 A very good morning to all of you and a warm welcome to this fourth workshop in our series of enemy ICT and IST workshops. This workshop as you all know is on engineering mechanics and it is the fourth one in our series so far in the second phase. We have already conducted workshops on engineering thermodynamics, database management and green buildings. This is of course I am talking about the second phase and we have about 7500 participants across the country. We have remote centers joining us from Jammu to Kanyakumari and Silschar to Surat. So we have more or less covered the entire country this time. It's my proud privilege here to welcome you all to this workshop. I would like to now invite Professor Kanan Modgalyan the PI to please come and grace the stage. I would also like Professor Servic Banerjee to please join us. Professor Bandar Inamdar could not join us today so it's only Professor Banerjee at the moment. Professor Inamdar will be joining us a little later on. I now invite Professor Kanan Modgalyan to share his thoughts upon this workshop and this entire project. So Modgalyan. Good morning to all of you. So I am really delighted to be here and now that we made a change and we are starting at 10 o'clock, hopefully many of you could have joined in your remote centers. I want to take this opportunity to explain this project, the mission that funds this activity. This activity is funded by the National Mission on Education through ICT, NME ICT, MHRD, Department of Higher Education, MHRD, Government of India. It started in 2009, launched in February, we got the funding in May. This mission has three important activities. One is connectivity, the aim of this mission is to provide one GBPS bandwidth to every one of our universities and using that also provide bandwidth to every one of the affiliating colleges. This means the 400 universities that were there at that time in 2009 and about 20,000 colleges that were in existence would get the bandwidth. So this and NKN project are similar activities. Many people confuse the NME ICT's bandwidth provision with that of NKN. These two are two different activities. You can think of this as two collaborative activities, I will explain why. This NME ICT tries to give bandwidth to every one of the 400 universities and the 20,000 plus affiliating colleges. The NKN tries to provide bandwidth, has provided bandwidth to 1,000 institutions. These need not be colleges, these could be research centers, for example, BARC and so on. Now of course, a lot of input for the NME ICT's bandwidth provision comes from NKN. We work in close collaboration. As a matter of fact, some of the infrastructure that has been established by NKN is used for NME ICT also. In fact, we hope that in the near future NKN will be able to take up NME ICT's network as well and run them both. In fact, I would like to acknowledge Mr. Mani, who is a senior director, technical director in NKN, who is a great friend of NME ICT. Now just to give an idea of what this entailed, basically the colleges, the universities in the NME ICT network got bandwidth to about 1% of the cost at that time. I will not go into the details, but to just to give some numbers, about three years ago, maybe four years ago, some universities got 1 GBPS bandwidth for 10 years at a cost from their side of 55 lakhs. That's about 500 lakhs per year for 1 GBPS bandwidth. So many universities have benefited and there are some that still haven't benefited. So we would like to invite all of them to join. The reason why I wanted to point out the cost was that NME ICT model involves some amount of payment from the colleges and the universities, but it is only nominal. So this is the connectivity part. Then the second part is the device. All of you would know about the famous Akash device. It is the world's cheapest, least expensive, but very powerful computing device. And then IIT Bombay is glad to be a part of that. We procured 100,000 tablets, that is, 1 lakh tablets at a cost of 2,263 rupees a piece. And the pilot, all the 1 lakh tablets have been delivered. We have distributed over 70,000 tablets to a large number of colleges. In fact, 250 remote centers of our T10KT project. In fact, these have become Akash testing centers. So the idea is that the students at various colleges will have access to this nice device. So what next? The government has agreed. Now, in fact, not just the government, even the news media that had a lot of complaints at the very beginning says only good things about the Akash project now. And Akash 4 specifications have been announced already. And then Professor Ashok Jinjin Vala is the coordinator of those specs committee. DGSND has already announced that, has announced the document and has invited expressions of interest from various people. I believe a large number of vendors have shown interest. Now, what next from our side? IIT Bombay will continue to develop applications for this. Now that the procurement and delivery has been taken away from us, we can concentrate on the thing that we really like namely developing content, e-content applications and so on and so forth for this device. I am personally looking at developing Akash as a computing device. In fact, I am particularly interested in the net book version of Akash. Just