 I would like to invite Professor Fatak who is the brain behind this whole program of teaching a large number of teachers. It started with 1000, now it is fire, 10,000 and I think he has something more exciting to tell us. Good morning and welcome to this T10KT workshop which is unique in one particular sense. Many of you would have participated in some of our earlier workshops as you know these workshops and their execution have been funded by MHRD. I have always been looking for a long term self-sustaining model which can work without government funding and towards this end we had conceptualized the situation where the participants are willing to bear their own costs and they are willing to pay a fees to the remote center to take care of the expenses at the remote center and to begin with we said nobody needs to pay anything to IIT Bombay, we will continue using the government support although eventually the fees will have to cover that cost as well. That is the only way I believe that we can sustain such efforts for years to come and not just for two years or three years. Well, this workshop is the first such experiment. I can now share with you the anxiety that many of my colleagues had who said that people may not pay from their own pockets to participate. They will attend only as long as there is government funding. I believed otherwise because we had collected a feedback from several teachers who had participated in the earlier workshops and over one third of the participants in any workshop had said that they would be willing to spend money from their own pocket for their own expenses and they would be willing to pay some charges for participating in such a course. I am not just happy but I am proud of all of you, over 3400 teachers which is typically the one third of the T10KT or 10,000 teachers which is our maximum limit are actually showing to the country and to the world that if they see a value in something they are willing to spend money from their own pocket. My compliments and congratulations. It is indeed this workshop which has given me courage to conceptualize a still larger mission. I will speak about it briefly. We are working on it with the All India Council of Technical Education. But before that let me comment on communications in general although I understand that the title of this workshop is technical communication. I do not know how and when the word technical got into the communication because at IIT Bombay itself the course that we have is I think more correctly titled as communication skills or effective communications or whatever. Anyway communication when we talk about communication it is meant for enhancing the quality of human interaction. You know and I know that we all learn from human interaction. In fact the institution of a teacher is nothing but a human being who facilitates human interaction with other humans participating in the class and of course with himself and herself enhancing the engagement and therefore enhancing the learning. So any teaching learning process intrinsically depends upon human interaction. Communication is often called soft skills. I do not know where this term originated. Our management friends are particularly keen to use the word soft skills to generically describe things related to emotional quotient, things related to interpersonal skills, etc. I never believe that there is anything soft about these skills. In fact recently in a workshop in Washington a Harvard professor said they must be called hard skills. In a more recent event in IIT Agartala in their convocation when I mentioned this that according to me communication skills are not just soft skills but are hard skills and they are absolutely essential for doing anything useful in life for yourself and for others. I was followed by the ICT chairman Professor Anil Saraswati who gave me a new word. He says Professor Fadak these are not just hard skills these are life skills. Our lives depend on it and truly when you reflect on it you will find that you spend the first three four five years of your childhood actually mastering the art of communication, verbal communication is what you master first and then you spend rest of your lifetime in attempting to understand written communication. But we all know the value of effective communication we know the value of learning to communicate well. Sadly in the Indian educational system effective communication has not been as empathetically dealt with as it ought to have been. In fact this should have been perfected in the school stages since that does not happen we are forced to attend to it in our college education and you may not be surprised to know that our colleges also do not necessarily do a good job and therefore when very smart very intelligent and very knowledgeable students from your colleges come to do their masters and PhD they have to do a compulsory course on communication skills because we find these are the skills which they like. Many skills are harnessed by using tools and practicing both the tools their usage and using the tools to learn something about the topic namely effective communication. I would like to remind all of you of a great statement made by late Abraham Lincoln who was tasked to fail a tree and he famously said if I have six hours to cut a tree I will spend four of them on sharpening my axe that was the important he associated with the tool namely the axe with which to cut the tree. Do we spend that much time in polishing our tools what are the tools that we commonly use take very basic tools dictionary this heralds not just for English but for any language how often do we use these tools how often do we spend time to familiarize ourselves to find out synonyms these are important aspects which are very very essential in building effective communication skills today you have information technology tools so you don't have to spend time in sharpening those tools somebody else has already sharpened them made them available but do we spend enough time in familiarizing ourselves with those tools and using them effectively take for example simple word processing tools many of you will be using Microsoft word which is a good commercial product most of us here use Libre office or open office which is an open source product but nevertheless the fundamental question that I would like to ask