 Good morning everyone and I wish you a very warm welcome to IIT Bombay and to this co-ordinators workshop on engineering mechanics. I have with us Professor D. B. Fatak who is the project leader for this project and Professor Saurvik Banerjee who is the co-coordinator for engineering mechanics. I would like to invite Professor Fatak to say a few words this juncture. Welcome to IIT Bombay, all of you are familiar with the fundamentals of the T-10KT program where we attempt to engage 10,000 teachers at a time across the country for a specific subject and discussions ranging over about two weeks. The idea is to share with these teachers some of the best teaching pedagogies and the teaching methodologies followed at IIT and also to empower them with absolutely solid knowledge of the basic fundamentals and the handsong so that they can teach more effectively. As you are aware in the 5,000 odd engineering colleges in the country the number of qualified and experienced teachers for different subjects are highly inadequate. Given that the gross enrollment ratio has increased only up to 18% from 11% in 12 years and we want to increase it to 30% by 2020, what it means is we will have to double the total number of institutions and universities in the country. Fortunately, this expansion may not happen in engineering. As all of you know every year more and more seats are remaining vacant in engineering colleges. Of course, it is not because less and less students are joining engineering. I do not know how many of you are aware of the statistics but for last three years the number of students actually taking admission to engineering programs across the country has plateaued at 1.25 million. The capacity which was 1 million about four years ago became 1.2 million, 1.4 million and 1.6 million. That means new colleges are opening up. My friend Dr. Mantha, the chairman of IIT tells me that this is a free country and therefore any organization which applies to open an engineering college and meets the norms cannot be refused, which is okay. Because we don't know which one of these will turn out and nurture themselves into good colleges and which one of them may not. However, the fact of life is that the number of students seeking admission to engineering colleges may not increase substantially over the next few years. But another equally important fact of life is that 1.25 million students seeking admission every year means about 5 million undergraduate students are actually learning various facets of engineering in the country. That is by far the largest number anywhere in the world. We have achieved this number but not achieved these academic infrastructure strength that we need and that is the reason why we need to train teachers. As all of you are aware, if a young person joins a bank, the person is given a very heavy dose of induction training. A graduate, a student of yours joins IT industry given anywhere between three months to six months of rigorous training. In every profession, people are trained before they are expected to deliver. We are the only unfortunate lot that teachers in engineering colleges who, once they are appointed today, they are said from tomorrow, teach this subject. Of course, the way we handle it, we are reasonably smart people. We know something we have seen from our old teachers, something we learn from peers, something we learn from experimentation. But it takes time, two years, three years, four years, till we mature. And sometimes it takes many more years to learn some finesse. For example, after 44 years of teaching, I am still discovering new ways which are more effective. So that is a fact of life. I have recommended, and the UGC and AICT has agreed, in fact, there is a high power committee of the ministry, that now onwards, minimum number of hours of training for every teacher per year will be made mandatory as a requirement of the due. When that happens, today, that is achieved through recognition of the certificates of two-week programs, et cetera, et cetera, towards one's career advancement or increment or something. But that has to be made obligated. The other suggestion I made is that no teacher appointed as a teacher in any engineering college will be permitted to teach unless a minimum basic training in pedagogy and in the subjects that he or she will teach is undertake. Now, this will have to be the responsibility to the teacher and the institution. But that is future. Currently, as you know, you would have seen colleges around you struggling with competence to teach well. There are good students in every college, and that is the reason why we embarked on this program. You're already familiar with the Modus operandi. We, for a subject-specific engagement of two-week program for the 10,000 teachers, we request experienced faculty members such as you to become course coordinators, and you will be conducting this workshop under your supervision at your respective colleges. We wish to engage with you for a week so that we can, you can all find out how the teaching faculty would deliver that particular course to 10,000 teachers. What are the, what is the material that would be covered, what would be the tutorial classes, assignments, et cetera, et cetera, would be done, and so on. So that when you go back, you can prepare yourselves to set up things appropriately. This model, as I have said at many places, is similar to having teaching associates in IIT system. Nowadays, these teaching associates are our PhD students and senior M.Tech students. Earlier, the teaching associates were teachers themselves. For example, when I taught CS 101 for many years, the head of the computer science department then would be one of my regular teaching assistants. IIT system does not care one-fifth for seniority or whatever. Whosoever is the instructor in charge is the instructor in charge. All other teachers are teaching associates or teaching assistants. We would like that philosophy to be inculcated in all the institutions. Another thing which we are, we would like to encourage is that when teachers go back and teach, they should try and involve third year and fourth year undergraduate students amongst the better ones of them as teaching assistants so that the course delivery is effective. I would also like to share with you things which are likely to change the very way in which the education happens today. You would have all heard of MOOCs, the massive open online courses. Some of you might