 We have with us a few IIT Madras faculty and one faculty from CMI who have given online courses. They have graciously agreed, shared their feedback and experiences. So now I would like to invite Professor Nikit. Please come over and share and experiences. Professor Nikit is offering a course in MATLAB programming in Jan 2016. Hello everyone. It's nice to see you all over here. This January to March I'm offering a course on MATLAB programming. So how this course actually started was previously I last year I had offered a course on numerical methods, computational techniques for chemical engineering. And I got emails from four or five students asking me whether or not because MATLAB is one of the important, you know, softwares that students felt. So I got a few emails from students asking me whether MATLAB would be taught in an online course and we didn't have that course. And interestingly there were a couple of students, one from IIT Gandhi Nagar and one from I think SRM college who actually found from my website my office phone number and actually called me in my office saying that would it be possible to offer a course like this. And that's where I got started talking to Professor Kratap and Bharati madam and that's where this course came from. Thank you very much. Professor Deepak Himani. Professor had a course in artificial intelligence lessons. Good morning to all and welcome to IIT Madras. So my name is Deepak Himani and I work in the area of artificial intelligence. And I offered this course last semester which was called search methods in problem solving. And the next semester I'm offering a course on knowledge representation and reasoning. These two courses in some sense form the very basis of foundation of what we call as classical AI which of course is a little bit different from what is more fashionable nowadays which is machine learning. And I think one of my colleagues is also offering a course on machine learning. But this classical AI is basically the AI that you hear talked about when in TV programs when they say AI will take over humanity and things like that. How does a machine represent the world around it and reason with it and solve problems in the world. So both these courses are courses which I actually teach here at IIT Madras and they are identical. In fact the lectures that we have recorded were recorded while I was teaching the course. So the same course that was taught to IIT Madras students is also being presented in NPTEL. So that actually brings me to this problem which my colleagues Andrew and master or director have already mentioned. Which is that there is a problem of impedance mismatch essentially which I also noticed that I tend to teach the course as if I'm teaching an audience which is interacting with me and which comes and asks me questions at times but that as we discovered in the last semester does not happen. And as Andrew said a large number of people actually drop out of this interview. And at some point I noticed that the people who were left who were asking questions were mostly from the industries. People who were working somewhere and who wanted some clarifications and most of the time they wanted some extra time for assignments. They said no no we are working in the industry please give us more time in assignments. And very few from the student side. And this is where I hope as my colleagues have also said that the chapters will help us reduce this mismatch between how we offer a course and how the students are able to benefit from it. Because from a teacher's point of view it's always gratifying to teach a few people something which is useful to them. But it would be much nicer if you could teach a larger number of people and which is what this move is all about. So I think going forward we should try to see how we do this and I hope the local chapters will be instrumental in encouraging their students to ask a question. Because students always feel that oh it's a very silly question somebody will laugh at me or something like that. And they don't ask the question and then they get left behind and then they drop out essentially. So I feel that the local chapters can help tremendously in that. From our side I can try to see that my exams are more tuned towards the online course and less towards the course that I offer here. Because the exam in fact that I gave last time was the same as the end semester exam I gave to IIT students. And I could see that there was a performance difference here. So we need to reduce the simpleness in this match and that's my main feedback having offered this course. And I hope we can both work together to do this completely. And I hope you will have students doing my next course which is the second part of Artificial Intelligence which focuses on representation and reasoning. How does an agent represent the world around it and reasons with it. Thank you. Thank you sir. We have with us Professor Martin Mugun from CMI. I'd like to invite Professor to come and share your experience sir. Sir has done conducted courses in design and analysis for algorithms and Haskell's programming. Thank you sir. So it's a pleasure to be here. I'm not from IIT here. So actually it's been about a year since I think Andrew approached me to get involved with NPTEL. So I won't talk too much about the algorithms course itself. I think a lot of things have been said already about the feedback and all that. But I just want to point out that I am involved in this from many sides. So I've first of all unlike Deepak I don't teach algorithms in CMI. They would not let me teach algorithms in CMI because there are many more qualified people to teach algorithms. And I think that helps because I'm not an algorithms person. If I teach algorithms I think I can make concessions for the fact that