 Good afternoon to all the participants of the conference. I understand that The KB Patil former vice-chancellor of North Maharashtra University is personally present there and The Karata is the chief guest with the Dean faculty of engineering from University of Pune I would also like to extend my greetings to Dr. Patil and Dr. Devre of the institution. I am Deepak Phatak. I teach here. I've been teaching here for like 42 years and for last several years we have been attempting to Reach out to a large number of faculty colleagues across the country the Institute at Sherpur has been one of our remote centers for almost all last three or four years Thank you so much. I can see all of you participants in in the large hall I am Very excited that so many faculty members have come from various places to attend I would say not a conference, but a group of conferences In fact, it's a very unique organization. I had never seen multiple conferences being held simultaneously in different subjects So welcome all of you. I thought I will share with you some of my own Vision on this occasion before I introduce my colleague Dr. Mukta Atre Who is going to give a presentation on the activities that we do? As all of you are aware From mid 80s onwards there has been an extraordinary increase in the number of engineering colleges in the country We have today more than four thousand five hundred colleges and when I asked Dr. Mantha, he jokingly said that was the number as of last week So practically every day more colleges are getting added We admit close to a million engineering college students every year and this is indeed an extraordinary increase a Skellop that has never been attempted in the history of mankind for engineering education anywhere in the world Unfortunately the corresponding build-up of the academic infrastructure has not been able to keep pace with this Extraordinary increase as a result the faculty positions in our engineering colleges continue to languish we are not able to Spruce up and scale up the required number of qualified and experienced faculty members Those of you who are old-timers like me will recall that we had a five-year Engineering curriculum in which the basic concepts of engineering were grilled into our heads no matter what branch of engineering We specialize them today our students study only for four years and They get so compartmentalized so very early in their Education that if somebody is studying computer science and somebody studying electrical engineering and somebody studying civil engineering They genuinely believe that they have nothing to do with important concepts of basic engineering and science Which are so vital to any branch of engineering that you are studying So the teachers have an additional challenge as an added attraction. I put myself into the shoes of a young teacher Let's say coming from a college in Sherpur or Dhule or Jalgrao Then I find myself into a very peculiar situation. I have just finished my graduation I do not have opportunities to do forget PhD even a master's degree Conveniently and comfortably while earning my salary. I take up a job as a teacher I start teaching and while teaching I attempt to enhance my qualifications Now this is an uphill task because the opportunities for doing part-time M-take and part-time PhD are very few and rare it is under this Situation that we need to take measures so that all our faculty colleagues all across the country benefit by at least getting some inputs about specific topics and About the mechanism that is followed in the teaching learning process in well-known institutions like IIT it is with respect to it is it is in it is in this context that We started our distance education program towards addressing and engaging teachers So as many of you would know This national mission project does not concentrate on training students But it concentrates on engaging teachers because we believe that if you change the mindset of one teacher It would have a multiplier effect Helping hundreds of students to think differently in the education that they receive later It is in this context that thousands of teachers have been participating in number of workshops that we conduct About those workshops my colleague. Dr. Mukta Atre will be speaking shortly But what I wanted to tell you is that these conferences which you come and attend where not only you present Your work, but you also listen to other people who present their work it is the Combination of all the work that somehow must find its expression in the educational process it is not I am not talking specifically about the Actual papers which are published and the problems which are discussed there But the basic theme that I want you to imbibe is the kind of rigor that needs to be put in by anybody Who publishes a paper the kind of hard work that one is required to do and That rigor I would like you to sort of put into the minds of your students Of course, you have to imbibe it yourself first. I do hope that by attending the conference over the next few days You will not only deliberate upon the specific problems which are discussed through the papers that are published and presented But also imbibe this philosophy that research is not just about publishing papers Research is not just about getting PhD and doing postdoctoral work But research is about developing a mindset which represents the best of analytical enquiry the best of Ability to experiment the best of ability to persevere In the face of difficulties and failures It is these features that I would like you to filter from the Presentations that are made in the conference in addition of course to understanding properly the Presentation and the problems that have worked upon So I would submit that please utilize this opportunity the best of your ability to get both the knowledge in the specific areas in which the papers would be presented and The work culture that must have gone into the preparation of these papers that are being presented I would like each