have read that IIT Bombay has actually done a partnership with EDX and will be offering four of our courses under MOOC model next year. The global experience is that lakhs of students, one lakh, two lakh, three lakh students register for this course but only four or five percent complete the course. We have analyzed these reasons. The reason is that if I am a student in Coimbatore, let's say, and I am interested in a course which is offered from IIT Bombay, let's say by Professor Shaui and Professor Mandar, I would be interested in looking at that course and learning something. However, I know that at the end of the day, I had to pass my examination in my university to get marks. So towards the end of the course, I may hesitate in spending time in his subject offering and spend more time in preparing for my subject examination and that too, not necessarily through good textbooks or assignments or something but through guidebooks and the past examination papers and what is important or what is not important, et cetera. However, the fact remains that five percent of one lakh still means 5,000 students and if 5,000 students complete that MOOC course up to the last certification, it is still a very potent way. It is the vision shared by many of us that in coming years, almost all courses, and mind my words, almost all courses, including those which we teach internally within an institute, will use the MOOC philosophy. IIT Bombay has already started experimenting. I have taught a course in that fashion. Professor Kannan Mughalya and Kameshwari in my department, Kannan Chemical Department have already tried flip classroom with no lectures are delivered. Pre-recorded lectures are required to be seen by the students and each class is a discussion session, problem-solving session. Now, when that starts happening, imagine the role of a teacher. Today, I spent 85 percent of my time in A, preparing for lectures and delivering those lectures and B, setting up question papers and evaluating question papers and conducting exams. 85 percent of my time. Only 15 percent of the time I spent actually interacting with students individually in groups, asking questions, responding to questions, solving problems with them. Imagine all of this 85 percent time is now available because you don't require to prepare for lectures. I teach databases, for example. The best teacher in databases in the country and one of the best in the world is Professor Sudarshan, my colleague, whose book is followed by 95 percent of the universities in India. See, his recorded lectures are available. Should I be stupid enough to waste my time in giving I'm a good teacher all right, but can I do as good a job as he does? No. So suppose all his lectures are available. Should I not tell students, listen to those lectures? However, come to the class after listening to that lecture. We will solve only problems in that class. This is called the flip classroom one. It's been successfully tried in IIT Mumbai, successfully tried in IIT Madras, successfully tried in IIT Kharagpur. This will expand in IIT Bombay very quickly because we use our autonomy very, very effectively. Maybe 20 teachers next semester will start doing. I myself propose to teach CS 101 using complete MOOC methodology. Please remember that this will spread across the country as well because it is spreading all across the world. If it does, are our teachers ready to effectively use the additional 85% time which becomes available? Would there be ego problems? I'm a teacher in Coimbatore. My concept of teaching is giving lectures and evaluating papers. If that very concept is broken because someone tells me, look, you are useless as a lecturer. Somebody else will give the lectures. Will it not hurt my ego? Will I accept the role that Professor Sudarshan is a better teacher than me? Therefore, let his lectures be heard by my students. Yet I will make myself far more meaningful by spending time with students to solve problems to have discussions. And let me tell you, interaction with students in tutorials and problem solving and experimenting requires far greater preparation than what is required to deliver lectures. Those of you who have attended hard, I mean, phase hard questions from the students, OK? It is very common in IIT, for example, where students pose problems which I cannot solve but some other students solve. And we absolutely find no problem in accepting that fact. Are our thousands of teachers willing to take that stance? That it is OK. I may not know everything. Some of you may not know. Collaborative thinking and collaborative problem solving is emerging very fast. I would, although this particular workshop is being conducted in the conventional fashion, and teachers are being trained for the conventional teaching, because the conventional teaching in India will not die out in one year or two years. But we are attempting to get our own MOOCs courses. For example, next year, some of these courses to be adopted by some universities for their internal assessment. Yesterday, I was talking to Professor Maheshappa. Therefore, yesterday in Delhi, the honorable vice chancellor of Vishweshwara Technical University. And he says, all colleges in Karnataka will accept the grades that are given on MOOCs by IIT Bomb. What it means is that 300, 400, 500 all colleges, all students will benefit from the IIT style, of course. They will not do the corresponding course in that university at all. Whatever grade they get here will be considered as their grade in the university. And they will get a certificate from IIT Bomb. However, to get the proper certificate, they need to be supervised for their examination. And more important, they need to be helped for conducting their lab experiments, assignments, tutorials, and so on. We then discussed, and I said that we will train those teachers of your colleges in order to handle this kind of MOOC education for your students. So this is, and if it starts in one university with one course, you can see how quickly it can spread. I'm sorry I'm taking a long time to tell you these two things, but these are important. Number one, training teachers is very, very important, in whichever way we expect them to teach. And second, the change in the training and teaching that is going to happen, which we need to make all our teaching colleagues aware. It is in this context, my dear friends, that I would like you to remember that you have an extraordinary role to