 So, what is the complex figures in my lesson plan or in what? In lesson plan. How to write the figures? So, that is it is like you creating a so, this is a web page that you are creating right. So, the when you create the web page, you are allowed a specific editor. So, this is a specific editor, where you can do the typical things like adding a table, putting a figure, putting a link, anything that you want. So, it is like you have a image on your computer right. So, I just put this one here. So, this is a web page you are creating right. So, typically you many of them need to know html. Now, you do not need to know html, just plain word kind of specific editing. So, you just go and add an image. Now, this will no no tags, it is just pure specific editing. Cut and paste also will work if you are working in a that is cut and pasting is controlled by your browser. So, if your browser allows cut and paste, then it will do it. Sundar, I have just a small question. How do you manage the logistics? Because now you have some window of 1 hour 2 hours for the assignment to be finished. And you keep this infrastructure in the lab or somewhere where students go login and do the job or how is it? Because in IAD you have a big infrastructure you can do, but in smaller colleges how do they do? They keep a lab for that specific for this. Right. So, the way we have is we have tried both the modes. One is have a lab where you have 30 40 computers and then call the students in batches. If you have more the more number of students call them in batches and anywhere you if you provided you have a good large question bank, it does not matter of this you have question bank of same difficulty. So, then you call the students in batches and finish it off or if you trust the students I mean which is difficult, if you trust the students you can ask them to do it from anywhere they want. Right, but typically what you do is in that case you keep a really large question bank. So, that knows two students get the same question, they work out from they do this you give a very strict time frame. You give a limited if you have if you need one hour to solve, if you quiz this one hour you give questions which will take one and half hours, but you set up a large question bank and let the students attempt from anywhere they want. So, each student will be busy with his solving for his own rather than helping other student. So, in that case we can have. No, see. Because anywhere in the mean. No, anywhere. So, I conducted by the students took it from their hostels. So, my question is is the student required to register for every course or he is registered for a set of courses. So, that has an administrator you can control. So, the way it is done in IIT is there is an academic section where the student actually register for a course. So, we have one database that database directly ported to the Moodle database. So, a student registers there which goes to the standard academic records which also gets transferred here. That is one thing as a teacher if it is a small number of a small group you can easily ask your teaching assistant your yourself can look at the list of students and enroll it that is one level or you can give in the class you give a password which is known only to the students. And when the students see a list of courses offered in your college students goes there only the students who know the password can do it. So, there are different ways that you can implement that. I also wanted to know if a student is registered for some set of courses for example, subjects may be. Then how he can search for a specific topic as regards to content of that particular subject. Of the particular subject. So, how to search for a topic? Is it keyword based search that takes place in Google etcetera or. No, the thing is it cannot what did you say is it a queue yeah you can use keyword based search, but what I am trying to say is if you are here a course means a subject. So, once you are to the course page once you are in the course page there are some things that you can search the search capability of this is not. So, very advanced only thing that you can search here is this forums. So, there is a discussion forum you type a keyword. So, those things will be those are easily searchable, but sometimes you will have scanned pdrs pdf files scanning of that searching of those is not possible. Let me come back to this what is the purpose of this model the purpose of this model is to guide a student participating student through the subject. If a student ever has to search something there is something wrong with the student. What what should student be searching student should be following the course point by point day by day day by day every week things are uploaded. Did you discuss the files thing for example, there are files where you typically upload all files in the files thing in which you make different folders. So, I will show you after he finishes let's say my course further. Frankly this is not a general internet web page where people are searching anything blindly. They are following a course. No, no, so the student suppose a quiz is given a quiz will never be given on something arbitrary that quiz will be related to a topic which was discussed for that topic there will be a material where the material is to be found is known you get my point. So, therefore in fact student should never be required to search anything he should be able to hear she should be able to go directly to whatever is relevant study that and use that. Like for example, in this my notes course notes are here in this topic and following the course notes I have quizzes. So, it is quite straight forward that they just need to see I will tell you where the student may have to search suppose there are hundred posts by people that's all because within those posts you can make a search within those posts as he showed you can make a search. So wherever there are text inputs will people will be able to make a search but even the posts are not arbitrarily organized there are threads. So, for example, a particular topic is started by someone on that thread there could be multiple posts is exactly like any web based threads. So, you will be guided in a almost a hierarchical fashion while using the word. Yes sir, my question actually came from from the beginning of this lecture that because Moodle is open source there are very large number of people using