 Good morning everybody and welcome to another important workshop in the series of workshops as our efforts for empowering teachers of professional institutions all across the country. I am Deepak Phattak. I run this project for trainer thousand teacher under the national mission for education using ICT. Today's proceedings are we will have a brief inaugural session for half an hour for this session we have with us Professor Tembe who heads our center for distance engineering education program and Professor Kannan Mawgalyar who coordinates all the NME ICT projects NME ICT projects in IIT. We also of course have Professor Sanamurti who is the coordinator for this workshop and with whom at least the workshop coordinators have interacted in past. And we also have Professor Uday Gaya Tunde he and Professor Kannan will actually be taking a session in the morning half to late the rest of the workshop schedule will unfold in fact Professor Sanamurti in her session will be giving some details of things to follow. I believe that the schedule has been circulated to all coordinators and we hope that the coordinators have got either printed copies or have read out the schedule to participants. So without further ado let me welcome the guests of honor for this brief function Professor Tembe and Professor Kannan Mawgalyar Professor Tembe please thank you very much thank you very much Kannan. Let me also use this opportunity to welcome with a bouquet of flowers our esteemed guest faculty Professor Uday Gaya Tunde many of you would have seen him in several of these I do this of course on behalf of Professor Sanamurti who is the workshop coordinator where is he? So I am glad to offer this bouquet of flowers to another colleague of ours who is going to teach in this workshop Professor Sunoj but I have to do it in absentia because he is expected to come for a session sometime later. So with this what we thought in this short inaugural function we would like to tell all the colleague teachers who have assembled for this workshop including the PHD and ME students whom as a special case we have permitted to attend this workshop indeed I am glad to tell everyone that there were more than 3500 participants who had enrolled but because of the lack of facilities and infrastructure at the remote centers we were constrained to confirm the registration for about 2000 participants what is the latest number is it 2000 or 2000 teachers and of course large number of schools. Somebody in fact jokingly mentioned that we should put it in the Guinness book of world records but we will do that when we reach 10000 teachers in a workshop sometime during this year. However very glad to observe that in terms of the attendance and participation this is probably the largest attended workshop in our series. With this I will now request Professor Tembe to give his brief inaugural address. Professor Tembe. Thank you Professor Pater. Good morning and a very warm welcome to all of you. It is my pleasure to be with you today on this occasion on this inaugural session on effective conference paper writing. It is indeed reassuring that 2000 teachers and several more participants have joined in this workshop. This only reemphasizes the great importance of this subject. We all like to hear good conference paper. We all like to write good conference paper but there are hardly any training programs to empower us with this. In fact I have been writing conference papers for almost 30 years. Still I feel I am not perfect in this. So this is a very this subject where it grows with you and the older you are the better you become. My special compliments to the organizers in IIT Bombay for having thought of organizing this workshop. IIT Bombay has been involved in distance education program for almost 20 years now. It began with 4 or 5 teachers with a educational technology self and now it has grown into a full-fledged center for distance education engineering programs. And nearly 70 centers participate in our programs and we are able to convey our courses live as well as asynchronously. And you may all have heard about this national program for technology enhanced learning where with the association of several IIT's and other institutions we have created a repository of 1000 courses video as well as web so that this can reach out to all the needy students. On IIT Bombay we have our own recorded courses almost 200 in number and it is it will be made available to all users at a very nominal cost. I think human needs are really increasing now the demand for food, the demand for land, the demand for water and I think the next demand is education. Just we can construct 100 or 150 storied buildings. We have to reach out to a large number of people simultaneously so distance mode offers a wonderful opportunity to connect with all the people. And for doing this we have got extremely generous support from MHRD, NME ICT, individual donors and now the national knowledge network has given us the bandwidth so that we can reach to different parts of the country. We have also started a new interdisciplinary program in educational technology this is about 2 years old about 25 faculty members from IIT Bombay are participating in this and we have also people in other institutions which are co-guides for some of these programs. About 13 students have already joined in this program and with the help of all these faculty and students we hope to take educational technology to a much higher level so that we can reach out to different people effectively and in a way they can really communicate with the teachers as well as their peer groups. My colleagues here, Prof. Fatak, Prof. Maudgalya, Prof. Gaithande and Prof. Sahana Murthy have played a very crucial role in setting up these centers and taking distance education as well as educational technology to new levels. It is indeed wonderful that they have chosen this timely topic. We produce lakhs and lakhs of students but we have hardly any emphasis on effective writing skills. Our competitive exams, there is no section for communication skills so they can get their