 I am delighted to be participating in this event from one of our remote centers in Nashik. This is the last session of all face-to-face interactions and therefore I wish to use this opportunity to say a few things before I come to the discussion on the topic that will be discussed in this FDP over the next two weeks. A couple of things which I wanted to say were as follows. First and foremost, almost 2,500 teachers have been consistently participating in all activities although the overall registered participants were 4,000 to begin with. A large number dropped out right at the beginning when they saw the assignments that were to be completed and submitted. Perhaps they lost heart. Some people realize that it's going to be a very long drawn affair. So they had perhaps thought that it would be like a hundred meter rest. When they found out it's a marathon, they lost heart. But we had somewhere between 2,400 to 2,800 participants consistently working right from the beginning. I would like to use this opportunity to compliment all of you. As I had said at the beginning, this kind of FDP has never been conducted in the country earlier and the All India Council of Technical Education is so excited that they want us to conduct this FDP for all 5 lakh teachers of professional colleges in the country. Now that's a very tall order. A taller order is they want us to finish this in next 3 years. And as an added attraction they have said that please do it Professor Fatak but we don't have any funds to give you. These are the kind of challenges that not only the technical education faces but the whole country faces. And we have to answer these challenges by coming together and working on our own. So this is the culminating set of weeks for the first ever historic FDP which concentrates on this aspect. Some of the learnings that we had from this FDP is that instead of conducting a comprehensive 4 week equivalent FDP which takes more than 12 weeks to complete because 10 weeks of online activity has to be completed before. We have decided that we will break this FDP into two parts. The first part will concentrate on foundations of ICT where we will cover all the common technologies and their knowledge in a shorter framework of a FDP equivalent to 2 weeks which will mostly be conducted online. The second component which relates to the pedagogy of effective use of technology in education will be covered in another FDP which is equivalent of 2 weeks of work which of course if you consider the online activity it will run for at least 5 to 6 weeks with some interaction. We may not have remote centres as the only places for that interaction. Right now on the drawing board many of my colleagues are working out the modalities but we are clear about one thing. If we have to conduct these programs in future to cater to a very large number of professional colleagues then IIT Bombay or IIT Kharagpur alone cannot do this task. We will need assistance and help from committed professional teachers who are willing to give their time and effort for helping us and that is the reason why we have conceptualised the scheme of teaching associates and where from these teaching associates will come where to begin with they will come from among the 2500 teachers who are participating in this event. I look forward to seeing more of the passionate people among you who are willing to lead this effort with us so that the learning that we have is communicated to a much larger number of our colleagues all across the country. I would like to repeat that in this matter of the newly emerging pedagogy on effective handling of ICT for greater quality of education is not something on which textbooks are available or standard material is available. All of us are learners. People in IIT Bombay have been more fortunate for having experimented with these things over the last 5 years so perhaps we know a bit more. Now you know something as you go back to your colleges and practice some of these at least a few of you could become better experts than even asset IIT Bombay and together we hope to take this style and technique to greater perfection so that the entire Indian education system of higher education, higher technical education benefit. So this is the first point I wanted to share with all of you. The second point is not very pleasing as I had observed last time that we noticed a few cases of undesirable plagiarism where some of the colleagues were tempted to copy submissions of their friends and submit those submissions as their own and in IIT we take these things very seriously. They generally don't occur but when they happen the penalty is very harsh. I was quite surprised that why such things are being detected from amongst teachers because we are not dealing with students, we are dealing with teachers but then my colleagues told me that part of human being is a human being. After all where you not tempted to copy an assignment when you were a student I said yes I did. Then when you grow what is the reason why you will not give into that temptation if the chances are bright that you will not be caught. So I grudgingly agreed that yes I might fall to that temptation. However I still hold that as a teacher we have a greater responsibility to demonstrate higher values and we cannot demonstrate these unless we imbue these values ourselves to the perfection. Since it is entirely possible that we might be tempted because temptations occur in life for a variety of reasons that is the reason why I had thought of an alternative where I requested people to give a feedback admitting clearly in case they were prey to such temptation and they mentioned exactly what they have copied and from whom. I was again surprised that more than 200 people more than 200 participants have actually confessed that they were prey to this. While I feel sad that there are so many teachers who felt prey to such temptation I also feel proud that the same 200 people had the courage to come forward and say yes we did that it was a mistake we are sorry will not repeat it. Believe me my dear friends it requires tremendous guts to admit a mistake. To commit a mistake is relatively easier but to admit a mistake and to correct it. So I compliment all those 200 plus friends who had shown that courage and I'm sure that they will never ever permit themselves to be tempted like this in future. I would suggest that all others who have not indulged in such practices should note that temptations in life can occur anytime not necessarily now they may occur next year they may occur here after that particularly when many of our faculty colleagues are pursuing their research many are working post their PhD on research work with the research scholars several of our colleague teachers are actually themselves doing PhD and many others would be soon following and that is an area where the temptation to copy material from somebody else's work is the greatest. You might have heard that very recently a vice chancellor of a university in Pudulcherry was caught doing this plagiarism it was the cat was caught last year she submitted a resignation but did not submit it properly she's now been removed for civilly that is the downfall my dear friends that may occur if we fall through such temptation it is therefore very very important that we avoid these