 Yes sir, we are live sir, please start. Okay, we'll start. Morning everyone, thank you for being here with us for the launch today. We are launching the new initiative from NPTEL and NPTEL plus portal as well as our redone NPTEL website. I invite Professor Vignesh Muthu Vijay, who is a faculty in the department of biotechnology, IIT Madras and the coordinator of both the NPTEL and the IIT BSE programs to give the welcome address. Hello everybody, I'm very happy to welcome all of you for this launch event. So we are glad to be launching two major initiatives. The first one is the NPTEL plus, which is the self-paced portal and also the new website. I would like to welcome Professor Kamakoti, who is the new director, who just took over about 10 days back, welcome sir. I would like to welcome Professor Andrew Kangaraj, the coordinator for NPTEL programs. I also want to welcome Professor Ramakrishna, who is an NPTEL coordinator here at IIT Madras. I would like to welcome Pratap Haridars, who used to be the NPTEL coordinator in the past and currently serves at the vice chairman of the, thank you, welcome all, let's have the launch. I invite Professor Kamakoti, the director of IIT Madras and the chair of NPTEL PIC to kindly launch both the portals now. So I am very happy to launch NPTEL plus, followed by NPTEL new website. Thank you, thank you, Professor Kamakoti. This is the new website, the NPTEL plus website that's been launched right now. Let's go back to the new NPTEL site, a very new look and feel for NPTEL and get t-shirts. You can see all the stars and the faculty. It's a very nice new website. Thank you, Professor Kamakoti. Okay, next I invite Professor Andrew to continue and walk us through the two new portals, the features that will be unique there. And what is the addition that we're bringing on with the NPTEL plus portal? So a couple of quick words from me before I begin. We're really, really, really happy that all of you are here. We didn't have an adequate opportunity to welcome all of the participants who joined us live into this program. We're very happy to have Professor Kamakoti, Professor Pratap, director and dean at IIT Madras and my fellow coordinators, Vignesh, Ramakrishna, so many other faculty and students across the country and joined us. Thank you very much for that. NPTEL plus is a wonderful new initiative. Actually, it's not very new as such, but a launch is always new and exciting. So let me talk about why NPTEL plus, what is NPTEL plus and how does it look, etc. Give me one minute. We just go to NPTEL plus. So NPTEL has traditionally used its own learning platform. We don't outsource our platform to anybody. We built it from scratch and we use our own LMS, our own front end, our own registration processes and etc. And a lot of people have asked us to share that, to market that or put it out there and let everybody use it. Number one. Number two, a lot of NPTEL courses are offered only in the two semesters. If you want to get a certificate, you better join the regular semester and get. There's no question of getting anything outside of that. And for popular industry-oriented courses or many other popular courses, people want a certificate at their own time and their own convenience. So we wanted to have self-paced learning through NPTEL courses and certification also. So now that's also something that we offer here. The third very important part is IITs, generally these good institutions do a lot of short-term programs. Traditionally, they've been doing the short-term programs. Some 30 people will come into a hall and the professor will teach. It's a very nice learning experience, but it was very limited and closed. Now we wanted to take that online and put it out there as well. So that's another big step we have made in this direction. And finally, many others outside of IITs also. There are many government organizations, private organizations, just independent people who are good, great teachers who wanted to offer their course on the NPTEL platform seeing that it's the national program on technology and that's learning. So all these things we are solving through NPTEL plus, this is our ATEC portal. The ATEC portal from NPTEL in which all these courses are going to sit. Let me just quickly walk through. This is home. This has like this carousel, which these days you find in every web page. You see a carousel and the logo of all the institutes are offering courses. Popular courses will come here and testimonials from people who have learned from NPTEL. The main meat of the site is in these programs. NPTEL courses will take you to the NPTEL courses which are available for self-paced learning. You can click on any one of these courses. Let's say you want to know about introduction to machine learning and there is a cost associated with it. Like I said, it's our own portal that we are using to, you know, funded through money we raise through the use of the portal. So there's a very, very minimal cost to make sure that we can run it successfully. For the certification, at least we believe it's really, really worth the time. Just imagine learning machine learning from a leading prof at IITM and getting a certificate in the process. So that's the description for the course and the certification process is actually very, very simple. You simply join the course because there's a fee for joining the course. You join the course, you study at your own pace, do assignments at your own pace. When you're ready to write an exam, you ask for an