faculty member attending these conferences to go back with the following resolution That I understand that I am teaching at a small place where I have limited opportunities But if I can see so many colleague teachers Working hard and making sensible presentations on solutions to the problems in different areas Then there is no reason why I cannot do it and there is no reason why I cannot Imbibe this philosophy of hard work the philosophy of research oriented thinking into all my students No matter whether the student is a postgraduate student or a first stage engineering student I wish you all the best I do hope that in coming years when we are expanding our Workshops to engage 10,000 teachers at a time rather than just 1000 teachers Many of you would benefit in some of the subjects in your own areas of work We have been fortunate that in IIT Bombay we have several colleagues who have contributed to The different subjects that are covered under our training programs In fact, the most important contributor from the Label of a field wise is not computer science and engineering department is my own department But the mechanical engineering department I am very happy to share with you that Two of the stalwart faculty members from mechanical engineering department are here with us I would like to briefly introduce them Professor Bapat and Professor Atre In fact, Professor Bapat was the head when the majority of our workshops in mechanical engineering subjects started Professor Atre, apart from being a well-known professor and researcher Is also head of our society for innovation and entrepreneurship And I hope that someday we will do at least a Short program on a weekend on how to encourage entrepreneurship amongst your students Yes, Professor Atre has Please observe carefully. He has said yes So that he is now honor bound to offer a weekend course on entrepreneurship sometime And I hope that not only teachers, but even your students would be Would be able to attend and benefit from well I have taken more than fair share of my time. My objective was very limited I wanted to introduce my colleague Dr. Mukta Atre before she starts engaging with you So let me say a few words about this When I started the distance education program I was actually looking for people who are not only capable and competent to handle the issues related to conductor workshop But who are also passionate about it Dr. Mukta Atre at that time had just relocated from England And she was actually looking for a faculty position And I did not have a faculty position to offer But I said I have a position of a manager to handle these Workshops which will engage teachers So you can effectively be a faculty member to a large number of teachers not directly to some 30 40 students I don't think she was fully convinced that she thought she might give it a try Ever since she joined she has been the crux and the fulcrum of our entire program She would soon probably take over as the program director for the whole mission of training teachers And indeed I am very happy to have her and a large number of her colleagues and her team We have a very large team which she and some of her other severe colleagues coordinate And it is because of them that we are able to relate and engage to a large number of faculty members such as you So I very happy a happily and proudly introduce to you my colleague And the chief coordinator for these workshops Dr. Mukta Atre all U.S. Madam It is indeed a great pleasure to be Sharing let's say virtual space with the honorable chief guest and The guest of honor and also with all of you who have Come here to listen to me Talk about something that is not directly related to your conference topics But I am indeed very grateful to Sherpur education societies R.C. Patel Institute of technology the principal professor Patel and Professor Devrape to Think that I am Capable enough to talk to you and that my Subject will be of interest to all of you Thank you very much and to give a very brief Outline of what I will be doing As you know we have been conducting large scale workshops for engineering college teachers and I will be taking you through a little bit of history a little bit of Reasons why we started this program and then of course There are many of you who come from colleges who are not our remote centers And I would be giving a sort of a Walkthrough to the entire procedure of becoming a remote center of IIT Bombay and also the various Procedures that go into it. So when you go back if you are interested You can definitely apply to become a remote center of IIT Bombay and We are partners in this very exciting mission of enhancing skills of Engineering college teachers at the moment we are restricting ourselves to engineering college teachers, but I do know that in the next couple of years we will be Expanding to include other colleges such as science colleges and also Higher secondary schools. So it is indeed a very very Exciting time ahead for us and I invite all of you to become a part of that and join us on this exciting journey So, I will start with a short Introduction As professor Fateh said just now The number of engineering colleges has Absolutely boom ranked in the country. We do have an approximate figure of about 5200, but It is again an approximate figure apparently new colleges come up almost every weekend it seems like And proportionately of course there is a Increase in the number of students who are opting for engineering courses as opposed to other professional courses Of course the money is there the money is fast, but then do we have Faculty who are equipped to take care of this large number of students Do we have faculty who are themselves trained in Subjects many many faculty that I have I have been meeting a lot of people in the past three years And very often I find that Especially from remote areas there are faculty from engineering colleges who Have not had an opportunity to enhance their teaching skills. They have Either joined the joined the