values and once again I will say that while I feel sad that so many of our participants were tempted but I feel immensely proud that they had the courage to come forward and say yes we made a mistake and that it will not happen in this context I would again like to mention the importance of open educational resources on which you have had a large amount of discussion earlier coupled with open educational resources is the matter of open source software which permits us to use that software freely modified distributed and therefore I can legally use something which otherwise might require obtaining a license at the cost in the context of open source software I will mention some discussion which happened yesterday I was sitting with my colleague or in front of my colleague Mr. Kannan when he was talking about use of spoken tutorials in teaching people different things and then there was a question saying Sylab which is one of the open source software having the same functionality as the well-known commercial product MATLAB many teachers said that our students are more comfortable with MATLAB they are not comfortable with Sylab and his answer I think was that the matter of comfort comes out of the matter of exposure and the matter of practice however if your people and you are comfortable using MATLAB absolutely no problem make sure that every copy of the MATLAB that is used by any student on any computer at home or in the lab and by the teacher is a licensed copy now that is a hard problem because many of our institutions are not careful about checking whether the software is actually licensed software or not please understand that if we do not respect the intellectual property right of others the rest of the world will never respect our intellectual property that we keep so in a nutshell you are of course welcome to use any piece of software that you feel is required to do the necessary work however ensure that the software that you use is legal tender if it is a commercial product ensure that you have a license which is properly paid for if you can't afford that license then you must use an open-source free software instead I will tell you an instance where this happened not now but 30 years ago when one of the researchers in a company Godrej company who was doing research in graphics then was attending a conference in Germany and in that not conference a trade show and in one of the stalls he was shown a particular utility which was extremely good he wanted to see something more and he says yes I can show you that something more but that requires an additional piece of software I have it loaded on the machine but I don't have license to run it the license is only on the machine which is in my lab which is 100 miles away but if you are willing to spend time I will drive you there show you that and then I will bring you back he did that because he did not have the license to run that software on that machine do we inculcate these values amongst our students do we insist that no student shall ever use unlicensed software do we do it ourselves very carefully we unfortunately don't and that is the national problems I'm not blaming anyone in particular but this problem will have to be solved it is this habit of not respecting the law of the land which says that if there is a proper commercial software it must be paid for before I start using it they must have to do many other things also copying somebody else's material and passing it on as one's own research work is nothing but a author of the same philosophy that I don't care if I use anybody else's work I would once again emphasize and no amount of emphasize is good enough that all of us must be extremely careful in ensuring that intellectual property is respected and protected one of the reasons why we have embarked on this large scale effort on creating open educational resources is that all learners can freely utilize it and they can do so perfectly legal now I come to the second part and the main part of my session which relates to the next two weeks of our online activities namely building and nurturing collaborative community all of us are very comfortable working alone when I work alone on a given task I see several advantages first of all I can do that work at any time and place that I choose I don't depend on others second I control the quality of that work so I don't have any meddling from others third if there is a team of people then I have to live with the idiosyncrasies of those people in the team and this is not only related to their different professional competences but they were their work habits their behavior you know how difficult it is for multiple people to work together even personal interaction could force a problem so these are some of the disadvantages because of which I would like to work alone however let us look at the advantages of any team working together first of all when I work alone the amount of time that I can spend is always limited after all there are only 24 hours in a day if instead three or four people work together each one can contribute substantial amount and therefore the sum total of the efforts that a team can put in is always larger than the effort that any one person can in fact that's an oxymoron it's a mathematically proven fact that some total of n number of people's effort is always greater than the effort by one person but I might want to add greater than equal to why because if all other members are sleeping members that means they are only notional members but they don't do any work then the contribution will be only same as my own content so it is to be understood and assume that the team actually content in fact it contributes in such a meaningful fashion then as it is known many times two plus two does not become four but it can become a 10 so four people work instead of two people and if they work in a coordinated fashion in a collaborative way then the total work is quantitatively and qualitatively much better than what a single individual can this is not just to say that team work is important but I will also add one more thing if you look at problems that engineers and this of this century are expected to solve they are all multidisciplinary problems as I have already mentioned once these problems are both complex and multidisciplinary and therefore cannot ever be solved by any single individual they are all to be solved by multiple teams working together and these teams must collaborate and coordinate their effort sadly we have not developed habits of working together efficiently more sadly we have no component in our curriculum which will train our students to work together in teams in our IIT system we invariably have group projects which are part of every subject that we teach or many subjects that we teach in other engineering colleges the group projects take the form of only the final year project that the undergraduate students do and they usually have a team of three or four people working together unfortunately they have no guidance till then on how to work together effectively and efficiently they have no guidance till then of how plagiarism is bad and that they must do their own effort and document their own effort as a result you see a large number of v-take projects and mca projects which are ditto copies of some