wishes to correct, yes I can see you Jabalpur over to you. Sir, the present condition we facing the problem that is the good results facility is only available will be limited places just such as IIT, but the step taken by the government this facility also will be able to the other industries or other places. Okay, very good question. Thank you for asking this question. My own dream has been that today for example IIT Bombay is a hub to which all these remote centers are connected, but you are absolutely right. There is nothing in the technology that we are using which cannot permit its utilization at any other place. I mentioned that sometime ago the AVU technology is accessible and available for all people. You need to set up the servers and so on. The facility to conduct a workshop is as much there in any other institute as is there in IIT. I have suggested to the government that like IIT Bombay is a hub. There should be 100 such hubs in the country, 100 not 1 or 2 or 3 more and there could be local hubs. For example, Jabalpur engineering college could become a hub for a set of courses and workshops to be conducted in areas of your own specialization for any number of institutions which are interested in conducting this. That is one of the reasons why the M.H.R.D secretary told me that Fatak we need to move more and more towards self-sustenance, whereas the government cannot fund a large-scale proliferation. But I told her that madam in my opinion there are larger and larger number of teachers that if they see the benefit to themselves occurring from these workshops they will be willing to spend money from their own pocket to attend these workshops. With this model in place we are preparing a documentation on how to set up a hub, what equipment is required. For example, if you want to become a hub like IIT Bombay what equipment you need to set up, what teams of people you need to build both the technical and administrative teams because you will have to interact then with the remote centers directly and do all the paraphernalia that our center does. We will be setting up a documentation for using of this technology, the documentation for the methodology that is to be followed, the documentation on how to conduct the courses, the documentation on how to collect the contents and release them in open source. All of these is expected to be ready by end of January and all those manuals will also be open source they will be available in fact on the Moodle for these workshops. So, you are welcome to start thinking about it and I will certainly make sure that apart from putting these information on the web we will send a copy to you as I plan to do it. I am proposing to send a copy to all the participating remote centers because it is my honest hope that each of the remote centers which is actually transmitting courses conducted by IIT Bombay can in turn start conducting these workshops on their own. Thank you for asking that question. MNIT Bhopal has a question. Sir it was a very inspiring address from your side. I have one question. You talked about four qualities of that have to be inculcated curiosity, boldness, perseverance and I think you missed the fourth one. Please tell us in detail about that also. And secondly I wanted to say that our present system of appraisal doesn't give much weightage to teaching of a teacher and laboratory work the effort she takes in class and laboratories rather it focuses more on his efforts in research and other activities. So, if something could be done in that direction I think that teaching will improve the efforts will be more from the side of the teacher. Thank you. Thank you very much for this question and I am sorry that I missed out on the fourth which is I believe an equally important characteristic. The fourth characteristic is excitement and passion. A child is always excited about everything it does. That excitement and that passion keeps driving the child in spite of the failures. And it is that excitement and passion we often start missing when we grow up. Many times because the work is of a mundane nature or a repetitive nature we don't show the same excitement and passion that we do things which a child does. So, that is the reason why I say that somehow if we can rediscover the child in ourselves and recall our own curiosity at the age of five years, our own boldness at the age of five years, our own perseverance at the age of five years and our own excitement and passion at the age of five years. I think we would be doing far greater job for ourselves and for the rest of the world. But I would like to add one more thing which also I missed. There are two additional very important characteristics which unfortunately the God has not naturally endowed amongst children. These characteristics are nothing to do with the life of a species. These are special characteristics which are available only with human beings and these are part of our human culture. Let me just mention these two. The first one is humility. A child does not have humility. The child is not humble. Many times the child is very arrogant, very insistent. Humility is required when we deal with large number of people around. We must learn to carry our knowledge very lightly. The way, the more you learn, the more humble you must be. That is what all the philosophies say. This humility has to be inculcated in the children. It does not come natural. The second equally important thing is to inculcate in the children is ethics because ethics is not part of a natural survival instinct related characteristic. Young children are not ethical. They are very possessive. They will possess everything. They will take something from somebody else and they would feel bad about it because they are doing it because of their self-interest. It is the social norm. It is the norm of good behavior in the society which demands ethical behavior from us. And if ethics and humility is not equally well inculcated from the childhood, when we grow up, sometimes we tend to neglect these. You will see that is the reason why students copy. You will see that is the reason why people do funny things. Why people become corrupt later? All of these are traits. We show that we have been unable to incorporate strong ethics when we were, when the students are young. So, I would submit. Thank you very much for reminding me of missing the fourth characteristic, but I have added two more which are artificial, but extremely important for the normal growth of human society. So, remember those four. The fourth one is excitement and passion and remember two equally important things, humility and