college immediately after their graduation or have baby done A m tech but wish to do a phd to further enhance their career as well as to enhance their own Teaching capabilities as I've said there is real a lack of You know access to good quality education Institutes like iit iit do conduct a continuing education program But very often you know you see that a cep program will cost nothing like nothing less than about 10,000 rupees minimum for as registration fees and it's not always that Faculty can faculty or his or her institute will be able to pay that much so There is this scarcity of opportunities and that in turn sort of affects the kind of students that you produce The teacher does not have fundamental You know clarity about fundamental things and that is not Sort of transferred properly to a student. So, what do we have in the age we have faculty who are Who could be frustrated in such a situation where they do not get to Enhance their skills or and on the other hand you have students who are somehow deprived of the kind of quality education that they deserve And it's a vicious circle. So In this background we decided that We will have Something to do with the large number of teachers and that we would be trying to help them realize their true potential and How do we go about it if we have cep programs we have qip programs We found that the number of participants in a cip program in a cep program cannot be more than 30 Or at the most 40, but what about the thousands of teachers who are out there in the country and who cannot really Have access to this kind of quality education. So, we do have problem of synchronous delivery to a large number so in this In the background of this situation The project called empowerment of students and teachers through synchronous and asynchronous instruction took place This was initiated by professor farthak in 2009 and very luckily we the national mission for education on ict through ict took it up and They supported us wholeheartedly through mh rd in the initial stages we Used the edusat to link up to various colleges, but then very soon we found out that only those colleges who have the infrastructure to Establish an edusat connection Those kind of colleges were very few so again we were restricting ourselves to a couple of n it's a couple of government colleges But what about so many teachers out there who are desirous of willing who are desirous to learn but Are left bereft of such things So, in 2010 we moved to a software called avu Avu has also been developed under the edemi ict by amrita university They are our collaborators in this mission as well and this software we found that with minimum of Bandwidth infrastructure we could use this feature to reach out to thousands of students at a time Definitely increased our reach So, we decided we also had a tie-up with ict we have been doing a lot of research in the background So, when we were talking to ict we found that If a faculty member does n number of ict courses it is definitely helpful in his or her promotion So, we collaborated with ict they very kindly agreed to give us their help and to permitted us to use their Logo and to treat our workshops as ict So, we hold a two week ict workshops across the country the transmission is from iit bombay and we have various remote centers across the country the length and breadth of the country and Avu mandate so far has been to focus upon core engineering subjects Under the nemi ict our mandate is at the moment only for engineering colleges So, we focused upon core engineering subjects and we decided that the kind of syllabus that is taught in a iit and Colleges across the country may not necessarily be the same in fact There are other programs which Which give participants access to recorded lectures from iit faculty, but then again It is asynchronous. It is not really interactive. We wanted a kind of a interactive virtual classroom kind of an environment where you have a teacher and The participants across the country registered as students. So, it is a kind of a classroom environment And we used a combination of asynchronous and synchronous delivery We have the Avu to create a virtual classroom that is the synchronous part. There is a very good interaction usually And the asynchronous part we decided to use some learning Learning management systems and We use these to interact with our participants And another very very important feature of our workshops is that all the content that is generated during these two weeks of the workshop Whether it is lectures Lecture recordings whether it is the slides whether it is the assignments whether it is the questions Asked by the participants everything is compiled in one place and then we release it in open source. So, all of you out there Could easily download these things from our website and use them as a part of your own teaching I have a picture here of a workshop in progress. You have the Remote center here. They are obviously listening with great interest to a faculty teaching From iIT Bombay in this case it was professor Gayathundey and he was teaching thermodynamics Now, I will come to our workshops that we have conducted so far. We have conducted about 12 workshops on various topics Some of them I have said various engineering topics here, but some of them have not necessarily been core engineering subjects, but Topics that are of great interest or of great relevance to a teacher Some of these unusual courses are like free and open Software how to use it in when you are teaching science students or engineering students Then we had a very very Popular program called writing effective conference papers This area I believe is largely unexplored. There are hundreds of people out there who still do not Know the mechanics of writing a good paper. So, we decided to have a Short today course on writing effective conference papers and then We also did a very special course for ministry of new and renewable energy which was called the solar photovoltaics The ministry