 So good morning everybody. I'm very happy to introduce Karl Mehta. Karl, why don't you sit down for a minute? Okay. I first knew about Karl when a common friend sent me a letter Sandeep Pandya, many of you might have heard of him He used to be the president of FIAT Bombay Heritage Fund, which is the alumna association And of course a close personal friend In fact his father the close personal friend who was a faculty member a professor here Sandeep was a campus kid But that introduction was very sketchy Much later. I knew for more about what he has done. So let me tell you in a very brief nutshell He's a hardcore techie from Mumbai It is very sad that he was not part of IIT system otherwise I could have touched him for large donations Which I will still continue to try anyway, but more importantly, he went to the US I was amazed to find out that he actually His expertise is in payment systems. In fact, he's writing a book which will shortly be released Because I have dabbled on the bank's payment systems for years as an advisor and consultant So I know how hard those problems are He set up a company of his own which did some remarkable stuff in technology and Then when he had brought it up to a certain level He sold it to VISA at an undisclosed large sum His ambition was that by the time he is 40 years old He should have made all the money that he needs in life so that he can spend the rest of his life in Doing those constructive things which he enjoys doing a very interesting pension time. I really love him for that Unfortunately, when you sell a company to a large organization like VISA, you are bound to work for them for a few years So you work with them for two years and Subsequently, he became a venture capitalist He was on the team which advised Obama president Obama set of people who advised Obama In fact, he is here today as part of the official Kerry delegation which went for Vibrant Kuznabh Gujarat and he will be part of Obama delegation when President Obama comes for the 26th January parade so When he was working as a venture capitalist He describes his life in a very interesting way. He says every day I get two or three proposals and term sheets Two of them. I find flaws immediately. I throw them away Third one I say we can fund it and then the funding starts and the activity goes on But day after day month after month doing that. I felt that I was not doing myself anything You can appreciate most of your techies. So if you are not doubting your hands, okay? Somewhere doing something yourself you feel uncomforted So one fine day he quit that job and he says I will go back again to the startup mode But this time startups which are close to the passion of my heart and his passion like Me and like many of us here has been education Good quality So that is when he set up a company called aircast There are a group of young people here in IIT Bombay led by Nikhil. Nikhil is here. Yeah a small company in our startup and And he says that will you be willing to work for aircast? So he acquired that company and that company now is the aircast India arm Curiously they work within a few miles of IIT Bombay in Hirandan. They have an office here When I found out more about aircast I found that they had done some amazing Modifications and additions to the open edx platform. Their work is also based on open edx Then There is another organization called ikrisat which offers agricultural courses To agricultural learners from across the world, but they are situated in India So they wanted to start some courses in India and they had made a presentation to the national mission for a project proposal Where they said that we will be based basing our thing on aircast and the Standing Committee advised them No, no, no Fatak is working on open edx. So start using that platform It turned out that we are talking about the same thing without knowing That is when I got more interested. I met him in the Boston open edx conference where Aparna and Shweta were with me and I was quite excited to hear what he was doing So recently when I had gone to Washington I made a special two-day trip to Bay Area and spent one and a half hours with him and his colleagues on what they are doing on aircast and I was so thrilled I tell you That I said I would invite you here to give a talk to whatever you are doing Primarily because you should know that boy in our own capacity. We are doing variety of things But what they are doing is amazing. They have very large vision Centered around the youth of tomorrow So for example, the social media the way youth uses social media We have actually not paid attention in our work on the open edx on the social media. It is an exciting thing and more importantly He has agreed that we shall have a long-term partnership Because of the similarity of thoughts similarity of the technology that we are doing and similarity of purpose So I'm grateful to call for sparing his time and coming here sharing his thoughts Thanks also to Nikhil. I'm sorry. I'm very bad at names. I forgot the yeah, Vijay and Prashant Prashant so Vijay and Prashant are part of the aircast team As I said Some of you will be seeing more of them in coming months and years. So that is why it is important for you to note Prashant Nikhil and Vijay So, thank you very much for sparing your time And without further ado, I will request all to share His vision his work at aircast and how he sees things moving forward To all of us and welcome. Thank you very much, sir So very grateful to professor Fatak. He's a towering personality Parath Ratna to be introduced by him is is very humbling and I have a small gift for you So the book that I mentioned that I'm writing Well, this is the first manuscript and it's going into printing, but I wanted to give you the actual manuscript. So Thank you because I we need your yes, no, no, I'm gonna absolutely so I'm gonna Yes, but this is needed for your blessings before it goes into printing. You don't you don't get the commercial copy So You know, I think