ethics. And I think we as teachers must become role models because whatever we do is often copied and aped by other people. I forget the second part of the question. Sir, it was about the contribution of a teacher to teaching and his work in laboratory. I wanted to tell you an example which I saw I think somewhere in Odisha in one of my visits. In one of the colleges I had gone and I usually keep asking people what else do you do other than syllabus and so on. And one electronics teacher sheepishly told me that he runs a lab on Sunday. Every Sunday morning for three hours he runs a lab. And then I asked him what does he do in that lab? He says that sir, we take up some problem, we analyze that problem, we design a circuit and we fabricate that circuit. We meet for three hours every Sunday, most of the Sundays and at the end of the semester this circuit is built. And then I said this is wonderful. He said, but sir, not all students come. I have 60, 70 students, only 10, 15 students come. I said my dear friend, those 10, 15 students are going to make a difference to the world and to themselves because they are coming on a Sunday. They know that they are they whatever they are doing is completely useless from an examination point of view and yet they are coming. So, you are doing something great. You know what he told me? Sir, you are amongst the very few who appreciate this work. Most of my colleagues say, he is teaching something outside the syllabus. Now, this is what I would like to say independent of the rig moral of the syllabus and the compulsions of your own mechanism. Why do we look forward to government and external forces to recognize our work? That teacher must have been deriving extraordinary pleasure and if every year, if he is able to train those 15, 10 students in this fashion, he is actually creating problem solvers of the future. Please remember this, while as teachers, we do want immediate recognition from our colleagues, our superiors, we also want our students to recognize that we have done something special. Don't you feel very happy and proud when a student whom you had taught 10 years ago suddenly meets you somewhere and says madam, you taught me this and I am grateful. I learned something useful. Don't you feel very nice? I will tell you as a teacher who has been teaching for 40 years, that is the biggest reward. There is no money, no honor in the world which is comparable to one student telling you that sir, you made some difference to my life. That is the privilege of a teacher. There is absolutely no other employee of any cadre in the world who can claim that privilege except parents, because the children are always grateful to the parents. Similarly, children are grateful to the teacher. Of course, I agree with you. There has to be a mechanism within our university system to permit greater recognition for such additional work, to permit greater recognition in terms of marks, because that is what these students understand. In IIT system, we are privileged. When I say this is a special assignment and you will get these many marks and when I say you solve these additional questions, you will get bonus marks. I am permitted to add these marks in all kinds of ways as long as I have announced that scheme at the beginning and permit to calculate that as a grade. You unfortunately may not have that privilege, but my contention is keep fighting for it, keep fighting for autonomy of the college, keep fighting for autonomy of the teacher. Let me tell you that there are many institutions which are supposedly autonomous, but they in turn do not grant this autonomy to the teachers who are part of that institution. That is very unfair. So, start fighting, start arguing and don't give up and don't get frustrated if nobody listens. That will happen for several years. You have to keep on arguing without losing your cool and keep on getting these benefits, but yes, someday we will change the system in the colleges. Thank you. Another question, sir. Yes, please. First of all, thank you, sir, for your inspiring words and I just want to say something to you. It is not suggestion because I am too young to give you suggestions, but I want just whatever you have told us, you could please share it to the social networking or YouTube because I am connecting with the students with the social networking and nowadays students are sharing so much of movie clippings and songs on Facebook and so much of the time is just wasted on social networking. So, if you could please upload a lecture so that I can or our faculty's colleagues could share those inspiring words among the students so that your message, your thoughts can be directly delivered to them. If you could please, sir, do this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for this suggestion and thank you for the appreciative word. For one thing, this lecture is also being recorded. All this interaction is being recorded and as per our principle, this recorded lecture will also form part of the released material on the website. Of course, you are permitted to download it. I do not think I have the energy or time to connect now at this age to the social network and put it up, but you are most welcome to do it on your own because all of this material is in open source. Secondly, my colleague, Mrs. Solanki, just pointed out that the madam who asked the earlier question belongs to some national institute for teacher training. There used to be a TTT Bhopal and there are some four such TTTs and madam, I had interacted with one of the directors of one of the institutions I do not know in Chennai or someplace and my request would be that if you could perhaps try and become part of this national mission activity because you directly deal with teachers in large numbers and if you could imbibe this style of empowering teachers, perhaps both of us would benefit. I would like to request you to try and take this up with your own institute. Thank you, sir. I have decided to interact with my director. I have this in mind that we will like to become a remote center for use of this technology and spreading further the inputs and we will also like to use it for our own purpose. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I think we need to stop because there are so many questions still, but I am aware of the fact that I have eaten away practically the entire lecture slot of Professor Sohanke. Let us not forget that the primary objective of all of you to have come here was to learn something and enhance the common knowledge on photovoltaic cells. So, with this, with the apology for spending so much time. Thank you very much.