imagine what will happen if we can get a full blown Linux based Akash with a full blown keyboard like a net book, no hanging wires and so on, with a net book, full blown keyboard, track pad, a dual core or a quad core, 1.5 gigahertz and all kinds of things available for of the order of let us say about 5000 rupees. Just imagine what this will do to our education. What it will do to our children in the country who do not have access to computers. Most children can then aspire to have a computer of their own and of course, it may be possible to use them as to play Angry Birds and things like that as well but we will be able to cater to the educational needs of a very large society. So that is something really exciting. Coming back to this mission, this Akash device is actually a convergence device. Many of the things that we are developing will be delivered through Akash. I will explain that when I go on to go on to the next focus area of the mission that is the content generation. So you know the famous NPTEL, this is funded by NME ICT. A project of similar magnitude is at IIT Bombay, the talk to attain talk, it started as talk to a teacher project, now it has become a substantial part of it has become a project, a big project T10KT are trained 10,000 teachers and that is a project which is going on now and as a matter of fact, it started as a trained 1000 teacher program but because of the success and the popularity of this, it has been now expanded into a 10,000 teacher training program. So there were several other projects, there are several other projects that are funded by this activity, this contents part of it. I will mention a few. One of them was to support the live transmission of CDEAP courses, CDEAP stands for Centre for Distance Engineering Education program and you can think of this as something quite different from let us say NPTEL, NPTEL is a studio recorded course whereas our live transmission at that time at least was seen as a separate activity and then I remember the Chairman Board of Governors of TCS of College of Engineering Pune, Mr. FC Kohli who is also considered as the father of Indian IT sector telling me about the benefits of live transmission. For example, he wanted the COEP students to get a taste of IIT education. He wanted his students to get IIT experience. What is IIT experience? He explained. One, if the faculty members make mistakes, he wanted his students to see it. He wanted his students to know that it is okay to make mistakes. When the faculty members at IIT cracked jokes, he wanted his students to see, he wanted them to know that one does not have to be serious all the time. The same time, he also wanted his students to know that every lecture is delivered and delivered on time. He wanted his students to go and ask his some of the faculty members that look IIT faculty members are delivering every lecture, why don't you also please deliver. He wanted his faculty members to go and tell his students, IIT students are doing so much work, why are you refusing to do the work? So he believed that through the live transmission, you not only get the content, but you get the pedagogy how a course is taught. So in fact, I'm delighted to note that today's program started on the dot at 10 o'clock. In fact, I want to thank the team for helping start on time. Some of the other projects, we have a project called FOSI, free and open source software in education. And then through that, we are supporting at IIT Bombay, of course, collaborated by students and faculty members, teachers from all over the country. And so we have, we provide support to Sylab, Python, OpenFoam. OpenFoam is something many of you would be interested in. This is computational fluid dynamics software equivalent of Fluent. And in fact, our colleague in mechanical engineering, Professor Shiva, has been spearheading it. We would be delighted to conduct workshops for all your colleges. Of course, not as a part of this program, because we have a tight schedule. Similarly, we will do this for Sylab. The Python effort is headed by my colleague, Professor Prabhu Ramachandran. We have other activities like OSCAD for circuit design and OpenFormal for formal verification by Professor Suprati Chakravarty. Sorry, there are lots of names, and I have to recall some of the names. And then we have SIMPAI for simulation, coin OR for optimization. Once again it is done by our colleagues, Professor Jayendraan and Professor Ashutosh Mahajan. What I plan to do is, I believe I'll get one slot on 5th of December. I think it's a four o'clock slot. I request all of you to join me at that time. I will explain to you, hopefully I'll convince you why we should switch over to open source software. Initially, there were plans to conduct a Sylab workshop as a part of this program. But because of time schedule, we may skip it, but then we would organize it separately to every one of you, if you are interested in, in every one of your colleges through a team that we have called events team of the Spurcon tutorial activity. So I forgot to mention about Spurcon tutorial. Through that, we are conducting IT training all over the country. And we train close to one lakh students every year. Many colleges have, many universities are accepting this as an accepted curriculum. For