 Welcome to this new series of teacher training workshops under T10KT, which we are terming as workshops on how to mentor online students. I am Deepak Phatak from IIT Bombay. My colleague I am Uday Gaitande also from IIT Bombay. We have a third colleague, Professor Vikram Gadre. Three of us would be leading faculty teams from IIT Bombay for each of the three workshops on computer programming, on thermodynamics and on signals and systems. Let me first state the objective of these different types of workshops that we are launching. As you are well aware, learners all across the world are increasingly preferring to go online for many of their educational needs. IIT Bombay just launched the online courses for Indian students. We had earlier offered these courses to the global learners on the EDX platform. IIT Bombay X is our own platform housed in IIT Bombay on which we will be offering these three courses online for the Indian students. We are simultaneously running the three workshops for teachers concurrently. The objective of this workshop is to familiarize ourselves with the use of online methods including the introduction to the platform itself that we will use. We will also learn in these workshops how to manage the discussion forums in which the learning students will be asking questions. We will also revise colleague teachers on how to prepare additional explanatory videos and text material including explanation of sample problems so that they will learn to post these things online. Finally, we would expect our participant teachers to help the Indian cause by translating allocated videos in any one of the Indian languages as far as the audio transcripts go. To begin with, I would like to share with you an important aspect of these workshops which requires you to engage some of the students from your own college face to face in weekly discussions sessions. Of course, we assume that there would be students from your college who would be registered for online courses. You might have heard of the blended MOOCs model which may eventually be used in India where students learn from the online portion as well as in the classroom from the local teachers and this blend is expected to provide a greater effectiveness in the education. In short, these workshops will have two components, an online component where all of you will practice things which I just mentioned and a face to face component which will consist of two parts. The first, as I just mentioned, you will be expected to mentor in a face to face interaction. The students from your own college who are simultaneously doing the MOOCs course for students, you are expected to spend about two hours per week on this activity. Additionally, every fortnight, we will be conducting online live interactive sessions using AVU in which you are expected to participate, raise doubts and clarify points of concern that you have. Since this workshop is about effective teaching and educating students, we presume that the content of each of the basic subjects are already well known to you. In fact, the participants will benefit most are those who have already completed workshops on these three subjects that IIT Bombay recently conducted. However, we believe that all teachers who teach these subjects might benefit by learning the pedagogy of handling online students. Let me now take you to the MOOCs platform that we shall be using. This is the IIT Bombay X website. You have been given IIT Bombay X website address in the handout. When you go to this side, this is the screen that you will see. If you scroll down, you will see all the courses that are listed. Please note that two similar looking courses are actually different. So, this one is for example, effective mentoring of online students and signals and system. A course which starts with W is the one which you will have to enroll for. Let us look at some of the aspects of this website. I will login here using my login. Those of you who are the first time users will have to register themselves on this site so that you can then login. So, please note that before registering, if you have not enrolled, you will have to sign up for IIT Bombay X today. That is what you will be required to do. When I login here, I can find courses. Since I am a teacher, I can actually go to the course that I am offering. When you register and enroll for courses, you will also see such courses on your site. Let us say we go to this CS 101 X introduction to computer programming. This is how you will see various components of the site. For example, the course information will tell you, welcome to this students and you will have a list of material about this course content of the course etcetera. Please note that I am showing you the site that will be seen by the students. I mentioned discussion forums. This is the way the discussion is handled. So, for example, currently there is nothing here, but later on the points raised by students will be posted here. The answers will also get posted here. This in fact will be the main platform for interaction between students and teachers. You can find out the course sphere by clicking on the course sphere tab. Notice that what we have done is we have created the course material for different weeks. People will be able to see only one week at a time. You are able to see this because as a teacher, I can see the lectures for various weeks. Notice that we have attempted to provide English as well as Hindi as far as our site goes and the courses go. One of the activities as I had mentioned will be for you to actually help us translate these videos and audio scripts into a Indian language of your own choice. This site will give you weekly contents which are sequentially listed here. For example, this is session one. So, this is the video. This talks about the course structure. You can get the video slides for session one by pressing this tab. In each session, you will find a similar sequence. Sometimes there will be more than one or two things here. There would be quizzes that could be posted on the site itself which people will answer. I suggest that when you register an enrol for a workshop course, please try to find out more about it by just discovering things. Although the student courses are not meant for participating