that the introduction at professor Fatak give was I think very glorified But I think I'll I'll still give you a little bit of background on myself just in my own way So that you get just some context on my background. So I did my undergrad in the University of Bombay So, sorry, I I didn't pass the I well actually I did pass the IITJE, but they were giving me into civil engineering and I wanted to do like at that time computer science was not there 22 years back, so it was electrical engineering and Didn't realize that it's okay to go into IIT with civil engineering and then you can go to the States and always change your major You know, so that hack was not I didn't know that hack So a lot of my other friends did that But I'm kind of half IIT alumni So I spent one year as a junior research fellow at the double E department because I wanted to be in double E so I spent a year with Professor Jay Vasi and Chandorkar and they were all there 20 years back and I worked at the VLSI design center One of the first US project that was outsourced to IIT Bombay to the VLSI design center on digital signal processing by Texas Instruments I was part of that so it was where it was fun working here I was bicycling in this campus almost like 22 years back. So it's great to be back here So quickly why I got into education. So I've built about three companies in valley in Silicon Valley one in multimedia one in mobile and then the third one was in payment which we sold to Visa and I have been very passionate about education mainly because I've been looking at the same problem that Professor Fartag and all of you See here. We have 1.2 billion people country We are all very fortunate that we got into good education. We are in the premier in studio IIT Bombay But we we see around we drive around you go around the country and you see that most people don't ever even basic education and So I joined the board several years back. I joined the board of Pratham. I don't know how many of you know Pratham but Pratham is If you don't know, please check it out Pratham.org Pratham is the largest education nonprofit in the world started in Mumbai by you know, Dr. Madhav Chawand who is a who was a professor at the What's the the chemical engineering Institute in Matoonga? What's that called? Ud City He went to us. He did his PhD. He was a professor in the US He came back he gave up his whole academic thing and he started this this incredible organization called Pratham Which now provides primary education to four million kids a year. So there is no There is no institution. There is no institution in the world There is no nonprofit in the world that educates four million kids in the world, right? And we have schools And and that those four million kids gets educated by 70,000 teachers and this 70,000 teachers They're all volunteers, right? So imagine all of us We all get paid for our job and sometimes how difficult it is to get come to work in the morning And you know, we think of some reason not to go to work. These are 70,000 teachers here in India They go to work every day without getting paid Right and by most of the Pratham schools that you find they are called Balwadi's I'm sure you know, there's a hundreds of them in Mumbai. They're in in Dharavi in slums in villages some of our Balwadi's Don't even have a four-wall. You know the classroom is under a tree even today in 2014, right? We're not talking about like 1914 or 2014 where there is a class, you know, they just hang a blackboard. So anyway Sorry some my my journey into education began with the eye opening of Pratham and Looking at the large scale that education is not on the equality problem But education is a scale problem because you know, how do you scale and give education to four million kids every year? So one of the first thing that we did as a board member And as a tech person for for dr. Madhav Chauhan and by the way, dr. Madhav Chauhan has received an award Is very illustrious as dr. Fatak. He's received an award Which is a noble prize equivalent in education, you know, I can't remember the name But it's there's there's an award that is given to an educator So we built an Android app Just for the 70,000 teachers because you know some of the issues are so basic Like even when they want to order like chalks or some supplies, you know They write a letter to the the whole central command is in Bombay They have like about 200 people in Bombay and all over the country across India You know, they send the supplies to them and we said, well, you know, you care, you know The kids can't be waiting for two days because there's no class because they don't have a chalk I mean, you know, that's pathetic, right? So so we built a basic app We said well, you know at least the 70,000 teachers can afford a basic Android smartphone Or we will give them and then why don't we put some apps so that, you know They can request things they can take a picture mother said that, you know I want to know attendance every single day at four million kids. So we said, well, you know You can't count and all of that stuff Maybe if we take just a picture of something and then, you know, there is some kind of an OCR or whatever But anyway, so that was my journey into eye-opening into how big the education problem is and you know How much technology has not made its way into education and in the US they say by the way as much as US is very advanced In fact, people openly admit that education and healthcare are the two sectors that are the the the worst users of technology I mean, they are the last adopters of technology even in the US by the way So it's not a criticism to IIT or India but you know in general so So that was the thing that brought me into education and when I saw first You know edX so I met Anant so the way I got into edX was that I was looking at now solutions saying, okay Well, I'm looking at Pratham's problem to solve for primary kids at at scale What are the solutions that people are addressing at the college level and I saw companies