example, the HV University with 77 affiliating colleges has introduced Spurcon tutorials as a curriculum for two of their programs. I'll talk more about it on Thursday 5th of December. We have E Yantra project at IIT Bombay, headed by Professor Kavi Arya. We have NPTEL, we have NPTEL I already mentioned, NPTEL is for theory courses, a similar activity is being conducted for carried out for laboratory program. This is the virtual labs program. It is coordinated by Professor Ranjan Bose of IIT Delhi. So these are some of the programs, of course, there could be some, well, actually there are several programs. I'm not able to talk about all of those in this short time. So that is, that in a nutshell is about NME ICT. I will take couple of minutes to talk about this particular course. First of all, I would like to acknowledge the presence of some important people who help achieve this. First of all, I would like to begin with Professor Sawik Banerjee, who is the instructor for this course. He and Professor Mandar Inandar have kindly agreed to deliver these lectures. Of course, you will see more of them in the rest of this course. And then I would like to acknowledge the presence of Professor Geithunde, who is a great friend to our project. In fact, people call him as the God of thermodynamics and he has conducted several programs. In fact, thanks to him, this activity has become very popular in mechanical engineering. So I would like to place our thanks. And then I would like to acknowledge some of the managers who help achieve this. Before we go to that, I will explain to you, I would want to point out why it is important, why the administration of this course is extremely important. Some people tend to think that it is only the lecturing that forms the centerpiece of this and I, as a faculty member, was delivered many courses through this, back to differ. It's like this, supposing you write a small paper of five pages, so there is some amount of activity, administrative activity that we involve ourselves in. Just imagine putting together 200 such booklets. That's a complete book, let's say 1000 page book with coordination of all the participants, all the creators, everyone understanding, everyone speaking the same language. For example, you have to use the same symbol, you have to use the same language and so on and so forth. Just imagine how much work that is. So it is, I would say, several orders of magnitude. In a similar way, this course, where we have 10,000 teachers, of course it's a nomenclature, there are some courses in which we had had some 12,000 participants, 15,000 participants, some other programs we had 7,000, 7,500 and so on. But I believe that with time, this will become very popular for every subject, we will cross 10,000 mark. In any case, some of these are niche subjects. For example, engineering mechanics, although it is quite important, I believe in popularity, it is not so popular as Android. I mean, there is no denying of that, after all, supposing I compare my digital control book with Harry Potter, can there be any comparison? So even though some of these are a little more specialized courses, I believe that even these will reach more than 10,000. So this team has to work with coordinators, faculty members, funding, camera team, moodle team, registration process, all kinds of things. In contrast for the faculty members, it is a lot easier. Of course they have to do a lot of work. For one thing, they cannot make mistakes because it is going to be seen by 10,000 people. There has to be meticulous planning and so on. But nevertheless, I would say that administrative work is several times that. So I wanted to make a pitch for this because some people think that it is after all administrative work. So I wanted to put that on record. So I would like to introduce Dr. Mukta Atre, who is the coordinator of this. I think, well, let me just put it, I think she is a senior project manager. I do not know the exact designation, but she coordinates this activity. Well, sitting next to her is Sajjan, who handles all our recording and he is also an IT specialist. And if our IT team does not respond to him, does not reply to his email, he will roll down his sleeves and actually develop the whole thing. He is capable of doing that. And then he has done streaming, he has done all kinds of things. I would like to also introduce our finance and accounts minister as Professor Fartex says, Mrs. Jaya Geithande. And then I would like to introduce Rajesh, who is the hardware person for Akash. Some of you might have seen him in the Akash course. I would like to introduce Mahindra, who is sitting just behind Rajesh. I am not sure whether I will remember all the phases. There are lots of people, as you can see, there are, I think, if I am not mistaken, at least 150 people who work in Professor Fartex project. So that reminds me, I have talked a lot, Professor Fartex will talk next and I am pretty sure that he will talk about MOOCs and so as a result I will not say anything about it. So I wish you all the best, it's a great opportunity. I want all the participants to make use of this opportunity, this golden opportunity and participate more than anything else. Please do ask questions and challenge our instructors and do that live and also through