at the government of India plan to Introduce solar photovoltaics in the engineering curriculum in a very large way and very soon So, they came to us with the request that we have a workshop and popularize and introduce the concept of Solar photovoltaics in the country and again that was a very very popular workshop So far, we have managed to reach about 22,000 participants distributed across 2003 remote centers We have close to 300 remote centers at the moment Not obviously not all take part in each and every workshop But I can safely say that about 265 are fairly active now Let me come to the methodology of how we do these workshops by now you would have understood that We plan a 10 day workshop. We invite a faculty from in our in in our case so far We have invited people from IIT Bombay To conduct a two week workshop for teachers across the country. So, We need to have remote centers to host these workshops for us obviously the teacher cannot go to 300 odd places in the country. So, we have Transmission at IIT Bombay and reception at various remote centers in the country Now, how do we choose a remote center? We have Several applications from colleges to become remote centers, but how do we actually Choose a college which will be a good remote center for us Now, one of the very obvious factors is that it should be a good college there should be Good infrastructure they should be able to host a minimum of 30 to 50 participants at one time In an extraordinary situation they might even have to conduct two parallel workshops So, all in all we need a good academic Foundation in the institute good faculty who will be able to who will be able to work as Workshop coordinators from other side and obviously good infrastructure Now, these are the people we are looking for at remote centers When we choose a remote center when we have an application from a remote center we ask the head Of the institute to nominate somebody a responsible faculty who will be the remote Center coordinator and he will be he or she will be responsible for the overall Management and smooth conduct of the workshop and when we come to a specific workshop for For example, we will be doing a course on database management systems very soon We ask the remote centers to send us a workshop coordinator who will be responsible Specifically for only one workshop, but he will be an expert in that subject And he will come here go through a five day Trading period and then go back and get ready for the main workshop Now, this is the coordinators workshop that I was talking about once the institute has identified Workshop coordinator he comes here and he attends the workshop for coordinators in which We talk about a lot of things one of the most important one is that All the coordinators who have come from various places in the country and the Faculty coordinator at IIT Bombay they sit together and decide upon a common curriculum Which will be used in the workshop because as we all know things are taught differently Across the country and need not necessarily be need not necessarily follow the way IIT faculty does for example, so they sit together and create a common curriculum And during the workshop we also tell them to manage a whole lot of things How to conduct the workshop at a remote center then how do you operate the A view How do you operate the clicker I will be coming to the clicker a little later And then how do you handle so many participants You are all teachers you know exactly how difficult it is to manage a class full of people And in this case teachers at that So, these are the things that we discuss about in the coordinators workshop and Then comes the logistics for the main workshop now typically the coordinators workshop is held About two months before the main workshop the main workshop is held I mean we have Decided that we will hold the main workshops in the vacation period so that A large number of teachers can attend these workshops and they need not be You know called back to their colleges for duty or anything they will be completely free so they If they are interested in further learning on a subject they are they can attend without any Problem now for the main workshop IIT does most of the work at least the logistics You have the remote center coordinator and workshop coordinator at the remote center But we take care of the advertisement on the website we take care of brochures and we Take care of the online registration as well and another very very important thing from Your point of view is that we fund the workshop at your remote center the institute Does not have to spend anything but to give us their time and space and we fund the Workshops and these are the few things that the funds include food travel allowance Lodging boarding and other miscellaneous expenses Now coming to a view a view is the medium through which we transmit these workshops it is According to me at least it is the most important factor in having a good successful Workshop if you do not have a good a view connection at your place then obviously you Will not be able to listen to the teacher from IIT Bombay your participants will probably Be frustrated and we do get a lot of adverse feedback about the audibility and visibility At remote center so this is all connected to a view so if you do have if you have taken a lot of trouble fixing up a good a view connection then you are on board this is another Feature that we use during our workshops while a view is for in interactivity we use the Moodle where the participants can post their questions their doubts their queries or even their assignments everything can be used on the Moodle and when the professor is not actually Teaching he will always go back to the Moodle and answer queries for the participants Now coming back to the main workshop these are some of the logistics that need to be Followed just before the main workshop I have already stressed upon the importance of getting a getting good a view connectivity so my colleagues here from the e