earlier project this my dear friends is spreading like a cancer in this country and that cancer has to be removed there is no choice in front of us and the flag holders of this campaign has to be teachers it will not happen otherwise I have suggested a few things although it is a digression but I will repeat that every college must make it obligatory that every project work done by either a singer student or by the team every research paper that is sent for publication by a faculty member or a team of faculty member must be displayed publicly on the website of the college if that is not done no degree should be awarded to students and no paper should be accepted for publication from teachers this single simple act will immediately prohibit people from falling temptation to copy from somewhere and do it because public scrutiny transparency after all that is what the government keeps saying that e-governance means openness transparency and that means correct things will happen wrong thing will not happen sorry for this digression but it is very very important that through our efforts we spread this message across the country and try to ensure this talking about the license behavior I will again urge all participating teachers that when they finish this FTP or even otherwise they should raise this matter with their own issued authorities they should raise this matter with the labs in which they are in charge for the equipment hardware and software and if there is something which is illegal or something which is not properly respecting the IPR they must object and they must immediately stop using such there is no shortcut to that there is a harsh medicine that is required because as I said is spreading like cancer and cancer requires surgery it cannot be controlled by ordinary medicine and we are therefore all qualified surgeons now who will have to undertake that surgery let us come back to therefore the main topic where we want to establish and nurture collaborative community we start with a small team effort that is the reason why there is a team assignment to be completed by all participants after the online portion gets over all of you have formed teams I have gone through many of the teams many teams are properly done there between two to four people as was required they have identified the main domain in which they have an expertise now they will have to define a sub-domain for the particular work which they wish to do together the nature of the work will be in the form of an OER generally that OER could take various shapes and formats for example somebody might some team might just decide to create a video lecture or a set of video lectures explaining some concern some team might decide to design quizzes with questions answers and explanation some other team might decide to give the description of a possible course project that can be done in one of the sub-domains of their domain as long as any work that is undertaken is done with an intention to provide an extremely good quality useful resource and usefulness will be decided by the people who will use it please remember all the work that you submit as your team assignments will definitely be released as a part of the OER repository of these FDP and therefore that will be available and accessible to lakhs of teachers and millions of students and that is the reason why we must actually try and do this team assignment work very very carefully and serious I also notice that in few remote centers I have come across teams which consist of only one person I can see why that might have happened I mean I put myself into the shoes of that person and I realize what I just mentioned some time ago I'm more comfortable working alone if I have three more partners and if all three turn out to be sleeping partners then I will end up doing all the Kholagiri if those people are not sleeping partners but they do not contribute meaningfully they do shoddy work their documentation contains errors then I'll spend my time in correcting those errors these are the reasons why I'm tempted to work alone but the point is we want to actually nurture the notion of working together in team when I work in team even if I consider myself to be the best person in that team I must realize that because I'm the best perhaps I have a greater responsibility to take others together with me and please remember that in a team work even if I'm the best I will always learn something from every other team member because every human being every participant in any team has some very plus points which are so unique that they're not available in other we can learn from every other human who works with us something or the other it's not it is not necessarily the technical competence alone but it's behavioral niceties the way of functioning meticulousness so many characteristics which individually we may not possess all of them but a team will contribute to that when the teams work in a manner where they are not physically at the same place it puts some additional problems in the path of the team work for example consider there is a team of four people all four of them actually work in different city now will they work together that is the reason why in the afternoon session today and this you may want to note down the major part of the second session I understand that Samir Sahasruthay's assignment of a peer assessment has to be completed the time has been extended in today evening so you might want to use the part of the first afternoon session to complete that if you are already completed you can directly go towards the contouring of the team work which I will now explain so let us come back to the case where four people have to do a team work over a period of time but they are all not coming to a common place as colleagues in the college or as students in the same class even if they are they have to work individually from the pressings of their home or from the pressings of their office when the other members of the team may not be there this asynchronous nature of teamwork is increasingly going to be the common factor in almost all team efforts even today you will find large teams which do software development for companies like Tata consultancy services jointly with their partners such as Boeing or Microsoft or whatever you will find teams about 200 people spread across 25 places and yet working like a military operation perfectly plan and coordinate and that is exactly what we need to first learn ourselves and then teach our students how to do that unfortunately the domain of management which deals with project management and which therefore has a complete set of systems on how to handle teams and teamwork whenever the teams do a project that knowledge is not accessible to scientists and engineers because that is considered project management is considered a topic under management domain which is not in the syllabus of any engineering or science this is very sad but what I am trying to suggest is that if we have to perfect the teamwork that we will do it is mandatory that we learn from our brothers and sisters who practice management and at least the project management component we should try to learn their best practices unfortunately this FDP cannot cover project management in its entirety but I would like to mention today a few