it no, no, no, no. Moodle as a software is being used by large number of people but Moodle configured to be used for a course is being used only by those course students and the teachers. So, there is no notion of searching all courses on Moodle and things like the courses are not open source. The administrator has made it public. See this course can be private to the students of the course or it can be public. Public to so if you have this course open to public obviously your Google search engine will come and search and you will get it in text. But otherwise. Otherwise it is typically closed. That's right. The course is not open source. The Moodle as the management software is open source. So, when you use that software in JSITS for example, nobody else need to access it. My own Moodle cannot be accessed by people other than those who are registered for the course but I am using the same Moodle. I just want to ask you like the if I what do all this exercise for my subject. I will save it as a what at some kind of a dot whatever we the extension is there and then I will give it to as a web page to the all the students. No, no, no. You do not creating any file separately. You are creating a file within this. You do not have a separate editor at all. It is a editor provided by the Moodle software. And you say I want to create a web page. It will give you an interface to create a web page. The way it stores is not your botheration. You are simply seeing a specific editor. That is all. If you know HTML it is just added advantage but you forget that you know HTML. Let me explain. You are just seeing a specific editor and it is just saved as such. You do not know what extension it is saved, what it has done. You do not know. You do not need to know. Let me clarify further. There is no notion of you creating something and then separately posting it in Moodle. You create everything in Moodle except for the documents which you have created independently. Whatever format you have those documents you can upload to Moodle. Like you created a document. When you upload Moodle stores it internally in its own database. So you are not bothered about where it is stored or whatever. Once you install Moodle Moodle will take care of all storage. So even the web page that he mentioned you do not create that web page separately. You have a utility to write something which will appear as a web page internally to that particular subject for which you are the editor. And if the student want to give or appear for a quiz they have to just configure that Moodle. No they do not configure anything. The teacher configures one Moodle. On that Moodle people will see the quizzes. All students will see the quiz. The student takes the quiz means what he actually says I want to appear for this quiz. The quiz comes before him. He gives his answer. The answers get loaded. Students do not configure anything. Even teachers do not configure anything. In IIT Bombay for example there is a central administration that you will see tomorrow when you see the installation. Not tomorrow day after tomorrow. So that particular thing is configured for the whole institute. Now over and above that if individual teachers wish to set certain parameters. Like he is an extensive advanced user. So he has set so many other parameters which are useful to him. I am let's say an intermediate user. I am actually. So I do not fiddle around with parameters which are set as default. I am happy with that. I will show you my own site for my course which I use. I have not done any installation. I have not done any configuration. The moment I become a teacher for the course the data goes from the academic office to an independent interface which has been set up by the institute administration of the institute information system. So we have like LDAP setup for the whole institute. Now I have an LDAP user ID and password. So the moment my user ID is there when my name goes into that moodle as a teacher for the course CS634 for example. Automatically a course is created. Automatically my entry is made as a teacher. And once that entry is made I am now responsible for managing that subject within the moodle. I am not concerned how the moodle is running how it is storing whatever. But you people at the respective remote centers will be concerned with that as well. You will have to set up the moodle for these 35 teachers who will come. And each one of those 35 teachers when they go back to their colleges will have to set up the moodle. What we are suggesting is while we may do all of this with respect to just one subject that we are teaching. The moodle is such a powerful weapon that other teachers in your colleges and their colleges also can use it effectively. That is the purpose. Just to add to that point see the way a student would see this whole thing is when you switch a role to a student. This is how the student will see. So student sees there is a quiz on statics. This is that this quiz has closed you cannot attempt it now. But otherwise this is what the student will see. He cannot configure or do anything with the setup. He just see that there is some notes posted he will read the notes. Another will say that I want to see the post a new discussion question. I post it or if I want to participate in the quiz I participate. So there is nothing configuring for the student as such. And what will be the course setup by you? I cannot see it from outside remote remote areas. Unless you are a student in the course or unless I say that the course is visible to everybody. So for example there is a provision by guest login. So IIT courses if you are a student in an IIT course and if you are configured our elder properly you can access that course from wherever you are. But if you are not a student you will not be able to access. See just like when you run a course in your own college it is meant for only those 30 students isn't it? You don't want 3 crore students to figure out what you are doing. Not necessary. If you wish you can make that course public. But be ready to ensure that your infrastructure can take lakhs of hits. Otherwise your internet bandwidth will choke up. So that is all a matter of choice for the teacher and for the local administrators. Let me put it this way. You have an academic office in your institute. Yes. That academic office handles usually the conduct of exams, definition of syllabus as per the senate resolution etc. Moodle