exam, you write the exam and there is a separate exam fee because we run a remote proctor exam for you or maybe even an actual physical proctor exam for you. There's a fee for that. If you pay the fee, write the exam, you can get a certificate. There are smaller modules you can learn. You can learn 12-week modules, 4-week modules and all that. And you get a certificate which has your name on it and it has your photo on it. A very nice looking certificate from NPTEL and IIT Madras. If IIT Madras is offering the course, other IITs would have their own courses. So this is programs. IIT workshops. I mentioned IIT workshops to you. A lot of short-term programs are available. You can go in and register. Advances in optical communication is one of the workshops that's currently open. You can register for it right now. And once again, we are a government organization. So we give different rates for different people. If you're a college teacher, you pay only 1000. If you're an industry partner, you pay more. Government organizations, you pay somewhere in between. So we discriminate based on who is taking these courses as well. And these are cutting-edge new results that faculty are presenting. And the deadline looks like it's just a few hours away. So please go ahead and register. And other courses are still coming soon. We haven't yet populated it. Mainly we're thinking of government organizations which want to push their courses online. But it can be anybody. Anybody who thinks they can draw an audience can come in and put their courses here and benefit from this. So this is NPTEL Plus. Thanks once again to everybody for being here for the launch. The next is the new NPTEL website. So I've been a coordinator for too long. Some people will say about 10 years now as NPTEL coordinator, I've seen the website grow purely in an organic fashion. Anytime we wanted some new initiative, we would launch a new website, new database, new front-end, new back-end, everything new. And as you know, I think Prosecum-Coding will know very well, once you have 10 different applications like that, integrating them into one new back-end with multiple possibilities for wonderful front-ends and accumulating all this data is a very, very non-trivial, difficult task. And I should really congratulate the team for putting their time and effort and blood and sweat together to accomplish this. They have accomplished it. They've integrated everything in the back-end now and were able to create fantastic pages for you just from this case. You see these carousels, then there's news and announcements, there's testimonials. The first page is very simple. And all the meat is inside initiatives which has local chapters, industry associates, translation, grade preparation, CSR, internship, faculty-initiating workshops. You can click on every one of them and you get all the information that you want. You can go, you can look at colleges, you can click on particular colleges. You will see, you know, Raji Lakshmi Engineering College, what they have done, etc. Everything integrated into one clean website. Okay? So of course, the programs are what is many people would consider the main part of NPTEL and you can come in and look at NPTEL courses and you can search for any course since the Professor Pratap is here. Okay, I think you should search for instructor here. So let me just search for introduction to research. So you see the course, it's a very popular course and you can see everything is integrated here. The course details, if you want to go to Swayam for certification, you can do that. If you want self-based certification, you can do that. You can look at statistics, how many people have so far enrolled in this course, 68,000, how many people for registered for exam over every semester, what all they have done. You can see the toppers list, who have all the toppers in different semesters. You know, we are able to integrate all of that, which were all independent applications syllabus certificate and you can also see lectures. If you want to see the actual lecture, this is funny talking about literature survey and you can see the, you know, the subtitles or the text. This is, I think it's called something, what is it called? It's the text scrolls here. So for instance, if you want to go here and you want to see the video, once you play the video, if you want to see what's there here, it will go here. If you go here, the subtitles will also quickly catch up to that. So it's all very interesting new stuff that we have been able to add into the portal. So I should now bring to you the people who are behind the creation of this portal. We are really, really thankful for this wonderful team. We have a very young team, a brilliant team that's led by Sorna. She's the technical lead and Shankar is a developer in the team. Both of them played active role and Satya has been guiding them. She's a senior developer. She's been with us for quite a long while. We're really happy to have them. And the other team members are the two Nivedas and Chitra and Rudra. They're part of the development team as well. And then of course, design is everything, isn't it? And these things, and we have three wonderful designers in the design team, Miraj, Rajesh and Adarsh. And one more important group of people are the people who managed the whole affair. So we have Lakshmi, Kamala, Divya and Sandhya who played a very important role managing everything, talking to different stakeholders, bringing everybody into the same page. One