things which all of us must learn few very basic things and then practice those while we do the teamwork for the team assignment and later when we train our students to work in team so let me take matters in sequence there are five things which I am going to mention and you may want to note down number one handling team communication how do you handle team communication the team communication can be handled either through face-to-face meetings or through emails there is no other mechanism if emails have to become the standard way of handling communication there are several things that need to be pre-decided and pre-agreed by the team simple thing what should be the subject line of an email which is related to this project what are the email IDs of the team members many times we do not have this information easily available today afternoon therefore the first task that you'll have to do is you will have to ensure that each member of the team has a copy of the complete contact details of all team members preferably in a soft copy but also preferably as one single page of hard copy where email IDs and telephone numbers are written down for all that in members of the team additionally since all teams at a particular remote center form a larger group although the individual teams in that group might be working on different problems but collectively they do form a coherent group in the sense that they have an affiliation to that remote center therefore this information must be available with the workshop coordinator of the remote center if you have not already done that please ensure that this is done as the first task today in the afternoon session whenever you exchange messages through email as I already mentioned you must standardize on what should be the line in the subject that will mention because invariably when we read our email the first thing that we read is the subject and the subject is blank or the subject is arbitrarily written then we are not able to correlate what will be the content the email itself should be short and brief but succinct and carefully written people think that they can effort to write bad English in an email only in a document which is to be formally submitted which is a properly word process they should take care of correcting all grammar and spelling mistake that is not correct even an email communication has to be as perfect as a document that you will prepare mistakes can happen even I make mistakes but I will tell you a habit which I have developed even if I write a slightly longish email having two paragraphs I never press the same button unless I have read it at least once completely and carefully and try to see whether there is any spelling mistake or grammar mistake then only I press that same button this is a discipline that we must inculcate and this discipline must be visible amongst all the team members who collectively interact through emails the second important thing about the communication is that you often have to exchange documents images video clips or whatever material that you are preparing as a component for your team assignment what should be the format of such files and what should be the names of such file naming conventions in files are extremely important because otherwise there could be a large number of files with very same or similar names causing confusion as to what does that file contain you have to evolve a file naming convention amongst the team members so that whenever you attach files everybody will know from the name of the file itself roughly what that file should mean the format in which the data in that file should be stored should also be pre-decided for example if it is to be an editable text file such that I prepare that file and a colleague of mine and the team might have to modify that file later then the file has to be editable if it is a text file you may decide whether it should be a .txt file it should be a .odt file like open document format for open source word process or it should be a .doc file for Microsoft word processor to be used my request is make sure that if you decide that all editable text files will be .doc or .docx files then make sure that all the members of the team have access to legal copies of Microsoft Office if you do not have access to legal copies of Microsoft Office you cannot use that software to edit those files period it is blasphemy it is a criminal offense and we will not commit crime anymore in the worst case use ordinary text files that is perfectly fine better still use open source word process of course if you are more comfortable with Microsoft or any other proprietary package go ahead and buy the license and then use that license but since now we are talking about a team effort suppose there are four members three of us have let us say software license for the best package for photo editing because we might be working on creating some engineering drawings or photograph but the fourth person does not have the license now the fourth person says boss if you do this I will not be able to contribute anything I can use only this open source for the benefit of that one person all the remaining three must agree to use that software which is commonly used I am elaborating but it is very very important that initially itself the team decides what kind of pieces of software will be used to prepare that project and what kind of communication standards will be established the second thing is about the discipline of the activity itself the activity itself as they said would be a project of your choice that you may decide to do generally resulting in an OER and as I already mentioned think about the possibilities that three or four of you or two of you whatever be the team size can do together but let us be very clear about this that team effort is expected to be equivalent of what should I say two days of full-time work that is what is the team effort one day of full-time work is eight hours on and out two days of full-time work is 16 hours that means each individual member must put in honest to God 16 hours of work since the coordination in team takes away some time this will be plus or minus something plus but not mine now this effort obviously cannot be put in a single day because all of us have to do so many other thing I would submit that the best way of going about it to divide the work such that you can spend two hours every day the advantage will be that you will have to attend to emails which come from your colleagues there will be some consolidation and coordination of the work that will have to be done and therefore spread the work in a time frame which is suitable for all of the time limit that has been announced for submitting the team assignment is two weeks after the conclusion of the ten weeks that is whenever the ten week online activity of the FDP ends you have to complete and submit the team assignment four weeks is the time because four days of work not two days of work but four days of work has to be done for the team work so the total amount of effort is about 32 hours of effort on each individual and that's a huge amount of it now you may not take four weeks you may compress it to two weeks you may compress it to three week you may even compress it to one week if all the team members are sitting together and working at the