after companies in Silicon Valley as a venture capital is You know Coursera and Udacity and Udammies of the world and they would come and pitch us for money and things like that And I was wasn't convinced that if this is all the right approach In between I was as professor Fadak said I spent a year at the White House. I was a presidential first presidential innovation fellow So I worked with the Department of Education and saw some of the first-hand issues of US has some major crisis in higher ed I don't know if you if you've been keeping tab of that, but we have a trillion dollars in Trillion-dollars bubble in higher ed loans like student loans So if that burst it can have a massive crisis. So higher ed is almost Unaffordable by an average American So imagine a first-world country a developed country where an average American cannot afford to send their kids for a four-year Degree program. In fact, actually India sounds much better. We have much more affordability Thanks to government and policies and all of that that actually India In though in some in a lot of ways is in a much better position than United States The US is going down in a in a you know, really bad You know the situation if we don't fix that problem and then the second another third dimension to education was I was I was appointed by Governor Brown of California on the workforce investment board So the California government invests about a billion dollars into over three levels of education system We have you know, the UC's which are the top tier the UC Berkeley's and all of that So we have UC system then we have the Cal State system so that we have 22 campuses like Cal State Northridge and Cal State Long Beach and all of those and then we have 108 Community colleges, right? So those are community colleges what we call in America. So those are 108 and We invest about roughly More than a billion dollars every year and so I'm on that committee to Approve, you know, which colleges get the money and I realized that you know And we get to see all the proposals and I could see as a technology person 20 or seeing the technology adoption in other sector That none of these colleges were thinking about even using some of this, you know, large-scale open education technology Because when we see this trillion dollar bubble crisis, I'm looking at you know Why can't you use technology to lower down the cost because the cost in America as you all know is just you know So high because the people cost so high, right? And so technology has to balance the people cost and they were not thinking about it And then luckily in that quest to find the right technology to solve this problem I ran into Professor Anand Thagarwal at the World Economic Forum in Dallas and it was just this is in this whole Edcasting is an accident because I ran into him at a At a Harvard party so in Dallas and I was not even knowing him We were just like at a party you go and talk to like strangers and you just say hi to him because you see another fellow Indian in Dallas like, you know, so and he introduces me and he introduces himself and says, you know Hey, I'm a professor at MIT and I have just started this was two years back about roughly so he said I've just started, you know, this I mean that X was known at that time and I really immediately fell in love with the concept because I had seen all the commercial ones the Coursera I would ask you to give me by that time and I was waiting for something like this to come in and open source In a nonprofit way to really do good to the society, you know Because this problem really needs to more than business model It needs first to do good to the society and second thing to have a sustainable business model So so Anant and I spent almost like late night or almost up to two in the morning Maybe either both of us were drunk or whatever it was But we spent almost, you know late in the morning discussing about how to scale at X and I said well and at that time he promised me just like he promised Professor Fadak I heard from Professor Fadak's keynote at Harvard That he promised me that he was going to make it open source It wasn't an open source at that time, you know So in January of 2013 it was not and then in June last year June last year he made it open source. So he followed through on his commitment and So I said so Anant So I told Anant that look, you know, I want to do something in education because I'm I've seen this problem to the White House I'm seeing it through the California Workforce Investment Committee I've experienced it through Pratham. I'm into all this and I'm kind of a retired fellow I'm looking for next thing to do, you know And he says so he actually gave me the business idea So he says look, you know, I'm going to open source this But, you know, we have a lot of institutions corporates non-profits. They come to us to edX and says can you host a edX version for us and he said that That's not edX's business. He says that's not my vision means Anant said that that's not my vision He says we have to be more like focused on being parallel to Coursera and always getting better at Coursera Which is keep a central site that has and he says his focus is all content He says end of the day the highest quality content and highest quality course That is gonna make edX successful because when people go to edX.org Their brand name is all based on high quality courses when people see eminent professors like professor Fatah's course Then people are gonna say well edX is good Right, so he says he doesn't look at edX as a technology business He looks at so that's why he says I'm I'm going to open source technology because he realized that it's not the technology race It is all about the highest quality content and the largest amount of distribution to reach so and and and I was quite impressed with him because you know Being coming from the business side of the world for 20 years. I Generally have a healthy skepticism about some professor's ability to think through about business