is an academic office created individually for each subject is the notion. Does your academic office work for rest of the world? No. Academic office works for your institute. If there are 2 institutions which are working collaboratively like 20 institutions in a university. The university academic office will work for all 20 institutions. We are trying to create a distributed Moodle in the country like that as an extension. What Professor Sundar is describing is the Moodle in IIT Bombay and how it is being used. More importantly he is describing that if you are a teacher of a subject. How you can exploit Moodle to administer that subject very well. That's it. So you are administering that subject for those 50 students. Nothing else. That is the purpose. But we have to communicate in our administrative department or academic department like that that this kind of activity is done in IIT Bombay and we can adopt that for our course. You don't have to describe anything to the academic department. You teach a course. What do you tell your academic department? You tell them only the marks that they final get, isn't it? What else do you do? Nothing. But what tutorials you are giving? Let's say sample information you are giving. What is your schedule of weekly teaching? Does your academic office concern ever with that? Those trained marks are specially forward for all these internal activities are there. So if I go for this method and others are also always taking the help of this one. That will be more easy for students and how to manage all this. How the internal marks will be given. We can have that sources. I appreciate that. But please understand that you are looking at it from the administration of the evaluation marks. The purpose of Moodle is far more. The purpose of Moodle is actually keep all the exchangeable information. All the useful information at one place in an organized fashion for the course. That is the main purpose. Evaluation is a side activity important for the students. But that is not the most important part of the course. The purpose of the course is that students learn what is there. And you can see for example the best example he gave is I can set a quiz. Where I can say people can attempt multiple times. Sir this is for my subject. But it should be for each and every subject. But that other teacher better be subject. I just communicate how the things work. Not only you should communicate you should give the same top to all your teachers in your college. There is another set of series which I will be giving you DVD. We conducted a five day workshop on effective teaching of engineering courses. An ex colleague of mine from the department who had developed this course. She came and many people participated in that. You might want to do that. But I just don't see anything specific about Moodle. For example as I mentioned the open course project in MIT and the development in Michigan and other places. They are using Sakai. Sakai is another sort of collaborative information management tool like this. The point is in today's time we have to use such tools to be more effective. And particularly when... It is really very effective but I think so if in case we have to post certain things. And if in case the student have to post certain things and quiz has to be handled. I think so it will be more effective if in case the student as well as the faculty. If in case on Saturdays or Sundays they are able to handle the things from home also. From? From their home. Not necessarily you don't have to come to the college. Yeah. So it is a web based. It is a web based. You have access to web. What you said was you have to install the Moodle. You have to install the Moodle in your institute on the server. So this Moodle is installed on IIT server. It is centrally administered. I access this Moodle from my home within IIT. I access it from San Francisco as well. The excess control is a different issue. Whether you want to give free access across internet where security is not guaranteed. That is why what we use is an LDAP excess control. Which is going to be discussed separately I think the institution and so on. But you can decide which way you want to do the excess control. Otherwise you can impact the beauties. The whole thing is web based. You don't require anything other than a browser to access this. That's it. So browser based. I want to know about the configuration of Moodle. Does it have minus killer Postgres as the pattern? And whether can we integrate it into this? All in good time. Tomorrow when we discuss the installation and implementation they will answer. But yes you are right. We have integrated with our LDAP data. My question is if you need to set this up in some university. We have our own management system. So that's fine. But in smaller universities what would be the hardware requirements? So would it be expensive to set up Moodle? For example do you need a large server? That's the question. You see it depends upon what is the total number of users that you want to manage on that Moodle. So if for example you are using it for one course and let's say there are 100 students. One teacher and four teaching assistants. An ordinary PC connected to your local area network will be more than adequate. You can distribute it because we cannot expect the smaller universities to have say centralized servers. You will be surprised what smaller colleges have today. Okay. Yes you will be surprised. Hardware is cheap. Just to give you an instance when the first Gigabyte disk was purchased in IIT Bombay in my department. I was heading the department then. The cost had just reportedly come down from 3.4 lakh rupees to 2.7 lakh rupees. One Gigabyte hard disk. I had to appoint a committee of three professors. A purchase committee. Do the whole diligence of procurement and so on. Many years later when my son was studying his engineering. One day he announced that from Lamington Road I got a 40 GB disk. No committee. Okay. So things are different today. The important problem is you will recall what Professor Sundar said initially. There are some other excellent learning management tools also which are costed products. And the costed products in terms of software licenses, the number of user licenses become actually more cost. Today a very decent entry level server with adequate memory, very good power, multiple core things etc. etc. does not cost more than 40,000 rupees. All that