same but suffice it to say that the material that you produce and the records that you submit along with it I will explain what records you will have to submit must demonstrate very clearly that every member of the team has put in the required amount I effort please note that the OER that you produce not only should be usable not only should be high quality but it should be almost like a work of art that you should be proud of because hundreds and thousands of people are going to look at that your names are going to be written on that OER your names are going to be remembered and therefore it should be a matter of great pride that you perform that act of art very very carefully and delicate coming back to the scheduling of the activity that I mentioned such a team has to be coordinated and there has to be one team leader multiple people cannot take decisions on the same topic and therefore every team has to have a leader normally as we shall see over the next two weeks in larger teams of volunteers which emerge to support typically open source software development or any other activity leadership emerges here we do not have time for leadership to emerge I understand that the team formation which has been provided by all the participants already has the name of a person as the team leader am I right in assuming that and the teams already have a team leader I would like to advise the team leader as follows you are not leader because you are extraordinarily better than all others you are one of amongst the equals you are a they are all your peers leading a peer group is far more difficult than leading a hierarchical group of juniors since they are all equal the leader has to demonstrate the ability to take everybody together one has to blow hot and blow cold somebody will shout on a deadline and everybody else will suffer now the leader has a choice of shouting through a harsh email or has a choice of picking up the phone and speaking sweetly will you please do this quickly because everybody is waiting for it there are multiple ways of handling this and this should teach us a whole lot about human interaction but at the end of the day once a person is named as team leader or good or bad whatever the team does the team leader gets maximum credit of the team's work and team leader also gets the maximum debit of the team the team does not perform the whole team will lose out on the credibility but the leader will lose out most what should the leader do and this is the next task that the leader should do jointly with the team members today itself namely decide on the exact schedule so define that when the 10 weeks of face-to-face interaction finishes or even earlier if they so wish what are the kind of activities that individuals of the group will undertake what will be that frequency with which emails will have to be sent to by team members what will be the frequency of consolidation of the material who will do what review when when final documentation of that OER will be commencing who will do that review and correction and when that final documentation along with the OER is fully ready to submit these are no trivial activities my dear friends one suggestion is keep the frequency of at least two emails per week if not three emails which are mandatory to be sent by every participant independent of whether any substantial work has been done during that period or only very little amount of work is we will suggest a comprehensive mechanism whereby we will be able to track all the emails because the email exchanges you will have to send a copy to a specific address which will outline so that all the emails that you exchange within the teams are available and accessible for the backend team to look at because that will display the effort and the frequency at which such effort is but what is more important is the coordination of these efforts has to be done at the level of that please spend time today afternoon in discussing the modalities of how you will complete this particular task in the remaining two weeks in the first week I will be discussing some of these modalities so discuss these modalities and try to finalize to your at your end what you would like to do and how you would like to do it as part of the team work for the assignment that you have chosen however don't freeze it please wait for the discussion that will happen over the next week in the online portion of the next week you will have inputs precisely helping you to decide on these matters or how people take decision if you think some of the inputs some of the suggestions make sense you may try to incorporate those and modify the decision that you have taken about the communication about the file formats about the methodology about the scheduling etc. the fourth important thing that you will have to do is to maintain a tracking record basically it is like the history of your activities we are very bad at writing our history as I already mentioned earlier but it is important that we learn to write the history of the activities that we do ordinarily such history is written by professionals by accumulating daily time sheets I think I had mentioned it once that when our students go and take up a job they don't have to just sign the attendance but every day they have to fill up a time sheet saying what they have done in the day and how much time they have spent on each activity I might say I spent two hours in reading something one hour in drafting something one hour in writing an old report two hours in reviewing some design whatever work I do I'm required to it does not take more than two three minutes but unless I put in the time sheet at the end of the day I don't get paid for that day that is the standard way in which industry works we don't work in that way and our students don't work in that but when it comes to doing a project it is important that we learn to maintain the project diaries and the account of the time that we spend and the nature of activity for which we spend that time I might spend some time in writing emails or reading emails from my partners but much of the time I am going to spend on doing a part of the activity which has been assigned to me jointly by the team and that part I will be doing at my own chosen time generally I may not keep any record believe me if we don't keep any records six months later if I were to ask you how much time did you spend on the project you will generally say about 30 hours 25 hours 40 hours or all right how much of that time did you spend in writing something I don't remember how much of that time you spend in thinking about an idea I don't remember because our memory is short we don't remember this the only way we can remember is if we whenever we carry out an activity we actually write it down now we don't have the habit of writing diary even if we were to write our right diaries they would generally contain the personal observations of what happened in a day on every day we are not talking of that we are talking about a professional diet in the next week I will be giving you a format a suggested format on which such diaries are maintained we have been using these formats for the project work that our students do in some of our courses for example when our students do a team project in CS 101 which is an introductory programming course