models and and I was quite impressed that you know What he's saying makes sense at least you know He's figured out that what are the two things that really matter in his business and what are the things that don't matter You know because most people are not even crisp and clear about those things They're like confusing in kind of you know and trying to you know go into like multiple things So he was very sharp very clear that you know its content and its reach And he says this whole technology thing we're willing to give it up Make it open source and folks like you from Silicon Valley who are the technology people You guys should be engaged and you and Google and Stanford's of the world. You know go ahead and build stuff on it and He would be the beneficiary of it and says that's how we're gonna scale on technology not by Hiring the largest number of engineers into the edX offices in Cambridge He's gonna run out of funds very soon if he keeps hiring people for technology So that was a smart idea to say hey, you know what I won't leverage the volunteering and the open source crowd The second thing he said that look even distribution, which is his number two goal access He cannot reach just by having that one single side and trying to bring every single eyeballs in the world to edX.org So he realized that people would need Institutions around the world corporates around the world. They would need their own version You know localization Whole bunch of needs are there and that cannot be addressed by again a single site the destination site like edX.org So that's where he gave me the business idea and he said, you know You have all this background because you know, we had built a very highly scalable in my previous company that we sold to visa We had built a very large scale payment processing platform in the cloud that became like the multi Multi-channel payment processing for visa today and you know the level of scale that is needed on the cloud the level of security That is needed for you know transactions You know so he as a you know as a very smart guy and technology person He could see the value he could immediately say that look you've done all this stuff So why don't you take the edX code and provide a SaaS service software as a service Put it massive scale on the cloud and he said that look I will bring you businesses Which means that all these people who are knocking the doors of edX saying that I want my own version so I'm gonna refer it to you and Again, or even on that second front. He absolutely followed up on that Immediately, you know when we both went back, you know from Switzerland back to the US You know, he connects me to his business development guy. We have an agreement signed up We were the first community to sign an agreement where and since from from that day to to now Most of our customers are actually today that we are service servicing. There are they're all edX referrals So every institution fortune-finding company that goes to edX and says we want to run an edX, you know platform They send it over to edCast So that is kind of the history both the personal history of how I got into education and then kind of the the history Of how we started edCast This is some of the slide deck that I had used so Aparna and the the other person Sorry, what's your name? Shweta, you probably saw that at what I presented at Harvard. So sorry for the reputation But essentially and then you know, we also Back in California. I realized that I'm just a technology person I have no experience in education as a domain and the pedagogy is and all of that so I need an educator a Person as a partner. So I partnered and brought Dr. Paul Kim as a co-founder Dr. Paul Kim He is the chief technology officer at Stanford University of their grad school of education So someone who has spent 25 years of his life into education technologies learning technologies learning sciences That's all all his research is about and he spent actual time in the field He's been hired by the United Nations by the governments all over the world He's come to Bihar and has tested I have never been to be her But he has been to be hard and has tested mobile learning on Tablets he's gone to Saudi Arabia by the invitation from the king of the Saudi Arabia to test mobile learning. So Amazing person. You can check his profile on the on the internet So I partnered with him so it you know, we in Silicon Valley We believe in complementary team and knowing what you don't know more important That's more important than what knowing what you know, right? So and finding not trying to focus on your weakness because there are always other people who has strength in your area of weakness So might as well partner with them So the the whole thing is essentially what at cast and so by the way So we were incubated actually at Stanford because of Dr. Paul Kim and my affiliation with Stanford because of my venture fund And then Stanford University liked this idea as well because you remember that Stanford's online education attempt the class You know edu they merged into edX so Stanford University came and invested in our company Which was a pretty big endorsement and it is a it's a great, you know credibility Mark on us and so the our whole thing is our mission is to expand The open edX ecosystem. So that's in a summary, you know, what our mission is that we want to expand the ecosystem Why open right because The opposite of open isn't closed. So what is it? What's the opposite of open? So something that is not open is broken Right and so it's very important, especially in technology and software that you know the more it is open Because then anything that is broken will get fixed, right? We cannot limit to just the people in the room or people in our organization to do things We have to figure out a way to collaborate with anybody and everybody in the world who has an ability to contribute and we should We should be reducing the friction so so we love we love open edX mainly because of that open source