masters, bachelors, all degrees and we have seen PhD students even at the end of their program with some 30 presentations are still not able to communicate effectively because this communication skills you cannot learn in one or two days. So I hope that this will form an initial nucleus for you to get started and with time not only you can improve and perfect these skills but also impart these skills to your students. And lot of emphasis today is on mobile uses and laptops and I think these are in a way an impediment to communication skills. So I hope that you will have a very good workshop these next two days and use this opportunity and another advantage this will provide you is that you are in contact with 2000 or 3000 students. So you can form very good associations in this workshop so that when you write a next paper you can flash it up to four or five people so that they can communicate to you how you have done and you can communicate to them how you have improved so that this will all be an extremely enriching experience for you. I thank the organizers again for giving me this opportunity to talk to you and my best wishes to you for an enriching workshop. Thank you. Thank you very much Professor Timbey for those encouraging words as also words of wisdom I would like all participants to remember one very critical thing that he mentioned ability to write and ability to communicate cannot be developed in one or two days. It is a constant continuous effort for a very long term so indeed I would like to endorse what he said that this two day workshop should only be treated as a beginning foundation on which all of you would have to construct fairly large and stable buildings over coming years. I will now request Professor Kannan Mawgalyar as I said he is the coordinator of all MSRD projects undertaken at IIT Bombay and there are several I would like to request him to share his thoughts. Good morning to everyone. Thank you Professor Fartek. I will briefly summarize the enemy ICTs activities. The main objective of this mission is to raise the levels of education in the country. Enemy ICT stands for national mission on education through ICT. So it is based on the belief that technology can be used to raise the levels that we have a lot of problem, quality has to be enhanced and there is no better tool than technology. So this enemy ICT is based on that assumption. There are three components in this mission. One is to provide bandwidth at a very low cost. As a matter of fact every university is given one GPP as connectivity to this mission at almost one percent of the cost. The second one is the connecting device. We know about Akash. It was launched in October. We expect the second edition of this Akash to roll out soon. The expectations and the expectations of use and the excitement that one can actually get a computer of that type full blown computer for about 2200 rupees without any subsidy has made the demands much bigger than what we expected. So as a result there is a big team that has been formed to look at the second edition of Akash and we believe that it is going to be an exciting opportunity for everybody. Content generation is the third one, bandwidth, connection device. The third one is the content generation. Now content generation is the heading under which a lot of funding has happened for institutions and individuals. AT Bombay is a recipient of some of these funds and we are actually grateful to MHRD for putting its trust on IIT Bombay to do this. One of the requirements of the content generation in this program is to release all of these as open source and also to use open source software as a way to make the content generation in all the projects. NPTEL is the flagship of this mission that Professor Tambay already mentioned. I will briefly mention some of the other programs that have been funded through this mission. The first program, first project is called the talk to a teacher project. It has various components. The most important component is the thousand teacher training program. I am happy to know that this title itself will become incorrect because in this course itself we have 2000 plus participants and there is an aim to go towards 10,000 to train 10,000 people during the summer and MHRD is now actually talking about training lakhs of people through this mechanism. So I am glad to say that this thousand teacher training program is doing extremely well. In fact, I would like to congratulate Professor Phatak and his team members and of course the faculty members of IIT who participated, who delivered lectures and who made this success. One of the things that we also hope to do in the future when we go to 10,000 or lakhs of people empowerment, teacher empowerment is that we will also get experts not only from IIT Bombay, IIT system, NITs but also go to NITs and also go to all the universities, get the experts and ask them to deliver. As a matter of fact, we need to have several of these programs running in parallel and it is going to be an exciting opportunity, exciting experiment and the bandwidth that has been made possible through this mission is going to be handy. The software AVU through which you are receiving this transmission which is also supported by this mission is also going to be a very important tool for enabling this activity. Professor Tembe mentioned live course creation, recording of courses at IIT Bombay and then offering them and then so those will be available, please some of those will be available for free download and of course download cost could be high. So, you may need to take it through some media. So, there could be some cost in that, spark and tutorials is one of the important components of this. I plan to spend about 5 minutes during the next session, in particular I would talk about latex spark and tutorials because latex seems to be very important software for writing papers. The search of scope is another component of talk to a teacher project where the research scholars who are close to graduation come and give 45 minute talk at a level that many people can understand. Ask