people are not experts in the area. So that is a I think it's a huge thing. But for the last 15 years or actually maybe 14 years I've been involved at the other end of the spectrum. I've been teaching high school kids algorithms for the Informatics Olivia. And then I got involved a couple of years ago when Microsoft Research started a program to try and offer online courses matched more to individual university syllabi. So they were trying for VTU in Karnataka. And then this came up where I got the flexibility of both worlds which is I could offer an online course but teach what I wanted to teach and not what some other university had prescribed. And I found that very liberating. And I think my other hat which is that I am on the ACM India Education Council. So speaking from a purely computer science perspective I think there is a lot of concern and a lot of interest across industry and academia in trying to make teaching of computer science in India more effective at all levels. So I have been talking to various people from industry about this issue about you know how to get industry to make some kind of formal record of online courses in their selection process. At the same time we are also talking to various people from different universities about how to allow some flexibility in taking these courses for credit. So I think we need to work and it helps that I can talk to NPTEL and you know maybe work together to offer different modes of offering these courses to try and make all these things happen. So I think that this is a very exciting medium and I think as Bhaskar and others pointed out one of the big differences is that we are largely addressing students as opposed to self motivated learners. I think self motivated learners are ideal targets for this kind of thing because they are doing it since they want to do it so you don't have to really spend too much time. This is when I deal with Olympiad kids this is the model you know I don't have to tell them they are the ones who are pushing me to give them data. But if you are asking you know students who are already involved in regular program to take additional work then you have to give them a carrot at the end of it. So Microsoft research model was that you align it to the syllabus so it can help with the syllabus and the exam pattern may not be the best way to deliver knowledge. So hopefully the other carrot could be if it is actually a valuable certificate has an independent value then people might be motivated to study this. One part of this thing is that of course I think that it is very good to have basic courses like in computer science like you know programming data structures algorithms because at school level we have very poor penetration. I think most people in schools don't even understand what computer science is about and for me for example I can make this available to them saying that you know for example these Olympiad students if you want to learn programming algorithms these are available for you without any constraints. You don't have to pay anything it's up to you how much time you take so that is one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is that unfortunately the way our IT industry is set up there is no incentive for anybody to go in for graduate studies. So there is a huge vacuum of people who don't know advanced topics because they simply have not been exposed to it and also in colleges there is a I mean university there is a shortage of people who are trained to deliver this. I am also working with some colleagues this time we had a course on model checking by one of my colleagues verification so I think we can also so I think there is a market for both ends of course you know this very basic courses which are wide spectrum which can be used to lift critical thinking and problem solving skills in a large body of people and the scope for focus courses which could be I think I also get a lot of feedback as Deepak said from people outside academia. So my direct feedback through NPTEL has been very you know I would say not very informative partly because the format is not very informative but I have got I mean okay so you saw the number like thousands of people know that I have got maybe five emails but these five emails have been so reassuring and so positive and not one of them has been from a student. But it's me I mean if you get emails of that nature as the ones I have got it makes you feel that you're doing something worthwhile and I think in the long run of course it benefits a lot of people but I think we need to work out on mechanisms to make this things more effective but I think that it's a start and I think NPTEL has made a huge I mean considering that this is less than a year and a half old I think in terms of offering courses. The number of courses and the scope which has increased I think is great and I think that going forward if we have an embarrassment of riches it's only a problem that we would like to have I think and I really hope to and also from the CMI side we are trying to work more in expanding this into say areas more into mathematics and stuff so that we go a little bit outside the main engineering stream. So hopefully you know this whole thing is going to go forward so I would like to actually congratulate all of you guys at NPTEL for doing a great job. Thank you sir. Sir had run couple of courses last year and this Jan he's running again language and mind course. My name is Rajesh Kumar I teach linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Madras. In particular I teach courses in natural language syntax which is different branch of linguistics. I'll tell you my personal experience with NPTEL and how I got associated with this in short for the first time when I went to NPTEL office which is located on the