play. The extraordinary role is that for those 10,000 teachers, Professor Shauiq and Professor Mandar Rane might be the faculty members. But you are the teaching associates. And please remember a teaching associates role. I will take two more minutes to tell you an anecdote how important a teaching associate is. This was mid-70s. I was teaching CS4101, as it was called, early 80s, I think, 79, 80. Professor Jimmy Isaac, our head of the computer science department, was one of my teaching associates. And he was allocated the tutorial batch comprising of metallurgical engineering students. As you know, in those days like today, programming is obligatory for all first-year students in the BTEC program. As a teacher, I would roam around the tutorial sessions from here to there to there to find out whether everything was going on. And as I approached Jimmy's class, I heard some lot of arguments going on. So one student got up. And he said, sir, we can't write programs as well as electrical engineering students. After all, we are metallurgical engineering students. Electrical engineering was regarded as part of the computer science kind of activity. So we cannot write programs as well. And Jimmy fired them, saying, what nonsense are you talking about? He mentioned one fact which I use even today in every talk that I give. He told them that as children, you learn a complete foreign language which was later called your mother tongue. And you speak it well. And you learnt it without any school, college. And you learnt it in spite of becoming a metallurgical engineer now. And the joker in electrical engineering also learnt it as well. So what's your problem? He encouraged them to turn out, we have compulsory team projects in our courses. He encouraged them to think that they can produce the best projects. We evaluate all the projects, independent of which tutorial batch they came from. And in that particular year, two of the team projects submitted by the metallurgical engineering batch turned out to be the best across the entire class of 300 students. Can you appreciate the motivating role that a teaching associate can play? Of course, it is not just a motivating role because he was with them writing programs with them, correcting programs with them. And if I'm a teaching associate or a teacher and teaching programming, and I expect my individual students to write 200, 300 lines of code for every assignment and about 3,000 to 5,000 lines of code for a team assignment, then there is no way I should not have written at least 10,000 lines of code in the previous summer. There's no way in which I should not have attempted and solved at least 100 programming problems myself, even if I am a teaching associate. So please appreciate that teaching in this mode will make life more difficult. And even today, the way the labs are conducted, assignments are given, tutorials are given, they are getting extremely simplified. People, students, therefore, tend to prepare only for the examinations. I call them learning less examination passing. And to avoid that, we want to encourage all our 10,000 teacher colleagues to think differently. And to achieve that, you are going to be the main focal point of this change. Please remember, each one of you will affect the thinking and, therefore, the lifestyle of teaching of anywhere between 35 to 50 teachers. Each of those 35 or 50 teachers in turn will affect 100 students every year for next 10 years. Please appreciate the amount of power that you hold in your hands in your mind. You do a little less work, and your impact on these 35 teachers will be that much less. And the corresponding impact on these students will be that much less. You do a little delta extra work. Believe me, it will impact positively those 35, 40 teachers, which in turn will benefit our students. I can go on and go on, but because of the time limit, you need to start the session in time. You would be spending a lot of time with Professor Mandar and Professor Shaui. So I will not waste time in telling you too much about them. Suffice it to say that these two are amongst my best teaching colleagues in this particular subject. They've been teaching it for, what, 12 or four years now. They are considered the best teachers by the students. Please remember that in IIT system, students evaluate teachers at the end of every offering. And their gradation is considered the ultimate, accurate evaluation of your teaching promise. So when students think that Shaui and Mandar are extraordinary teachers, we all believe that they are. They, of course, are. Please remember that engineering mechanics is a course which unfortunately is taught differently at different places, including at those places where the syllabus is identical. It is still taught differently. Now that is true about every subject. In fact, in IIT, if the same subject with the same syllabus is taught by two different teachers in two different semesters, the offering could be significantly different. We sometimes say that it is a miracle that students still learn that subject and go on. The fact of life is students learn not necessarily because we teach them, but because some of them want to learn. We are only facilitators, helpers, to help them start thinking about it and guides and mentors to solve their problems if they face those problems. If we take our role as teachers with this humility, I think we can be far more effective. I will not stand between you and Professor Shaui. Professor Mandar, unfortunately, could not come here because he has another lecture there. As you know, I think his exam is going on. And for us, a lecture or an exam is the primary duty like all of you. In fact, we are very proud of the fact that if the semester starts, for example, on 2 January, and the first lecture is at 8.30, then the first lecture starts at 8.30 sharp in all departments by all teachers and all students attending. We are very, very proud of this fact that the lectures are attended to lectures are not missed. Even if I have to miss a lecture, I will make a compensatory lecture on Saturday or Sunday. I'm aghast to find out from many college students that in their colleges, all lectures are not even held sometimes. That is another thing that you will have to convince your colleagues, those 10,000 colleagues, that, Baba, at least go to the classroom regularly. If you reach your class for a 8.30 session at 8.35, you lose the moral authority to tell students to come in time.