studio follow a very Very rigorous schedule for a view there is absolutely no compromise to be made when it Comes to a view I cannot stress this enough there have been cases in the past where We have just blacklisted colleges who have not followed our instructions The instructions are all there on our website if all of you if there are some colleges which wish to become remote centers I will be giving a link a little later on about How to become a remote center and in that you will find a list of the infrastructure That is necessary to set up a view now we also as I said before we also release all the content that is generated during this workshop in open source so we use something called the creative commons license we release the content under this license and it is free to share and to share alike and you can use it in your classroom teaching as well We provide helplines I mean our office is supposed to close at 630 but there have been cases where our people are working till almost 9 9 30 because the remote centers have so many queries so these are the important things that will happen during the main workshop we will be conducting quizzes we solve assignments using the moodle Then once the 10 day workshop is over the faculty in charge in IIT will also give a final assignment to the participants this is to be completed within two weeks after the workshop this particular assignment we are we have been using to create a sort of a repository of learning material all these assignments can be used by any teacher anywhere to set papers or to give quizzes in their classrooms so all the assignments are used in a repository we also distribute participation certificate this participation certificate will be from IIT Bombay ISTE and the remote center which has hosted the workshop So, you get a certificate from these three agencies and in some workshop we have also given certificates of excellence to some participants who have done very well in their assignments and we send you the funds well before the workshop begins and at the end of the workshop you are expected the remote center coordinator is expected to give a proper utilization certificate and receipts to us you remember what professor Fata said this is this workshop is completely funded by MHRD so the way you are accountable for the money that we give you we are also accountable to MHRD we have to provide very stringent utilization certificates so this is this is why we insist on this Now, these are some statistics that statistics of workshops that we have conducted now a colleague of mine has been doing research on the findings that have come out in these workshops and one of the most positive factor that has come out is that 30 to 45 percent of the participants are women now we do have a lot of CEP programs running in IIT Bombay and we very often see that women cannot get away from their homes for a whole period of either 7 or 10 days but during our workshops they can easily go to their own place of work and attend the workshop there they find it so much easier than leaving their hometowns and coming away for 10 days so this number was very very important to us 30 to 45 percent of the women of the participants so far have been women we have found that our workshops are extremely useful for participants in remote areas now by remote areas I could give you an example we have a remote center at a place called Nirjuli in Arunachal Pradesh participants of that area could not they do not have any other remote center close to their place of living so if a center if a college from a remote center from a remote area becomes a remote center it is definitely very useful to the participants who cannot move out of their own area we have also found that there is a increased collaboration and interaction amongst participants of different institutions now you see the audience for these workshops are college teachers from various colleges who meet at one remote center now the remote center coordinator makes makes them into groups and they do group assignments together people who have never talked to each other before now work with each other for the for a period of 10 days or or even later for the next two week assignment so there has been a great increase in the collaboration and interaction that is happening amongst participants now I come to some additional features of our workshop we have you we have used a student response system called clicker it has been it has been of course used very widely in the western world but in IIT Bombay we have developed an indigenous clicker it is a bit like the you know the device which is held by the audience in Konpeniga Karodpati for example this particular system works very very well when it is being used for a very large audience nowadays you have classes of classrooms which have more than 100 students 120 students how do you know who has understood what or how do you know how can you conduct a spot quiz without getting into so many paper corrections and you know a lot of time is wasted so we use the clicker system there are spot quizzes and the students are given clickers and they just have to press a or b or c or whatever the option is and all the data is collected in the back end of a server and the teacher has the result within 5 minutes and it is so useful for the teacher to understand which student is not doing well or whether the topic that he has taught has had immediate you know effectiveness or not so this is one feature the other feature is another program called the proximity it is a it is a tool which integrates all recorded lectures and it is published as a standalone application and you do not have to search for I mean you have a set of lectures and the learner can navigate straight from one lecture into the other or he can skip a few lectures he can skip slides he can go to any section of a lecture that he wants and this particular feature has also been developed in IIT Bombay now we come to the most exciting part of course the 10000 teacher program is equally