third floor of ICSR building was when a senior colleague of mine invited me to record few videos on the topics of my specialization in a course on introduction to modern linguistics that he was already teaching. When I and teaching those topics in any course were not difficult things to do. When I went to the NPTEL studio and to cut the whole story short when I watched those videos later I couldn't watch 50 minutes video for five minutes or more than that. It was horrible. I couldn't watch for more than five minutes. And then it starts from there in the next semester I requested Andrew Pratap and others Professor Mangal Sundar to allow me to record a full length course that I was teaching 50 minutes every day and I ended up doing for the whole semester with the students. That was little bit little bit improved and since then I'm trying to improve upon these things. We started with a for more we started with a course on language and mind and then for 20 hours last semester I thought I designed a course on language and society which we introduced only for 10 hours. And with the help of feedback and difficulties and my own understanding of these things we are trying to improve language and mind once again and we are reintroducing this whole course once again. So I'm not sure how many courses are being repeated but I think mine is also one of them which is being read them. First time to tell you a little bit about language and mind also you can look at the contents people who take the courses they look at the contents. But when NPTEL started this program I thought the maximum number of people who will be enrolled in these courses will be 20. When I got the number there were 4000 it was though I didn't meet with them in person but that was also scary to be interacting with many people. More than 500 people were actively watching videos and not 500 people were asking questions on forum but definitely huge number of people were asking questions on forums. And yes sir it was true that lot of people were calling in offices and sending IITM emails and other things as well. It sounds 20 hours it says 20 hours for us it is not 20 hours beginning from recording to the end of the delivery it's more than 250 hours I guess. But I don't know I have not calculated those things. In any case to conclude I would like to say one more part of my experience. So since I started recording courses few videos for the first course that I did. And until now when I record courses for videos for other courses and keep revising and redoing things I came to know and meet with the staff at NPTEL office. I must tell you it's my personal experience that they help you do anything that is possible and everything they spend their hours they stretch their limits. And Saturdays Sundays everything that is possible that has been done by the staff members camera people editing people and everybody included. It's been wonderful experience and I must tell you I have not had that experience anywhere in the world in India so far. It's been an amazing experience. I'm sure your experience your interaction with these people must not have been very different. They do their best best is small thing to say they do everything that is possible to do. So I'm looking forward to another another semester. Language mind language in mind is going to be dealing with how biologically embedded capacity of human mind helps encode and helps decipher the common properties of language underlying properties of language and how it works. It's all about natural languages. Thank you. Thank you sir. We have Professor Arun Kangaralla from chemical engineering department. Professor has run a 20 hour course in Jan 2015. He's going to be offering a 40 hour course in July 2016. Good morning. Good morning. Good afternoon. It's always great to be at any event associated with education and teaching. So welcome to IIT Madras. I just want to say of course about three things. One is the great initiative of NPTEL and MOOC itself. And second thing is of course briefly about the courses that I have taught and a plan to offer. And thirdly about the NPTEL staff. I think really Rajesh has expressed everything that I wanted to say. So I'm there. I'm going to just do a copy paste. But let me say a few words. I'm sure Pratap and Andrew have said a lot of things about NPTEL. And your own experience must have made you realize how great an initiative NPTEL and now the MOOC is. When NPTEL started off, I was a bit skeptical to be honest whether this would be popular or not. And I had several debates with Professor Mangal Sundar who was originally riding the chariot. And one of the concerns that I had was whether this material is going to be misused by several colleges and so on. I was told that rather than the misuse, the advantages are many. Because one of course we are now trying to reach the community beyond the compounds of the respective institutes be it IIT Madras or IAC and so on. It's really a very nice thing to know that we are able to reach the community. Of course there have been other forums like AACP sponsored courses and so on. But those have limited outreach I would say. I think NPTEL has had a tremendous impact. I don't think I need to add or say anything the statistics themselves say for the great success of NPTEL. I mean as Rajesh said there were certain limitations although many have said that they benefited through NPTEL web and video courses. I think MOOC is a great platform now and I hope that the student community at large takes advantage of this. I think the 20 minute module, 20 to 25 minute module really helps because today as all of us know the attention span of students is quite short even for us. We won't be able to concentrate for more than 20 to 25 minutes. So I think it's a great platform and I had a great