you is if you use these tools indeed how is it that there is even a single spelling mistake in any post that you make ever anywhere that any question paper that you set that any notes that you prepare and give if you tolerate a single mistake of a comma or a full stop or a punctuation mark or a spelling mistake of a word or wrong grammatical phase who is to be blamed do you lack tools no you lack the use of those tools and the reason you lack the use of those tools is you are not spent sufficient time in familiarizing yourself with those tools and practicing with those tools practicing with the skills that you are trying to acquire is an absolutely important the best example is the great eklavya who learned the entire archery and became the world's top most archer entirely by practicing self he practically discovered and invented archery in some way of course there has been only one eklavya in our country at least in mythology and there are not many most of us require some help and that is the reason why such workshops such engagement with large number of people would help but I will like to remind you that none of these is a substitute for your own individual hard work on your own time. I am tempted to recite a personal experience when in early 70s I was a young teacher and I wanted to ensure that when I give a lecture it is delivered well and succinctly. So, I purchased that tape recorder you may not appreciate that today in those days the cost of that tape recorder was 750 rupees and my salary was 350 dash 20 dash EV dash something something in fact my wife was mighty pleased she thought I got the tape recorder for her to listen to the music she was quite surprised very sadly surprised when she found out that I standing in front of a mirror in the night and speaking to myself and to that tape recorder for one hour and then I was listening to that recorded lecture for an hour making copious notes and again repeating the silly thing she did not understand why I was doing it but I will tell you that practice helped me to understand that what I think is a flow and flow actually consists of a whole lot of a and so on. My talks had actually several errors not just grammatical errors but errors in content most important there were errors in the flow and that meant that I had to reprepare myself reorganize myself it has helped me tremendously I know many of you would be doing something similar with one aspect or the other aspect of the communication point I am trying to make is there is no substitute for hard work in acquiring any skills do not forget how you acquired your first communication skills I mentioned you are learning the basic communication skills when you are two years three years four years five years old do you know how a child learns the verbal communication the child learns because of three or four extraordinary characteristics which all of us have God has been kind enough to endorse with them every child has great curiosity spirit of enquiry every child has great boldness to ask questions including silly questions every child has extraordinary perseverance the child never gives up do we retain that ability in later life do we find a hard word which we cannot understand and do we give up by not understanding that meaning of that word or do we persist persevere and look at the examples look at the meaning of that word and so on and last but not the least the child does all of these with extraordinary sense of passion and involvement do we retain all of that I often tell my friends that rediscover the child in you and you will become the best learner and therefore the best educator of course you have to do something better than being just a child because a child does not have two extraordinary qualities which are qualities acquired because of our social existence these are humility and ethics none of these are natural born characteristics of a human being by nature when we are born we are actually very possessive we don't want to share anything and we are of course not very humble but these two traits we acquire as we grow up anyway I digress so let me come back to the main point that I was trying to make the enhancement of human interaction is possible only when our communication skills are perfect in the days when physical human interaction is becoming both costlier and rarer and in any case it is not possible to have human interaction with all the best experts in the world however a most important element that we have is people around us and as professor said he mentioned people around you are your best resources do you know I have spent 45 years here and I have learned enormously from all my colleagues and all my students I remember how I got involved in this course I actually there was a lecture in our convocation hall some thousand five hundred students sitting and the professor said he and professor Sundar were addressing that first lecture Partha was also there I think and I was so excited in that short interval of one hour I learned so much about what it means to communicate I can never forget that my dear friends please remember what professor said he said learn from every human interaction and create human interaction wherever feasible and wherever it is not easily available most easily available access is to your own colleague one of the reasons why I insisted on this model of several people coming together in a remote center is not so much that you can listen to the experts from here and they can answer your question that is important but incident what is most important is though 20 30 40 people who assemble at a place and actually enjoy an opportunity to interact with each other learn from each other and strengthen each other that is the main purpose behind this model and I am sure you will you will enjoy this workshop I would like to tell you something more for which I would like to draw a diagram you will notice I am not using any PowerPoint slides I am increasingly getting convinced that PowerPoint has spoiled all of us and we have become far less effective particularly those of us I also use PowerPoint still but I use minimal number of sentences and words no slide of mine will have more than one sentence I will tell you the simple reason when I used to use very busy slides I used to find that whenever I flip a slide and start talking for first three