more. Finally, the whole team, NPTEL is a completely team driven activity. We have a lot of people. This is the whole team. We went as a team for an outing and you can see the pictures from there. So many different people, a very young team, a very eager team, which is going to do wonderful new things for you going forward. Thank you very much for patiently listening to me. And now let's have some comments from Principal Thaap. Thank you for walking us through the portal to Sandhya. And learn us for watching this session. I would urge you to go to the two new websites and actually check it out. Give us your feedback on how they are, give us suggestions. If you'd like to see more, just to avoid the NPTEL plus portal currently has only about 10 courses on the site and about 10 workshops that are open for registration currently. We will be populating more as the days go by. So watch out for that space, save that link and keep going there many times as you want to check out our new programs. I now invite from Sir Pratap Haridas, who is the Dean of Academy courses here at IIT Madras. He is the Vice-Chair of NPTEL program implementation committee too. He's a faculty in the department of metallurgical and materials engineering. Sir Pratap, some thoughts from you, please. Thank you, Professor Andrew and thank you, Bharti. It's a pleasure to be here this morning. NPTEL as a program has been around now nearly two decades, 20 years and it's surprising how time flies. Many things have been accomplished, many firsts accomplished by NPTEL. It is a much sought after education portal and adds a lot of value, not simply empty certificates, but a lot of value to the education system in our country. It has really been supported extensively by the government in all these years and they have been very supportive, very encouraging of the NPTEL team to try new things and the two initiatives that are being launched today are part of these new ideas that NPTEL has undertaken now. The first of course is the NPTEL Plus which caters to all the new demand that is there from the learning community on how they would like to learn, in what modes they would like to learn and in particular we would like to facilitate these new modes of learning while still maintaining good rigor in the learning process and NPTEL has always been very good at this. We have always managed to scale to very large numbers of learners while still maintaining quality while maintaining rigor of the learning process. The NPTEL Plus website and all the features it enables which in particular the idea that you can learn at any time that is at any time like today you can say I want to learn this particular course I want to do it in the next three weeks and this portal will enable you to do that in a rigorous way and get a certificate. You don't have to wait for six months from now and then start your learning process. You can start today. So this kind of flexibility while still maintaining quality and rigor is really a very welcome addition to the learning environment in India and I'm really happy and delighted that NPTEL has chosen to make this available to the public and also has made this whole portal there's a lot of learning a lot of detailing that goes on behind the scenes for this kind of a portal to be available for people to for a lakhs of people, tens of lakhs of people to use in a very predictable and stable manner. So all of that learning is now available to the entire learning community teaching learning community in India for them to utilize these resources and unlike commercial offerings we are not offering you something that is one generation old we are offering you what we are using directly I mean it's the latest version that is out there and we strongly believe that a lot of education and institutes will benefit from it. The revised NPTEL site is of course more to make it contemporary in our experience so that you have the same look and feel as any contemporary site that you go to and the kinds of features that you expect the kind of navigation that you expect is also available there and so it assists you in the overall experience learning experience that you have. So in all again I'm very delighted that these two initiatives see the light of day today and I'm so happy that we are in a position to share this with all of you. Thank you very much. Thank you Professor Pratap for those words. We now invite Professor Kamagoti, Director of IIT Madras and the chair of NPTEL PIC to kindly give his thoughts on the two new sites. Thank you Barthi. So it's a great pleasure for me to be a part of this function. We know the early teachers in the NPTEL platform as early as around 2003-2004 at that point when it was launched. So NPTEL plus plus the NPTEL new website actually we can call it the NPTEL university I think so we are almost there. And this 20 years in 2001 or 2002 when this project was conceived we never thought that there will be a pandemic in 2021 but this pandemic NPTEL had been a major source of resource for everyone and importantly the dedicated NPTEL coordinators I just want to name them Mangal Sundar, Pratap, Andrew, Vignesh and Ramakrishna all of them and of course the entire dedicated team Barthi and others. We have actually learned the art of online education I think we have now come to that stage and that justifies as now launching NPTEL plus as a platform as a service right now anyone who wants to launch a course can use this platform as a service and we have learned all the intricacies of