experience teaching a MOOC course. The first thing that I had to learn is to watch the camera. Now we academicians have you can call it a disease or a habit and so on. We cannot stand at one place and talk. We will have to keep moving and so on and keep looking at all directions. So this was a big challenge for me but somehow I could manage myself to master that in a couple of lectures. But once that was done I think it was easy and as Rajesh said it's not just 20 or 40 hours. That's just a number that you see on the paper. Just add a multiplication, include a multiplication factor by about 6 or something like that with all the re-recordings. And I remember during the time when I was recording ICSR had other challenges for us. So I think there was a lot of renovation going on. So we had our own challenges to pause in between. You won't know that in the video recordings and all of that has been edited. But yes there were a lot of special effects that we had to face but it was all a part and parcel of the game and we really enjoyed it. I just want to talk about particularly the experience that I had with the NPTEL course that I taught last time. It was on time frequency analysis. It's a fairly advanced course for many. It's an advanced course in signal processing. And a lot of students of course initially enrolled but I was already cautioned that the number whatever N will actually eventually drop to N by 20 or something like that or even probably much less than that. And depending on what reputation you have outside the institute as a tough exam papersetter, the number, the factor could be much lesser than that. So I think if I recall the stats about 3000 people had registered from all over the globe. It's not just India. So that was very interesting. And there were a few requests if I remember from people across the globe, couple of them to conduct exams outside online and so on and do something about it. And I think now we are probably made some arrangements or we are still looking into it. But of course I mean we could go by trust and conduct an exam and so on. But that shows the popularity of MOOC. So it was about 3000 but by the time the number of people who wrote exam at least in my course, it's not a reflection of every course. It's about 35 or 40. So you can see how things drastically dropped on. But still that's a great number because I don't want to go by the number who take the exam. I really go by the number who have registered because probably they look at these videos in leisure and so on. So that means we have really reached out to this coming. Now the two courses that I'm going to offer, one is a short 10 hour course on hypothesis testing. I just want to give a very brief background a minute. There was recently an academic summit at a Bangalore organized by the MathWorks who are the makers of MATLAB. And there was a panel discussion and I was fortunate to be one of the panel members there. And the topic of discussion was how do we prepare the engineer of tomorrow. I said you should also be concerned about the engineer of today. And also the past but we can't do much about the past. But how do we shape the engineer of tomorrow? So all of us concurred that engineering is now interdisciplinary. There is no debate, there is no doubt about that. And the common theme and the common point that all of us stressed on is an engineer is supposed to be very good at approximating things to be able to deal with uncertainties. We are not really giving exact answers all the time. Which means we should have a good base in inferencing, statistical inferencing estimation and so on. And that's something that is completely missed out in all the curricula across the globe. It's not just about our country. Across the globe you don't see this estimation or any component pertaining to statistical analysis in the context of engineering. There are pure studies courses that we all take and conveniently forget the hour after the exam is done. But that's not how it should be. We should learn how to apply statistical inferencing because we all know today big data is a craze. But it's not a craze. We are going to have, we have to live with the data for several decades to come. So as engineers we should learn how to make optimal decisions in the wake of uncertainties, how to optimally handle uncertainties. And that's why I said the first thing that we need to do is to learn how to test hypothesis because that is how systematically we go through in statistical inference. It's a short introduction to hypothesis testing. It's going to be a bit different from the way statisticians teach. And I hope that many of you will register and take advantage of the course. The 40 hour course that I'm going to teach on again is in the same lines on time series analysis which is a very popular course among our students for various reasons. Typically this course is offered during the placement season which I also call as a displacement season because they are displaced from everything else. They are only worried about placement during that time. So this time series analysis is all about analysis of statistical data and it's a huge hit among the students because they get jobs in financial sectors very easily. But you know the practicality is apart. Very importantly this course is really at the base of all statistical data analysis particularly when you are dealing with time series data, not just steady state data. So it's a full 40 hour course where we'll introduce what is a random variable and so on. Again from an engineering viewpoint not necessarily from purely statisticians viewpoint. And all of you hopefully will enjoy the course because it's for the first time of course you will get exposed to a lot of these concepts and so on. But please keep in mind that this is a