then apart from the project code that they have written apart from the project documentation that they have written they have to submit a composite diary an individual diary has to be maintained by every person of the team and that diary must say it is not a daily diary but whenever they do a project activity they have to write the date start time and time and a brief one line description of what activity that they did this diary is maintained by every individual it is consolidated by the team leader of that team at the end where you have names of all individual participants you do not have the start time and time but you have major activity component such as discussion review documentation programming of whatever other work thinking reporting consolidation whatever work and what you have to do is each individual person calculates the total time I have spent for example in review I might start review of one submission made by a colleague said today I might spend 15 minutes in that day after tomorrow I might review for half an hour somebody access thing three days later I might review somebody access thing if I'm supposed to be the reviewer of the team now this these entries I will be making in my diary but at the end of the project I must submit my team leader the total time that I have spent for review the total time I have spent for writing emails the total time I have spent for let us say writing a documentation these timings believe me will not otherwise be available to us if we don't write them down the moment we finish that one diaries cannot be constructed at the end of the project from memory human memories and believe me I'm telling you this from experience personal experience unless you jot it down the same day latest so don't sleep unless you have made the relevant entries it will not take more than 30 seconds or one minute but maintain a diary and write down what you have done in a day for 10 minutes 15 minutes half an hour approximate you will be surprised that many of you would actually spend much more time in the team assignment than what you are expected to spend because there are unknown components of activities which will suddenly email where it will take your time it's worth while to document so let me recall number one you will set up standards for communication number two you will set up schedule for different activities and schedule for both the communication and who will do what when and you will define let us say our team will try to complete this not in four weeks but in two weeks itself but then I will have to ensure that all team members agree to do more work on this day this day this day the days on which emails must be exchanged must be very clearly noted down and agreed to by everyone the days on which the team leader will communicate to all other members of the team must also be agreed upon and the team leader must ensure that such consolidation happens at the end of the team leader at the appointed time so all that you are doing is you are fixing a schedule in short you are planning and you're planning in a very deliberate fashion so that you can work almost like a military operation well I military operation throughout those two weeks without bothering our details because you know exactly what is expected at what the deadlines are supposed to be hard deadline so please remember when we say well midnight it would mean two minutes past midnight we always wanted to be very careful that is why you will notice that when we say the session will start at 11 15 if it does not start we apologetically inform everyone that the session will start 15 minutes late or 10 minutes late we have to learn the value of these deadlines in that context let me recall what my workshop team told me three days ago and repeated it yesterday you will remember that the deadline for submitting the feedback related to plagiarism was 22nd midnight a number of people have requested either by phone or by email saying please extend this deadline now this deadline is not extendable because it was a hard deadline and I had announced that you know what will happen as a result there are perhaps about hundred people I do not know from the sample I can estimate there could be hundred people who for some reason did not fill up that survey form and therefore are positively deprived of getting a certificate of completing this FDP although they have done all the work diligently and they will be completing even the team assigned I apologize to such people in advance because they cannot be considered for certification however if they feel that they will benefit from continuing to work and learn they are most welcome but that is what hard deadline means a hard deadline means every person in the team must meet that deadline of the activity not even one minute late and let us learn all of these ourselves let us practice all of these ourselves so that when we train our students then we train them proper I do not know but I can tell you the difference between the college where I studied the SJ SITS indoor is one of the good colleges like all your colleges and the IIT Bombay system in my college there used to be deadlines announced by the teachers saying this assignment is due this time a few people go to him self a perso holy tea so holy may not a guy talk to him a company can do the in guy extension let the teacher perhaps also has enjoyed the holy in the same manner so he says okay tomorrow that means we announce deadlines then we announce extension to those deadlines then we announce further extension to those deadlines and this becomes a matter of practice to the extent that our students assume that the deadline will be extended and because they do so they also assume that deadlines will be accepted the difference between developing world and developed that the developed world does not believe in extension of deadline a deadline is a hard deadline we are now becoming a developer you are the front end representatives of that developed world being trained in a manner of using the most modern technology for effective education you have to respond to that call saying that you will set and honor hard deadlines and if you miss that deadline sorry you miss it something is not done that's it so that is why the deadline that you set for that have to be hard deadline and they have to be on it I will tell you a trick by which you can maintain these hard deadlines and their sanctity suppose the hard deadline is tomorrow evening then the base bait is to complete that work by tonight letters by tomorrow morning itself hard deadline does not mean that we have to wait till the end to complete that work the work can be done earlier it is only a human psychology we says are we timing charge into time and therefore we can be dealing this scheduling that you will do is the draft scheduling for your project try to perfect as much as is possible today afternoon if it is possible for you I would like you to have two sessions of course the first priority is to complete the assessment work of Dr. Samir sir's with this portion but I guess many of you would have completed it and that may not take much time I would suggest that at each remote center there should be individual team meetings first where individual members of the team will discuss and decide I would suggest take about