 Hello, I am Prabhakar. I am with Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. I am going to talk to you about open and distance learning. The title of the talk is quality without exclusivity. So, ODL is all about pedagogical processes and information technology. Pedagogical processes is about how to teach and learn and how that has got impacted by advances in information technology and has resulted in a huge revolution, if you want to call it on teaching in teaching and learning. Let us start with a quote by Sir John Daniel. It is a very insightful quote. Essentially, what it is trying to say is the technology advances which have resulted in ODL has managed to break the age old concept that you cannot have quality without exclusivity. If you want to give high quality education, you have to take a smaller number of students and you cannot really scale up quality. So, this is what ODL or open distance learning has managed to do. So, what is this ODL? People have said this is a tsunami in education. Somebody said no, it is like snake oil which really does not work. It is like a gold rush. You think there is something happening there and you go there, but really there is no gold there. But the point is all this is driven by technology and how did it all start with MOOCs? Now, we will see what MOOCs are in a while, but a short statement on MOOCs, they started in 2008. By 2011 they blew up and the actual trigger happened to be the first big MOOC, if I can use that word by two professors from Stanford, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. They did a course on artificial intelligence and 160,000 students registered for it. So, this suddenly sort of opened up the possibility of this technology or this way of getting across knowledge or information or this way of learning if you can use the word. So, what is the trigger for this kind of tsunami? First thing is high speed internet access has become ubiquitous. Today it is possible from a hand held device to connect to the internet and get video streaming. Clients have become powerful. They have become low cost and hand held clients today are as powerful as desktop a few years back. And then cloud computing has come of age. What do we mean by cloud computing? We will explain this in a minute. So, if you look at cloud there seems to be basically three kinds of ways the cloud offering seems to have. So, these are called software as a service, platform as a service or infrastructure as a service. I will explain them in a minute. Let us start with infrastructure. Now, infrastructure as a service is basically renting a machine on the web. So, instead of buying a machine and putting it in your premises in your own data center creating an uninterrupted power supply security 24 by 7 manning you basically rent a machine which is somewhere in some data center. So, that is infrastructure as a service. Instead of getting a bare machine you can actually get a machine with some software loaded on it. What we call infrastructure middleware kind of software. So, that is like database engines and so on. So, if you do that then you are accessing platform as a service. So, what you need to do is to write your own application on using my sql and php or middleware like that and then host it on the platform that you have rented. Alternately you can also take an application which is already somebody has written on to your browser at it and start using it. That is called software as a service. So, infrastructure is basically renting a bare machine. Platform is renting the bare machine plus some middleware and software as a service is infrastructure middleware plus the application program. Same thing is depicted in some fashion here. So, infrastructure as a service is about buying a pre-configured virtual machine. Platform as a service is about getting a lampstack or a Tomcat server which allows you to run Java programs or Ruby on Rails which allows you to run Ruby programs and so on. Or software as a service like Gmail which allows you to start using your mail client or mail service as long as you have a browser and connection to the internet. This is another depiction of cloud computing. We have infrastructure on top of which the platforms which allow you to run application programs and on top of which are the applications. So, you can rent this or rent this or rent this. So, because of this ability to go and get a machine to build your application or deploy your application has become so easy. Suddenly, it is possible and to create a service which will host your let us say the learning management system. You have recorded some lectures. You want to put it out somewhere so that everybody can access. You just go and put it on in the cloud. Earlier, it was a huge effort because you have to go buy the machine, you have to keep it up and you have to manage it. Now, everybody somebody else does it for you. So, this ability to quickly deploy machines and increase their bandwidth, their capacity, elastic capacity that the cloud offers has again encouraged people to build applications and that is another major part of the revolution which has come in education technology. So, essentially it is technology which enables everyone, anyone on the earth any time to learn. But, having said this, let us be clear. It appears that the hype in this space is actually more due to the business opportunities that seems to exist. Not so much by the fact that it is easy to do certain things, but it is profitable to do certain things. If you look at this is the investment that has happened in 2011 in education technology companies, you can see the number of deals and the amount of money that got invested in 2011. It is going up. So, people have sensed that there is enormous opportunity here and that is the reason it is compared to a gold rush. So, if you look at some sample companies, I have a list of them. This is not complete, this is just very indicative. If your company's name is not here, it is not because it is not important, because it is just a small one slide list. So, Coursera is one of them. This is taken from the company's website. They say you get the world's best courses for free, that is their tagline. Udacity is about higher education for free. Udemy is learn from world's top experts. These are basically sites which host courses. Course load is the place where they actually create textbooks which are digital in nature. They actually aggregate content. Now, this is another interesting technology in education site. This is an app on top of Facebook where you can create networks amongst college students or school students to facilitate learning. Who has not heard of Khan Academy? You can learn anything from there. There are about 3000 videos as of now and it is increasing every day. Duolingo is another very interesting site. It is a place where you can go and learn a language. Simultaneously, help create a translation system. So, what we will do in this series of talks is discuss various issues related to online distance learning. We will talk about process issues. We will talk about technology and platform. We will talk about MOOCs. We will talk about learning analytics. We will talk about what are the standards that are there in this space and we will talk about a road map on how to roll out a MOOC. Thank you.