you need to do is put it on your network and you have huge amount of space. You can sleep in that disk. Okay. So the constraints that we had 10 years ago do not exist in terms of hardware. The constraints usually exist in terms of software licensing and expertise to use that software. What we are saying is Moodle is open source. Moodle can also be connected to a back end oracle if you want. Any JDBC, ODBC compliant. But recall the question that was asked and the answer that was given. You can configure either MySQL or PostgreSQL. Both are open source. There are absolutely zero license cost in installing and using Moodle and the associated pieces of software that you. Even if you want to put a network control for access. LDAP has implementations from the cheapest to the costliest. But the cheapest that we use is the normal LDAP lightweight directory that we get along with any Linux distribution. And what we want to happen is that during this workshop now and subsequently when you conduct the workshop in July. This message should go. That is why all the distribution that we have is all open source distribution. You carry it with you. Take it. By all means continue to use any other piece of software that you have in other places. This is absolutely no problem. But as far as this effort is concerned that is what we are planning. So I want to ask about whatever answers students are given. Can teachers see that after they have submitted the answers? Yes. So of course you would. It is stored in the back end. One is direct I can show you. See one is in this case in the quizzes the answers are what this is the. So Gaurav has made two attempts. One attempt here and another attempt here. So I just go and click on this best attempt. I can see what answer he has written. So 28.7 he has got correct. This is automatically evaluated. I can see what answers he has written. This is for automatic evaluation. Other thing is where student actually submits a web page. Submits a normal written page. You are also able to see that either as an attachment or as a page. And you can just below that there is a box for evaluation. So you see it on the top. Evaluate at the bottom. So do it one by one. The evaluation will be non-automatic. I mean students will submit their handwritten page. Handwritten as in written replies, long answers etcetera. Which your TAs can evaluate. And they can allocate marks. He is an advanced user. So he sets up quizzes which are automatically correct. Remember the efforts that he put in to become an advanced user. He is now reaping the harvest of saving all his time in doing the Golagiri of evaluation. Like some students already have some kind of management information system in place. Which are based on some kind of backing. If the backing is very primitive like say file based and like that. Can it be integrated easily or there will be lot of labor involved. Just installing Apache, MySQL is very straight what comes default in most of the system. So it is not at all a difficult thing. You are saying whether you can integrate your own back end with this. My suggestion is do not even attempt it. It is not worth it. It will involve lot of labor in just entering the data. No, do not enter any data. You set this model up as a separate environment and use it for your course. The only data that you have to enter is roll number and names of the people. And usually you will have a file upload facility that you can integrate. So treat this as an independent standalone thing. At best what you can do is you can collect a soft copy of final query report. Which you can take a print out sign and send it to academic. So what kind of database you are talking about the student database? The problem is when the institute already has its own management information system. Wherein we are supposed to do some web best things for our own course. And then if the switching to model has to take place, then it is a big thing. Absolutely no, I think we should continue to use your system if you are comfortable with it. But 99 to 1, if you will explain the advantages of this, the institute may agree to switch over to using it. I have not seen any homegrown academic administrative system for the courses and contents. I am not talking about the academic administration. That is the subject courses. There cannot be anything that is better than this. It is very difficult for anybody to have developed such thing on their own. So here you can see the courses that I am teaching. Let us take this CS64 intermain system course. So I have for example a large number of, if you look at participants here. There are some whatever 139 participants and their details here. You can see users may want to upload their pictures. And in fact you should encourage, given the webcams, you should encourage them so that you can recognize people. I find it very difficult with 139 students class. And I do not know what will happen to me when next year I teach 850 students in Convocation Hall. It will be mad house. What I wanted to show you was not this but says something like look at the files. So you are asking about the contents and so on. So for example a person who is not extraordinarily well versed with Moodle. This is my set of teaching assistants who help me. They will usually organize things like this. So if you look at tutorials for example, in this there are files. Usually we use either the open office or PDF. But you could have a doc file here. People could download this or see this. The point is PDF means because every browser has a PDF plugin. So you can automatically see PDF files easily. That is the reason. Otherwise you could use anything that you wanted. We have lecture slides. These are all PPT files. People can download them, use them. We first used to keep ODT files. Then people did not have access to open office as easily. So we started keeping PPT files. This is absolutely no problem. Whatever document you want to upload. But the point is you should generally categorize them like this. So quizzes and assignments. So you can see there are assignments. They are quizzes. We subsequently insert their answers. In my course they are usually discussed. And they are distributed in hard copies. I do not know why my students have not uploaded the answers also. But generally they do that. Now what I wanted to say is that without going into too many details you can use this model installation in the most simplistic form. And