a question is an important component, important supplement that is required for any asynchronous mode of education that it is possible for a live session where students can ask questions and experts assemble in one place and answer them. As of now the electrical engineering department at IIT Bombay has been doing it, they are close to completing about 50 such sessions, weekly sessions and we plan to extend this, for this purpose also we would need experts from all over the country to come forward. I will briefly mention the other projects happening at IIT Bombay through this mission, open source software. In fact, it is called POSSI, free and open source software in science and engineering education and it focuses on two software packages, Sylab and Python, exceedingly useful for all colleges and these are excellent, in fact state of the art and most reliable tools for their comparable commercial software. And as a matter of fact, Sylab is used by CNES which is the equivalent of our ISRO to launch Ariane rockets. You all know that Ariane rockets launched several of our satellites in orbit and they use Sylab for trajectory calculation, orbital calculation and so on and so forth. It is an amazing software, so is Python. Python in addition to being used for scientific and technical calculations, numerical calculations can also be used at almost as an equivalent to C including for example, writing device drivers and communicating with devices and all kinds of nice things. We have a project that looks at an open source equivalent to the popular lab view software for data acquisition and control and NG SPICE and T-CAD combination for simulating ICs, printed circuit boards and so on and so forth. Robotics is another important project carried out by my colleague, Mr. Kavya Arya from computer science department and the objective is to create low cost robotic devices. Virtual labs is a very important addition in this mission. At the end of first phase of NPTEL, the government realize that creation of courses through all experts in the country is a doable mechanism because in the first phase of NPTEL only five undergraduate programs are covered, but after the success the government figured out that it is possible to extend this to all other subjects also post graduate courses, elective courses and the other undergraduate programs are not covered in the first phase, but it was also felt that courses alone would be insufficient unless they were accompanied by some kind of laboratories and this virtual labs led by IIT Delhi. In fact, Ranjan Bose is the main coordinator of this program. It is doing an amazing thing. As a matter of fact, on 23rd, our honorable H. R. M. Kavya Arya Mr. Kapil Sibal is going to launch that program on 23rd from 3 to 4 p.m. We have Oscar which is led by Professor Sridharayar and Professor Sranamuti and this project looks at development of animation as an effective way of teaching technical matter. For example, they are working with many of the courses I mentioned earlier, course instructors to create suitable animations. They are using this open source software package called Blender. It is an amazing software and once again it is in line with the objective of this mission. There is another very important project that is done through this mission. This is done by Ravipuva Arya of Industrial Design Center. This is on creating design courses. In fact, the number of colleges that offer such design programs in India is very small. In fact, it is probably about 10 percent or less than that of the number of programs that China has. For example, as a result to address that this program has been started, the website for this is D-Source source dot in S-O-U-R-C-E and you just put the letter D before that. D-Source dot in. It has amazing courses that IDC is creating. Of course, they are partnering with IIT Goa T and National Institute of Design NID Amitabha. I gave in a nutshell the kind of programs that are being supported by this. I think maybe I have already exceeded my time. I will not take any more time. The website for the mission projects is Sakshat S-A-K-S-H-A-T Sakshat dot A-C dot in. All details pertaining to this mission are available at this website. With this, I want to thank the organizers for giving me this opportunity. I want to wish you the best of luck. Of course, I will come back in about one hour time. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Kannan. Before winding up this brief session, I would like to request the video team to focus on other colleagues who have helped in the conduct of these workshops. So we have, for example, Dr. Mukta Atre and I have Mahendra Parmar and Jaya. These are the people with whom many of the coordinators would have interacted both for administrative and financial things. And on this side, I have the video team which sort of takes care of all the audio-visual two-way communication between us and the remote centers. Needless to add, I must also thank the people at the coordinating centers, but for their help both the center coordinators as well as the workshop coordinators and the ABLE team which they have put together to help us conduct these workshops. It would not have been possible to be effective. We also have a number of people attending this workshop sort of live from IIT Bombay itself. Many of them are Ph.D. students as Professor Tembe said, Ph.D. students from our educational technology program. And of course, some PIP scholars who are teachers like you who are participating, but who fortunately have come to IIT Bombay itself to physically spend maybe three years to work towards that. So with these observations I will thank everyone for participating in this brief session. We will have exact three minute or four minute body break. We start the session sharp at 10. Thank you so much. I will request all the coordinators to sort of finalize any minor adjustments they have to get enrollments etcetera done. With this we will now have the three minute break and we will reassemble and restart exactly at the end of three minutes. Thank you so much. Over and out.