minutes everybody is only reading the slide then nobody is listening to me so I started writing only one sentence which people can read in five seconds and then they have no choice but to listen to me there are no choice but to look at me to understand my body language to understand my words and that help not that what I speak is extraordinarily important but you would like that if there is a talk being given then it is the talk that you would like to concentrate modern technology permits us to record these talks and permits people to listen to these talks at their homes and at their hostels you know what is the greatest advantage the greatest advantage is in a classroom if you are teaching me and I am listening to you and I don't understand something I don't have an opportunity to rewind you you have spoken like a radio radio a bar bolt I was spoken I have heard if I have not understood bad luck you are going to go ahead as a result in the first 15 minutes if I have serious doubts and if I have serious misunderstanding the remaining 45 minutes of my time is wasted your time is being fruitfully deployed for perhaps some others but not for me and if you look at a class of 40 or 50 or 60 this could cause a problem as was mentioned the flip classroom has been experimented extensively in IIT by several colleagues I have myself done that and I can tell you from first-hand experience and the experience of many including actual research findings by two of my colleagues Sanna Murthy and Sridharay here that the engagement level of students enhances from an average 40 percent to average 80 percent it is this part which we have now term blended books and we have been offering the blended books courses to about 11,500 students of 50 participating autonomous institutions will be taking this forward next semester and next year and year after that IIT Bombay X actually is not just a platform for giving online courses which will continue to do but we have extended the platform to support blended courses where the participating institutions teachers and students get access to their own scores on a continuous basis for the online courses they get facility for their teachers to add their local marks and to come up with a composite grade this you may not know but for the first time not only in this country but anywhere in the world 50 autonomous institutions have come together to study three subjects jointly with IIT Bombay and their own local teaching and most important all these 11,500 students will get their final grade in their university with a composite score part score coming from the online assessment and part score coming from the face-to-face assessment I call this effort the main streaming of MOOCs because as you know massive open online courses however popular they are unless their credits are recognized by someone either by industry or by the universities people will not give much value to this effort has succeeded and this effort is likely to be adopted I was told in Moscow by a Russian group of universities that they would be putting this in place next year and so in Washington I met large number of university people who want to do this for community colleges so India fortunately has had the first important pilot which is being taken as an indicator of things to come by rest of the world now I come to the last concluding point where I will actually seek your collaboration as I already mentioned you are pioneers in some sense because all of you have shown the courage and willingness to spend money from your own pocket to participate in this workshop I was talking to a ICT chairman and he said that forget a few teachers but all our teachers across the country we were sitting and counting the numbers they are about 9000 institutions approved professional institutions approved by ICT many of them are engineering colleges about 3500 the management colleges and there are polytechnic and he said that most of our teachers do not appreciate the importance of modern tools they do not appreciate that the pedagogy or methodology of teaching learning is changing rapidly and they do not know how to handle online courses and blended courses they are weak in communication he was making a general statement and their understanding and usage of technology is very limited so he suggested to me that instead of the T10KT project where we train 10,000 teachers at a time would IIT Bombay be willing to undertake a much larger national scale project which I laughingly called T500KT that we strain 500,000 teachers who are the numbers approximately across the country who need to adapt this new technology who need to adapt these new tools we are working on a project proposal and we will be soon putting in place some 3 or 4 modules tentatively we are thought of one foundation module one module in effective communication which is something of this course and another module in pedagogy for online and blended learning and how to use these tools for effective teaching now I come to the most important point it is almost certain that one of the modules to be used will be an effective communications module we are unlikely to run it as this kind of T10KT model because even 5 days coming together of people at remote centers is not easy not only it is costly but it takes a lot of toll on people's time the model that will follow will be largely online for the foundation course and an online course with just 2 days of interaction there will be therefore much larger emphasis on the online work much larger emphasis on peer evaluation and much larger emphasis on collaborative online work by the community I have made it clear to my own colleagues and to AICT that I would not like to build a model where IIT Bombay jointly with IIT Kharagpur just delivers these workshops my ambition is to build a very large collaborative community across the country comprising of teachers all of you all of us and from amongst these will come out a few who will be willing to take a leadership role say in editing contents say in monitoring discussion forums over the years so this is not a one-time job I conclude by saying that you are the pioneers not only in demonstrating to the country and to the world that look when you see a value in something you're willing to pay from your pocket my appeal to you is would you be able to show your willingness to