this all the pros all the cons and we have converted the cons into pros and I think now we are in a good place where we can give as Pratap mentioned we can provide this online education and at the same time with rigor and with also the adaptability to the mode of learning so the two modes that we are talking of one is the semester mode and another is your own based learning I think all these have become a reality and thanks to the big experience that we had in this on this Republic Day I am very very happy that this is this we are able to dedicate to the nation for the use of the nation and I am sure this will be a major platform and we will reach more and more students in days to come always as a publicly funded institution we always ask for our relevance in the society there are a lot of satisfactory answers there are a few powerful answers and I am sure this is a very very powerful answer that we say that this is what we can do for the society and again I thank the entire NPTEL team and the Dean Academy courses for this wonderful effort that you are taking and you continue to take for long now and now I am sure the new inventions that you are bringing up it is very heartening and I am sure this is going to take us long in our bringing in very inclusive education addressing the need not just of people who got into the IIT admission but also for students for every engineering student in the country with this I hand over back to Bharti thanks for this opportunity it's a wonderful day and a wonderful experience Thank you sir, thank you for the kind words I now invite I now invite Professor Ramakrishna who is a faculty in the department of electrical engineering IIT Madras and a coordinator of NPTEL IIT Madras I would like to mention one more faculty Professor Nikhil Kaisari he is also a coordinator with IIT Madras he is in a sabbatical so he is not able to join us currently and also I would like to thank the coordinators of the other institutes who have joined us on this platform today from the various IITs and IITs who have been a part of NPTEL and also been a constant source of support the NPTEL courses we have is from various institutes and they have also been major players in contributing to the repository that we have today So, Professor Ramakrishna, over to you for the world of thanks Thank you Bharti So, first of all a big thank you to the director IIT Madras, Professor Kamakoti for gracing this occasion and his kind words under his leadership we can actually make what he said the NPTEL University a reality Okay, so there are a bunch of people, organization, institute, industry to thank the first of all would be the Ministry of Education for its constant support over the years A big thank you to Professor Bhaskar Ramurthy former director IIT Madras under his leadership we grew leaps and bounds from what we were in say 2014 or even before that till what we are in 2022 We also acknowledge help from IIT Madras Administration other offices at IIT which help in smooth conduct of NPTEL operations Thanks to all the faculty from over 15 institutes who offer courses on our platform we have help not only with courses but with reviewing courses help us in classifying domain certifications bringing in fresh ideas and all this in addition to the regular work commitments that's quite commendable and of course not to mention all the coordinators and NPTEL teams at all other institutions How can I not acknowledge all the efforts of the TAs of the courses who bring a lot of fresh ideas who kind of make life much easy for the course offering faculty and of course the sparks of our local chapters a special mention to all the talented people who work in the background Professor Prasap was mentioning of things that happened in the background Professor Andrew showed a big team of about close to 100 people a special thanks to them so the team consists of the studio team the course managed team, the exam team or as we call them the QP team people managing exams at the centers the accounts and finances team the publicity social media team the software team the team that manages the data the team that does the transcription and translation student activities team in terms of internships coordinating soft skill programs organizing CSR funding and of course answering lots of queries emails, phone calls from students we also would like to thank our industry partners persistent persistence systems the Google Cloud team, our exam partners TCS exam partners outside India our transcription vendors our transcription partners and all other CSR partners and of course thanks for all who are joining this event remotely so I wish the teachers a happy teaching I wish all the learners a happy learning and a new experience through this new platform and towards the end I also wish everyone a happy Republic Day, Jai Hind Thank you, thank you for that Professor Ankrishna, so Professor Andrew any closing cards before we close this launch No, nothing particularly happy learning I always say happy learning learn all the time I think it was Gandhi who said that live like you're going to die tomorrow learn like you live forever so keep learning and that's fun Thank you Thank you all for joining us today taking time out to be here at this launch like I said mark the two URLs go there, check it out today itself register for the programs that are there and keep watching what we bring out new few weeks, days, months Thank you all for joining us, happy Republic Day Thank you, Balaji we can stop going live