half an hour to take that decision of an hour to 45 minutes spend 10 minutes in writing down whatever you have decided this board agree of course has to be done by the team leader who as I said will get more credit for the overall project anyway but all other people can assist once you have decided on this spend some time on more time on deciding on what particular activity you would like to undertake as the team assigned and of course the other thing that I mentioned towards the end I would request all such teams to come together and have a collective meeting where individual team leaders or any member try to suggest that they have formulated such and such scheme for file nomenclature for scheduling for email standardization etc etc and share the thoughts with everyone who knows some of the teams might have come up with something which is more useful as a process than some other things try to evolve the best process that you think and discuss this joint this meeting will not require more than 40 minutes 35 30 to 40 minutes is the time which should be coordinated by the workshop coordinator and not every member of the community because every remote center has anywhere between 20 to 50 people of course a remote center which has 50 or more people they might break themselves into two groups to conduct that discussion because the idea is not that everybody speaks there but the idea is you know exactly what common inputs that we need to share and those inputs have to be given by a few representative there could be some discussion on whether this approach is better or that approach is better a major part of the team work is running such meetings efficient so I'll tell you two things about running meetings which they developed practices first of all no meeting ever takes place without a return agenda second for each agenda item there is an estimated time which is written against that agenda item seven minutes for this 10 minutes for this 15 minutes for this three minutes for this third there is a timekeeper who is neither the president of that meeting namely the workshop coordinator here nor individual team leaders any one person who is chosen and appointed and that person does nothing but starts shouting the moment those seven minutes are over for a particular so he will politely mention that for this particular agenda item we had fixed seven minutes already two people have spoken for three minutes each now we have to conclude and write down the conclusion in one minute chart and at the end of seventh minute the timekeeper must force the chairman of the committee or the meeting to go to the next item we are not used to functioning like that it is very very important that we learn it and I suggest that you use the opportunity of this face-to-face interaction remember I had mentioned this earlier also because there was a feeling in the minds of many participants that face-to-face interaction means that is the time when we interact with the faculty at IIT Bombay of course that is one part that you do but this the other important part perhaps more important part is you interact with each other and that opportunity you will not get once you go back to your respective places colleges or homes please try to inculcate this learning how to conduct a meeting efficiently the responsibility should be taken by the workshop coordinator any one person can act as a timekeeper the person of course participates in the meeting and deliberations but the primary attention that person is on the watch this time is gone now nothing more will be so at the very beginning in this meeting I suggest that the workshop coordinator should announce that we shall discuss these three items today and for each item we have these ten minutes ten minutes ten minutes or whatever and then we will have a concluding discussion for seven minutes and final conclusions will be announced in the last one minute this is the way in which you can conduct a proper meeting of course since you are all faculty members you must be participating in your faculty meetings of the Institute or the departmental faculty meetings but I can suspect that neither the Institute faculty meeting nor the departmental faculty meeting is conducted with explicit attention to time span for every individual item we have in your faculty meeting the amount of time listed against each agenda item for which the deliberations will take place most faculty meeting do not have such time those who have such time written down I will ask the next question are you hundred percent sure that in every faculty meeting the time is added to scrupulously and not a single minute spent more than that it does not happen the reason is simple Indians are very expensive people expensive not expensive that means for them time is unlimited it goes from minus infinity to plus infinity so while time actually is unlimited the time available to us is limited overall it is on an average hundred years out of which we spend so much time in doing the FDP which is ten weeks online plus another three four weeks and when we come face to face the time is still more limited and therefore every second every minute of that time must be meaningfully utilised please remember conducting a meeting is actually an extremely important exercise as part of the teamwork here is a large team coming together for deliberating on something important and yet not being critical of the use of time for which the meeting is taking so please utilize this critical time learn something from this team work also called conducting a meeting efficient I will conclude by saying that the team assignment that you will do is an extremely important component of the entire FDP in the earlier part you have been learning from experts different things practicing those two assignments and pieces and so on but in this part what you do is entirely your own work a small team of people two to four people will be doing that work I will say this again there will be additional description by the way of what you have to submit you have to submit tax for example did I mention tax that are to be submitted along with OER that you give these are the tags which are words or phrases which can be used as a parameter for searching so if I say thermodynamics for example then if thermodynamics is a tag on any of the OERs when I search thermodynamic all 22 OERs pertaining to thermodynamics so on okay so I will explain about tagging in the next week's activities but you will have to create such that when you submit these and creating tags has to happen while you are creating the material itself the historical capture of activities automatically happens on MOOCs platform all the activities that you have been doing on IIT Bombay X for example are long so all activity logs are there who saw which video when is long who attempted which quiz when is long and will now be doing a downloading of all those event logs that gigabytes of log and will be writing programs to automatically analyze them to learn about the statistical behavior of the policy however what is not long is the individual diaries for example how long I spend in thinking about a topic cannot be captured online but if you send an email that can be captured when an email was sent by whom what was the subject of that email is known what was the attachment to that