participate in this much larger effort and become not just the pioneers but the pioneer leaders of the future collaborative groups that ought to emerge in our teaching community across the country at least for professional colleges of course you will agree that sooner or later we'll have to go over to cover all higher educational institutions and finally the school education I'll conclude by once again thanking all of you I must say one thing about my own colleagues here I have been conducting these programs for like six years now you know that whenever we work more than what is required to be done as per our own job profiles we do expect some recognition usually such recognition comes in the form of an honor area that we give what I'm very proud to tell you is that in last six years not a single teacher colleague of mine in IIT Bombay not a single teacher ever asked whether there is going to be any honor area for the effort that they are taking I am sure most of you would follow that philosophy and that passion I wanted to thank my colleagues for this extraordinary gesture of course we do give some honor into them because there is a government funding to this project in fact I have had some very peculiar instances one teacher wrote wrote back an email see oh you give honorarium for this exciting work I thought in engaging with ten thousand teachers at a time itself is a great honor anyway I'm sure that many of you are as passionate I have seen many passionate teachers across the country when I took a Bharat Yatra I took one year sabbatical and went around the country visiting small colleges whether it is a small NIST in Biharampur or whether it is a Nitte in coastal area or whether it is a small college in Vasai each place I have come across passionate teachers who do something extraordinary it is my ambition to collect all such passionate teachers in the country and make them to assume a leadership and guiding position for the benefit of all teachers and subsequently for the benefit of all students. Professor Sundar suggests that there could be some time for a couple of questions so I will start arbitrarily going to some centers I see Baulana Azad National Institute of Technology I can see a lot of people in Bhopal over to you Bhopal for some general comments. Hello. Good morning sir. I have traveled all the way from Bilai because that there was no remote centers in Bilai this time and I was keenly interested in attending the workshop on technical communication and the online courses which I have come across it was very beneficial and proved a great help to us and even sharing with the faculties over there in my college. Very good thank you very much I appreciate you are taking the efforts Bilai to Bhopal is not a small distance in future we'll ensure that there will be more and more remote centers near your place where you can attend easily thank you so much if we go over to D.Y. Patil Institute of Engineering Pune. Yes sir good morning sir this is Dr. Shalaka Parker from D.Y. Patil College of Akurdi affiliated to the University of Pune sir I really thank you for your insightful talk on the need and importance of communication skills and soft skills but nevertheless I if I could request you to help us sir on this front because I am heading the soft skills department at my college wherein we are grooming the students on soft skills and communication skills as per the inputs that we receive from the industry saying that our students are not employable because they lack in this area but sir we are just talking about the importance of these subjects but they do not have a pedestal as a subject is in the curriculum and sir as you rightly said people don't value a course until its credits are recognized by the industry or the university so sir in case you have an opportunity to talk to the chairman AICT could we have some directives from the AICT and experts like you to the universities to include this subject as a part of the curriculum and you know have a Viva or a theory paper and you know have prescribed norms for faculty members you know to teach this subject sir it'll get a concrete pedestal if I could request you to help us in this front thank you thank you very much I appreciate your concern if I'm not mistaken there was already a directive because I know a colleague of mine Dr. Agushe Agakar chaired a committee of AICT which stipulated as obligatory courses to obligatory courses of course I believe they were prescribed at the postgraduate level of professional education knowledge in education one was on effective communications and the other was on research methodologies I was under the impression that an effective communication skills course is part of undergraduate syllabus because it I think exists in the model syllabus of AICT of course it is named variously and treated differently because I remember when I was a student in 1964 there was a course on communication it was supposed to be English communication I sadly remember that I neither learnt English nor learned communication from that course but by just putting a course merely as a part of the syllabus nothing much is achieved what is important is for all our teachers to understand how important the knowledge of communication is so I will definitely heed your advice and suggestion and we'll speak to professor says what they are the first opportunity not only making it obligatory but strengthening the infrastructure in fact you will notice that he and I agree entirely that our emphasis in the next wave of skilling and training our teachers and empowering them would be actually to empower them in these skills as well but let me ask you one question why are communication skills considered to be covered only by one separate subject if I am teaching computer programming or if my colleague Gayathonda is teaching thermodynamics or somebody is teaching history of world don't you think indirectly and directly emphasizing good communication in whatever subject you teach is equally important do you think communication has to be handled separately because the moment you think it is to be handled separately everybody including students and teachers sort of assume that it is relevant only to get the grades in that course elsewhere in life it is not important how is it that in your own subjects that you teach if a student makes a