still believe me your teaching will become more effective. Try to look at it from a student's perspective. A student gets to know what is going to be the schedule next week. If you go back to the weekly schedule for example. Once I upload my lecture slides all I do is I attach those lecture slides here. So for example what is going to be the schedule this week? What is going to be the lecture slides for this session? Please understand one thing. The fact of life is that in most of the smaller places because teachers are inundated with work. They do not have ordinarily time to plan things in advance. There are many places where teachers have to just rush to take a course. And my humble submission is let us use this opportunity to modify our own self discipline. To say that no matter what if I am going to teach a course and if that course is going to be 14 weeks. In this summer I will plan for those 14 weeks. I will modify my slides at the last moment. But I shall not go to a class unless my slides are uploaded on the side ahead of time. Even if I do not use slides and I do not have a projector I will actually make those slides and upload them for people to be able to glance them later. I may be using chalkboard. So these are variety of things. The dream project that I am talking about is not merely conducting an ISD workshop for thousand teachers. It is actually to change ourselves so drastically that we do a huge quality improvement in the effectiveness of teaching learning process. So now here is the, I will just mention two things. He has shown you online quizzes. How do you conduct a online quiz when you are conducting a class? So I mentioned the use of clicker. I will be designing and actually making thousand prototypes and trying them in my course here in Convocation Hall. Where I show a quiz and I give 30 seconds for students to answer and their response is collected directly from that system. I want such system to be designed in a distributed fashion so that if possible for this July course itself I will send across some 40 odd devices to each one of your colleges with a collecting station and some distributed software which you can put on the serverment for this particular course. So if I am giving a lecture and I shall be giving many lectures in that course because that subject is computer programming. When I show a quiz here at 30 remote centers these thousand teachers will answer that quiz online. They need not have access to computer which is required if you set it up through moodle. And I want all that information from those 30-35 teachers to be collected automatically on your server and FTP to be initiated automatically here. A coalition software which will collect all these files and will show the results in 15 seconds flat. So that system is now being under designed to be implemented by about 40 people working in this summer. In exactly the similar way can you think of extending moodle to be a distributed system. For example, take this subject. All of you would be required to set up the moodle for this subject for the IST workshop in your places. We are going to use moodle. But your moodle in your respective colleges will cattle to those 35 participating teachers. You will give their assignments. You will do exactly the same thing at their place. They should also have access to the centralized system. Why can't we have only a centralized server and everybody access it? Of course we will have a centralized server. But imagine the internet connection breaks down. Should it mean that those 35 teachers who are assembled at your places can't do anything? They must of course be able to do that. So now we are talking about a true distributed design of the moodle framework, not just the database, backend database. That is a harder problem. Again a group of software engineers and summer interns are going to work on that problem. Tending which what my suggestion is, we will set up at least the backend interface where on a daily basis the incremental changes in your respective moodles can be uploaded into the central side so that we have the totality available here. Designing and implementing a distributed moodle of this magnitude has not been. Next we come to the subject portal. What is the purpose of that subject portal? We said that that will be a portal for collaborative creation of course contents, use of the question bank. Notice Professor Sundar correctly pointed out that if you have a question bank, people can select these questions. We are planning a question bank of minimum 2,000 questions and answers because 1,000 teachers are participating and each one would contribute 2, 3, 4 questions and answers. One of the requirements will be all these teachers must contribute multiple choice quizzes and they fill in the blankises which can be automated. So even for their students in their colleges they should be able to install this moodle for their college and use it for 100, 200 students for at least this course or this subject. But for the portal what do we expect? These 1,000 teachers all of you with three levels of coordination, hierarchy for that larger subject portal. IIT Bombay is the coordinating agency. It will set up the portal here, a much larger server. Next level of hierarchy is those 1335 coordinators who are actually participated in this program. Next level is those 1,000 teachers and the next level is those 8,000 teachers who teach programming in the country. And how many students? Every year 6 lakh students. I expect that within one year the moodle installation at the central site should be catering to 6 lakh registered students not necessarily from the management of their quizzes and assignments and so on. But at least from the point of you of exposing them to what contents have been developed by all these people accessing those contents and participating in discussion forums. So we propose to use that portion of the moodle which permits collaborative discussion and development of material on a continuous basis. Although the main intention of moodle is to be a learning management system. We are saying we are using it as a resource management system rather than grading and such thing for the portal. That is the objective. In this context if any one of you have any ideas of what should be the functionality of the subject portal and how exactly we could use moodle, what portion of the moodle could be useful etc. You are most welcome to post in comments.