teachers, I would strongly recommend that our teacher participants of this workshop should register for the corresponding students courses as audit people. Please do not register as honor certificate member of those courses because those are meant only for students. But if you register as audit students, then you will be able to monitor the discussion forum and the weekly progress that is made in that course so that in the teachers workshop course, you will be able to keep up to date of whatever is happening there. As I mentioned, the discussion forum is one of the most critical components of online education. I would request my colleague Professor Gayathunde to share some of his experiences when he offered the thermodynamics course for global learners with over 20,000 students registering for that course. You can imagine the kind of posting that would take place and the kind of care that we need to take in responding to such posting. Over to you there. Thank you, Professor Fatak. I had offered my course ME209X thermodynamics on the EDX platform earlier and I find that one of the most important aspects for a teacher managing such a course is managing the discussion in the discussion forum. Since the students for a MOOC are away from you, the contact between them and you is only through the comments and the questions which they put up in the discussion forum. And since the goodness of a teacher to a large extent depends on the interaction between him and the students, apart from the formal lecturing which is already available here as videos and documents. What the teacher says and in what form and in what way he responds to the comments and questions in the discussion forum turns out to be very important. Unlike a personal interaction with a teacher which takes place at more or less predefined times during the college or the institute working hours, the discussion forum is open 24 hours. On IIT Bombay X, since the students are expected to be all Indians, it is hoped that the discussion forum will be during essentially daylight hours in India. But on the EDX ME209X, students were there from all over the world and hence questions were put up in the discussion forum at any time of the day and night from the Indian point of view. So, what we had to do was to keep away a certain amount of time almost on a daily basis to look at the discussion forum, decide which questions need immediate attention and respond to them. And now since the students are not there in front of you and since the students are large in number and have come from a diverse background, it is necessary for us to appreciate the diversity of their background and sometimes even their ability to ask a question or make a comment properly. So, immediate response is something we should keep away from. We should look at the discussion forum, look at a few questions on similar topics. Fortunately the discussion forum is in the form of a structure where somebody asks a question then a supplementary can be asked, a new thread need not be opened. But this discipline is not always followed. So, when I decide to work on a discussion forum, the first one is browse through all of that, collect together similar questions and similar comments and then select one of them appropriately and provide a reasonably complete and comprehensive rejoinder or answer or comment on comment on that. Back to you, Professor Futter. Thank you, Professor Gayathandir. So, you see the problem becomes more complex when the number of students increase beyond our normal expectation. We did expect a few thousand students to enroll, but we are quite surprised to find twenty thousand and sixty thousand students in two of our courses. It is quite likely that in India, because our student population is so large, we might even land up with one lakh students. Very obviously, if even ten percent of them post queries on the forum, you will have ten thousand queries. Needless to add, if these questions and postings appear in a half a thousand or chronological order, it would be practically impossible for any one of the teachers to look at them and answer them meaningfully. That is why the discussion fora have tags, so that students or participating students are requested to raise a question within a particular tag, so that the tag could be related to topic, the tag could be related to general discussion, the tag could be related to a theme. This permits the entire effort of forum discussion to be well organized, so that teachers can respond to it. Please also note that since most of you, if not all of you, will have some students physically from your own college who are also registered on the MOOCs, you would have an advantage because those five or ten or twenty or thirty students who are simultaneously doing the course on MOOC will also be coming face to face with you as part of this workshop. That is where you can check what kind of questions are these students raising, are they getting responses promptly from their teachers, which is the IIT Bombay team or not. Explain some harder concepts to them in your own words. In short, I believe that this unique possibility of blending the online material for your students plus your own personal intervention will create a much greater effectiveness in their learning as also will permit all of us teachers to become well versed with using both the technology based solutions such as online platforms, further improving our interaction in a classroom in the context of these online things and together we should be able to enhance the quality of general engineering education at least in the subjects in which we choose to discuss such issues threadbare over the period of time. For the time being, we will close this session. I am going to request Professor Gadre to independently record a session which he would be adding to the workshop for teachers on signals and systems. Luckily, that workshop is going to start only from 12th of March, but both our workshops are slated to start on 5th of February exactly on the same day on which the corresponding students courses will also begin. I will once again welcome you to this exciting opportunity to try and understand how technology can be best used to enhance the effectiveness of our education. Thank you and goodbye.