submission do you actually ask that student to rework that submission by removing all the errors just because it is a technical submission do you not end up giving that student some partial marks for content that have been given completely ignoring the sloppy communication I think we as teachers are at fault we have not only to recognize the importance of communication in every subject that we deal with but we have to emphatically convey to our students and contribute to their becoming better communication I don't think communications can be handled by just one separate course it has to be handled as a all pervasive component of our entire education system sorry for a longish answer but this is my conviction UV Patel over to you sir thank you very much for your comments I'm happy that your research scholars are also participating they are the future teachers so I welcome all of them this Pillai Institute over to you good morning sir this is Stokhnil Tambay from Samaya Polytechnic and I am attending this technical communication lecture at Pillai's Engineering College I think this is a good platform for all teachers and a very good course design now I I think the quiz sessions were quite good and even the model session was good thank you very much sir for this great initiative so something I want to ask you a question since you have taken the trouble to come all the way from Samaya College to Pillai's Institute to attend this I take it that you are one of the more enthusiastic people would you be personally willing to participate in the larger national effort as a contributor over to you okay this is very near to you so therefore you will not participate in the national effort or will you yes yes sir very good thank you federal Institute of Science over to you Federal Institute aspect of it was like when I started I am a retired and I had about 34 years of teaching experience in the back love till I am fascinated how much into this area of communication skills and teaching in this area I am teaching MBA students is a little bit like the very name of the course was something like technical communication but as you said communication is rather a very vast area it can't be confined to the area of technical educational alone because it actually comprises the competence level of the students have to be sharpened at the presentation level because in Kerala what we experience is from the employability parts students are lagging much behind these days they have something called a technical university and the first semester I said it goes like hours apart for language learning personally I feel that's not the right way where in we have to start with the pressure because what they needed the kind of communication competence the inbuilt potential work it out through more of self expression areas rather than repeating and pronunciation practice and all that that is being done in the lab at the person how much was full in this particular communication area could you please put in inputs into those authorities to tell them in the first semester what is really needed is boosting their self-confidence presentation sharpening make them come out of their cocoons and start facing the world with thank you very much for your observation but I would like to tell you that if you have to actually do that effectively in the first semester in our colleges we should be doing nothing else but just build communication skills now unfortunately the so-called stereotype course structure of eight semesters four years etc. etc. does not give us that flexibility all that we can do is try to supplement our efforts by giving more and more online material and more opportunity for students to practice on their own and to discuss and interact with others thank you very much for your observation sona college of technology yes over to you sona good morning sir we are pleased and privileged to be the participants of the technical communication workshop and very happy to listen to your voice after three months oh where did you listen to it three months ago IIT Bombay oh you had come here she's the coordinator that is cheating right right thank you so much I'm happy that you have so many colleagues there all the best to you and thank you for participating techno India salt lake Kolkata let us go to eastern part of Kolkata over to you Kolkata it's a very interesting course to us most of the participants are basically from my college only and my question is very administrative part basically this is a self-finance program we are very much eager to do this kind of self-finance program in my college as well but can we do this kind of self-finance program in the name of a particular department let's say we are working on safe workshop on network wireless communication is a part of electronics department see and it's conducted by IIT Bombay that means the resource person is given by IIT Bombay but it's conducted by electronics department of techno India and in that case to organize this workshop can we take sponsorship from different vendors or some different publishers etc to organize it's more bigger way to get more participants yeah I understand you are talking about getting sponsorship from local people and so on I don't want to get into the discussion of either the financials or the fiduciary ethics that all of us must follow but I note your point and I'll keep that in mind and I will respond separately perhaps through a moodle posting during the next few days giving all of you an overall idea about the larger program that we have and more such self-finance program that will be running your observation is important and interesting I'll respond to it later thank you let me go to the medicabs Institute over to you good morning sir dr. Satsangi from medicabs college it's a really a great effort on the part of all of us being together today and enjoying this course on communication technical communication I fully understand that communication is a very slippery business one says something other understand something else and always it will keep happening because all languages are fuzzy or hazy thank you a lot we'll be more clearer after this one thank you thank you very much well I I take your leave I would I would like to request Professor Sunder to come back and take over the reins of the station he already exceeded my time thank you