very fundamental course if you want to really proceed or have a career in data analysis or even understand how data is analyzed systematically. I think from my past experience again coming back to the final point that I want to talk about which is the NPTEL staff. As I said Rajesh has really expressed all the appreciation that I wanted to and I fully endorse and support what Rajesh has just said. It's amazing staff they'll just I don't know what their limits are honestly speaking. So I don't want to say they stretch the limits. Whatever they do is the limit and then the limit changes the following day. So everyone technical administrative staff anything you want at any time of the day they are willing to help working on weekends, video recording, editing and so on. I can tell you it's so boring I don't watch my own videos. So for them they watch the videos and edit and so on. I think a really big round of applause for the NPTEL staff. Thank you very much and I hope all of you take full advantage of this MOOC and NPTEL and I hope to see you around. Thank you. Thank you sir. Professor Gaurav Rainer from Department of Electrical Engineering and professor is offering a 10 hour course. It seems difficult to add much more in terms of feedback compared to what the people have already said. So I'll keep this really brief. First thing to say is that so I give a course in nonlinear dynamics. It's a very specialized course fairly mathematical. It's not engineering applications but it's not sort of hardcore engineering as yet so to speak. Typically I get about 10 to 15 students in my class and I even offer it and I was expecting about 2 to 300 to show for this course. I was really really surprised to find when 2000 registered for this. And so what I really wanted to do was I wanted to give a 10 hour one on nonlinear dynamics, learn whatever I could and then next year I intend to give a 20 hour base course in control theory which is much more commonplace in electrical engineering. In summary I had great fun and I'm absolutely hooked. So I can safely tell the NPTEL group that I'll be giving at least one class every single year. Now that's me but I hope the students had fun as well. That was from my point of view. So I did put in a lot of effort because you're trying to do this once. You might as well say it as properly nicely as you possibly could. Once you've said it as nicely as you possibly could, you realize that you haven't said it as nicely as you possibly could and luckily you can go back to it the next year. I got one of the best compliments. I mean I got a bunch of emails and whatnot which would sort of keep you going. But one of the best compliments that I got was from a student at IIT Madras who didn't really want to tell me but told my PhD student who also happened to be in my class in non-linear dynamics in person and said, why doesn't he actually teach like this in class? So the person didn't want to tell me because he thought I might take a badly but I said that's the best compliment I've probably ever got. What else would I like to say? Yes, it would be really, really nice to get as much feedback as we can from the students, from the colleges, from NPTEL because there are small tricks, small thoughts, small ideas which lots of people have used sometimes consciously, sometimes inadvertently but which have had a huge impact and really be nice to just share all of these with us. Just to say that we always try to think of the best way to get an idea across but somebody said, why don't you teach the most common way that people make a mistake? I was like, oh yeah, perfect idea. So if you can just get lots and lots of feedback and it's usually the smaller things or what we think are the smaller things but actually have a huge impact. So that would be absolutely great. Another point I'd like to make is on this sort of 20 minute format attention spans and our ability to get distracted in a world of Facebook and WhatsApp is certainly there but from a very practical point of view a lot of students told me that if it's less than 20 minutes then it's not an activity. So I mean if you have a really engaging lecture I have sat through one and a half hours and being spellbound by lectures but that luxury sort of isn't there with us these days and a lot of students just said that whatever I had to finish at 12.30 I had to go for lunch at one and just the fact that I had nothing to do and that half an hour actually sat and watched your video. So the very fact that your attention spans I mean we can keep arguing what's the optimal size in terms of attention spans but from a practical point of view the very fact that once it crosses more than 20 minutes or half an hour it becomes an activity in itself acts as a bit of a barrier. The other thing is a lot of people talk about well you're not in a live lecture so it can be quite lonely for the student to listen to this lecture on their own I can guarantee that it's rather lonely for the faculty as well. Looking at the computer screen talking again and again and again and saying oh I made a mistake oh I made a mistake oh I made a mistake it's hard work because it's much easier to even just come have a few points and just keep talking when there are people in front of you and it's really hard work when you're sitting in front of a computer in fact right at the beginning I made so many mistakes that I actually made two of my students stand behind my computer so that I just talked to them they must be thinking I'm a bit mad but I was like okay I did it two three times then I got comfortable with the idea of talking to myself. So in summary the NPTEL team has been absolutely absolutely fabulous please give your feedback because that's the only way we can actually help and improve. Thanks a lot. Thank you professors.