exciting but this is the news of the day as you all know IIT Bombay has been given the Akash tablet project and the whole aim of the project is to develop open source applications and contents let me make it very very clear at this point that we are not in the commercial business of selling Akash tablets so please do not send me mails about ma'am can I buy an Akash tablet from you I do have a lot of queries regarding that but we wish to the whole aim of the project is to use the tablet in for educational purposes only and to integrate several applications that we ourselves have already developed like I just told you about the clicker now the clicker can is integrated on the Akash tablet as well so you have a class full of students with Akash tablets on their hands they can not only use the tablet for studying but also to take part in various activities like quiz for example you efforts are also being made to port the a view onto the tablet so there could be a day when instead of watching a workshop on the screen in front of you you can easily look at it on the tablet itself this was the launch of the Akash tablet and we have plans of giving Akash tablets to our remote centers for use in their classroom activity we are specifically looking at final year projects at the moment of any discipline and we do hope that representatives of institutes amongst you who have not yet become an Akash center or a remote center of IIT Bombay would definitely do so at least to be able to use the Akash in their own classroom teaching and for their own students. Now this is a picture of the clicker and you see how it has evolved this is version one and this is version two where you could just get a small number on the screen but now we have ported it onto the Akash tablet and this is how we will be using the clicker this is the Akash tablet if you look closely I do not know how clear it is out there but you have the clicker and you have other features here now the way we plan to use the Akash tablet in through our project is that we have conducted a workshop for faculty of all IIT Bombay remote centers this was a two-day workshop and 240 remote centers participated in this and since it was for their own teachers we had a number of almost 14,000 teachers who participated in this two-day workshop and we have also planned a very useful program for students and that is starting tomorrow it is a two weekend android application programming course on Akash and it gives me great pleasure to tell you all that we have nearly 22,000 students participating in this and it is of great pride for us. These are the workshops that we have conducted so far I am not very sure if it is visible but we have conducted two workshops on effective teaching of computer programming and then we have database management systems since there are teachers of computer science amongst you I would like to give an advance announcement that this summer we will be conducting a repeat of database management systems we will be releasing the advertisement shortly but do look out for that on our website and we conducted thermodynamics and mechanical engineering another very very popular program we conducted it once in 2011 for something like 700 and odd participants but then we had to do it again last December for a far larger number we have done courses in basic electronics heat transfer solar photovoltaics then the software development technology as writing effective conference papers and another very very interesting program on introduction to research methodology this was our largest I mean we had the largest number of participants in one single program for this project we had something like 7500 and odd participants and here at this juncture we had some very very encouraging positive feedback from the ministry they said since your numbers are so high why do you want to restrict yourself for 1000 teachers there are thousands of teachers out there in the country and if you restrict yourself to just 1000 teachers at a time you can easily you know go bigger you can scale up and December 2012 our project was extended by the ministry and we of course I will be come to the future plans a little later but I am very happy to tell you that now we hope to engage 10000 teachers at a time and the trend has already started with the Akash workshop where we had 140000 teachers and now 22000 students now we are going to be collaborating with IIT Kharagpur now the workshop is going to be called teach 10000 teachers and we have 15 workshops on engineering topics planned for the next 3 years of course we have already completed the pilot on engineering thermodynamics in December 2012 we had something like 7000 teachers participating here in engineering thermodynamics this is the second round and in these 3 years we hope to reach at least 150000 teachers this big endeavor cannot be done by a single individual we have a very large and a very very efficient team out here and we are very very proud of them and thank you all and of course the inspiring force the driving force behind the whole project is Professor Phatak he is untiring absolutely in his passion for education you all may have heard that recently on the republic day he was conferred the Padmasree he will be given it officially in April but it is also due to his untiring efforts to for the field of education that this program has been doing so well thank you very much for being so patient and listening to me and if you have any queries we have queries on chat right the question is that we want to use AVU software and IITB server for regular classroom teaching at our institute if possible now this is really a question for Professor Phatak I will definitely convey the question to him but it will take some efforts some efforts and a lot of hard work from teams at both sides and let us see I mean I do not promise anything at the moment but we will definitely look into the matter so thank you very much once again to RCP IIT and at all the participants thank you very much