email is known and that is how once you start creating digital records it will be easier for you to ensure that your diaries are properly written because all the timings etc can be kept but please note that digital capture will only be capture of an event when it occurs that capture or that event log can never tell me the total time that an individual has spent on an activity and that is why while such capture is important writing your diaries is equally important in this week you will get progressively first we will get some material describing how the collaborative work is done you will have to look at some websites to which suggest how groups can collaborate but towards the middle of this week or perhaps on Thursday I will upload an additional PDF file which will give you our thinking of what should be the diary entries that individual should write and the diary entries that the consolidated diary should be submitted by the team leader you may take that as an input which is the format in which you will have to submit but that will come only on Thursday meanwhile please remember every one of you has to record any activity that you do now after today evening which goes towards the team effort even if you spend 10 minutes sometime in thinking about an idea and jotting down a few things and then send an email you must have a record when you spend that time and what activity as I said I am looking forward to having all these 2500 people coming out to be expert collaborators with me in our future efforts to train larger number of people not all of them will be our teaching associates in future but I stand by my commitment that we will be identifying 200 participants who will be honored with the recognition of the SAP award of excellence I think there is a small non-trivial amount of rupees 5000 that is the SAP award that we will be giving it is not for the award that I am delighted to see things happening this is the first FTP when my workshop team and all teachers are reporting that the activity levels are immensely high one of the reasons could be that this is the first time because we have the IIT Bombay X platform where online quizzes are being conducted and submissions are being done with peer assessment I must mention a curious happening where many people in their interaction have said that this peer assessment is a bunk up thing that there are peers who are not spending time in assessing properly I recall observing when president Kannon was conducting a session a angry lady saying that two of the peers gave her 16 out of 20 and 17 out of 20 but one person gave zero and she cannot understand how anybody can give zero marks is something you write even to our student if something irrelevant is written there also we give half mark or one mark how can somebody give zero what it means is that that particular gentleman or lady was completely careless giving zero zero zero some others might be careless in giving 20 20 20 one solution is that when you do such peer assessment you remove the outliers statistically outlier means that anything which is highest anything which is lowest is removed and you take the average of the remaining average is general is supposed to reflect it overall assessment which is more accurate however this was the first time when we applied the peer assessment for this and therefore there are many broken hearts where I genuinely believe I have done good work but because this peer assessment and that too because some peer doing something haphazardly not being careful is causing me problem well I sympathize with such people the worry that many participants have is that while they have struggled hard to give all the quizzes and assignments if they score less than 50% marks because of this idiotic peer giving me zero here and there then is that fair well I will mention two things here number one life is not fair after all are we fair to our students how many times we have observed either us falling to that temptation of quickly correcting the answer books and returning them by giving arbitrary marks how many times we are known of the cases of our own colleagues who don't do serious work of examining those students complain they don't even know what has happened they just get marks from their universe I think it is important that we collectively rise up to the arcade more important the second observation if the participants are worried that they may lose out on getting a certification just because a few peers have behaved idiotically let me assure you that such a thing will not happen that whenever we consolidate all the assessment marks the quantity marks of all participants and if the marks fall short of 50% which was announced as the minimum qualifying thing I will personally spend time with my colleagues in examine those cases which you may call boundary cases so somebody has got 45% or 40% okay and they fall short of some percentage and wherever we find that in those cases the marks are lost because of such peer assessment we will ensure that the benefit of doubt is given to them so that is my personal promise because the objective is not to deprive people of a certificate for which they have worked hard but the objective is for all of us to understand the process of such online activities and peer assessment both individually and collectively at least if I have suffered because some idiot has given me zero mark it should also teach me that in future when I am called upon to do this peer assessment I will spend my time diligently to do that work and do it proper so as long as I learn that I have benefited from the FDP and therefore I deserve to be certified so don't worry on that count we'll take care of well that's all I wanted to say I conclude this interaction by thanking all of you for participating very vigorously complimenting all of you for actually sustained a very long term activity and promising to sustain it more not only for the 10 weeks of the online activity but even for four more weeks to continue to do this team work properly I look forward to some absolutely excellent contributions coming out of this team work and I look forward to getting maybe at least 50 top class contributors to our future efforts in the form of what I call teaching associates for the future FDP program I would like to compliment in advance those 200 people which will emerge as the top performers right now we do not know who those are we will see how we could honor them and recognize them better apart from just sending some money in their bank accounts we would like to recognize them by publicizing their names on our website by writing individual personal letters I will do that personally to all heads of their institutions and by writing a consolidated later to the chairman of AICT mentioning these people by the name and their affiliation of course the AICT chairman will get a complete list of all the people who get certified in this FDP because I have suggested to him that if individual colleges wish to conduct such programs we will assist them in doing that at their local level provided they have participants who have successfully completed this FDP and therefore can be considered as perfectly eligible and competent to conduct this FDP on their own with that hope and with that promise I take your leave thank you so much over and out