Moodle and then do share your exam papers, do share your assignments and so on. Thanks for joining. Goodbye and Jai Hind. Thank you, Professor Madhugalya. Our co-PI, Professor Fartex could not join us today, but he did not want to lose this opportunity of talking to you all, so he has very kindly recorded a few words for all of us and I will now play that. Greetings from IIT Bombay. I must apologize for not being physically present to interact with you, but I am happy that the recording technology permits me to share some of my thoughts with you. First and foremost, let us talk about the clicker application which all of you are going to test. We have long ago realized that the clicker application could be very useful for the teachers to get immediate feedback from their students. Many teachers in IIT Bombay have already been using this to conduct even two, three quizzes every day in their class. What we would like is to see teachers from all the 300 colleges which are Akash project centers to be doing exactly the same thing. For this reason, our team has prepared a version of the application which can be run locally. What it means is you do not require any internet connection, you do not require to be connected to the central model or central database, you can set up everything in your own college and run the clicker application for any class. You will recall that we had suggested that every college should try and teach at least one course using Akash tablets. You may try this out in this semester and you may therefore use the clicker application in your own classes. Please note that the infrastructure in the classroom that you should provide should be checked very thoroughly, particularly for the Wi-Fi connectivity and also the students participating in the class should be told to charge their batteries of Akash tablets well before they come to the class. We all understand that the battery does not last very long. Incidentally, this is something which will be corrected in the future versions of Akash. You must have read the news that with the success of the Akash project and thanks to help and assistance from all of you, the government has decided to go ahead with the next versions of Akash tablet. The specs for the next version have already been frozen. DGS&D will be floating at tender to possibly get 50 lakh or 1 kcal tablets in the near future for further expansion. I would also like to touch upon one point where many of the teachers who are assembled here would be concerned with. I have received some mails recently and this relates to the Akash Research Fellowship Award contest which I had announced for the participants of our Akash orientation program. I will frankly share with you some of my problems till March or April. It was not very clear whether we will be receiving all the 1 lakh tablets that we had ordered and therefore it was necessary for me to preserve the funding available to make alternate arrangements if necessary. However, thanks to DataVend, they supplied all the 1 lakh tablets and we have distributed them to all the centers. This happened in the month of April and May. Subsequently, there was a long gap of summer vacation and thereafter there was some delay on my part. I would like to assure all participating teachers that the Akash Research Fellowship Award contest is very much on. However, I would like to mention that our Peruzal and evaluation of the submissions indicates that many submissions are not up to the mark. Instead of depending upon the evaluation done at a center place, I have therefore decided to fall back to the peer evaluation system which I had in fact briefly suggested in the original contest. Accordingly, these submissions will now be evaluated at each remote centers by the peer groups formed by the team leaders of all the submitters. In about a week's time, I will be informing you the details of this peer evaluation process. We hope to complete this process within one month and announce the awards by end of September. I am also going to conduct a meeting through a view of all remote center coordinators as also all Akash coordinators. Tentatively, we have frozen the dates to be 31st of August for remote center coordinators and 7th of September for Akash coordinators. These are Saturdays. These will be short meetings for about three hours and they will be conducted through a view that means you don't have to travel anywhere but you have to be present and participate. Then I will be issuing the notification very shortly. I do not want to take more time. It is important that you understand all the details and integrities of how the setup has to be done and how the quizzes are to be conducted using Akash tablets in your own classrooms by your own teachers. My team has worked well but as you know in all such applications, there is always a possibility of further improvement both in functionality and in effectiveness. Please do use the tablets for this purpose. The people who have used it here, my own colleagues have given valuable feedback using which we have been able to make several improvements. I am sure that with your further inputs, we will continue to enhance the effectiveness of this application. Thank you very much. All the best. So, that brings us to an end of the inaugural session.