and and many other interesting things and So I'm going to quickly run into what our capabilities are So, you know as you as I said that we started with the business plan and business idea that my friend Anand Agarwal gave to me so I can't claim actually the the the business plan So so that's where we started which is SAS and cloud services and this is very large scale multi-tenant systems and things like that and we'll show you You know like dozens and dozens of institutions that are running on it The second thing that we focused on and that this was also something that we discussed originally with With an aunt was that I said look You know this whole education platform and MOOCs and all of this is all fine But you know you can bring the greatest content and the rock star professors from elite universities and everything But what if it's like bringing water to the horse, but what if the horse doesn't drink? Okay, how do you solve that problem? so because when I talked to a lot of government officials in fact yesterday I was at the vibrant Gujarat for the opening of our One of my non-profit court for India's chapter there and I met the education minister Of Gujarat and he told and I we showed him the demo and everything open edX and he his first question was that he says you know We have brought broadcast Courses and this that all kinds of stuff your content But if the students are not learning How do you solve that problem? Right? So he says this is not a technology problem This is not even a content problem. This is not even a faculty problem. So what problem is this? So well, this is a motivation problem, right? and so in the in the education world and and I you know I mean people who are into that Department of Education or people who do their PhD in education I'm they know this problem. So there is a lot of research goes on into just a fundamentally what motivates people to learn and What are the systems and techniques that can be used to motivate people and that is a fundamental problem because For someone if we can solve that problem because someone who is motivated Even a B level content and a C level technology all that stuff doesn't matter See all the IIT's that IIT has produced even 30 years back, you know, we didn't have I mean we had a great Profile, but we didn't technologies and things like that. So so this thing We took the metaphor or learning from many other fields. So think about so everybody wants to Educate wants to be educated. Everybody wants to be learned it because they know that that will increase their income level go up in the Society all of that, but they don't feel motivated. I mean there are five percent of the people on this planet who don't need motivation They're all here, you know, all of you are in that five percent category right all of us But you know what we realize is that 95% of the people on this planet. They need motivation to learn Right. We see with our kids also, you know But if you see the opposite You know in instead of education now you change that to entertainment. It's the opposite ratio 95% of the people on this planet don't need motivation for entertainment. You tell anybody Movie shall we go to for movie? You know watch this video on YouTube. Do you think that that person needs motivation? 95% don't maybe five percent. There are also nerds who would not watch that, right? So but but the ratio is exactly the opposite Right, so the fundamental thing is that okay How if we so the way to solve the this motivation problem is that if we can turn Education more like entertainment Then we can solve the problem Okay, so now of course we are not asking professor Fadak to dance and entertain you Or sing You know We can do much maybe there are some courses that might blend it lend itself into singing but Not probably physics or I don't know mathematics so But one thing we realize that within entertainment now right there is this new type of entertainment Which is where we are all consuming time, which is the social media entertainment We are all spending less time on TV less time on those televised You know entertainment and more time on social media entertainment, right? So there's all this more the people spend more number of hours every day on Facebook and WhatsApp then they spend on TV Or maybe they then they spend with their spouse or their family. That's very unhealthy, right? That's where the country is going where actually yesterday the one of the education So so when I when I gave this offer to the education minister, I said, okay You know you are saying that your biggest problem in Gujarat is that how to bring motivation first forget What all this and then I said, okay? This is the answer to that then he says well But you know my biggest problem is that I hate this social media because I think that this social media is taking way too much time Of the kids and they're not learning So we said, okay fine. We try to solve one problem. It creates another problem Okay, I try to solve your motivation problem with social media now. He says social media is a problem Okay, so so then the solution is that okay, how do we blend really? the You know take the content which is serious content because a lot of time education is gonna be serious content But can you wrap it around in a really nice way with your social media? So that it feels like entertainment at least the environment feels like very Comfortable very friendly your you know it feels like you're virtually hanging out with your friends It feels like you're chatting with them, which everybody likes chatting, but the whole context is Education so That was Kind of the the idea that was talked to to an aunt and this he said brilliant You know do that and I said look Silicon Valley is the place for social media We have Facebook's of the world and the Googles of the world. We know exactly how to do that stuff We'll take care of that so that's where you know We we build stuff on that and you know if I can get a I didn't plug in my Wi-Fi on my laptop But if I can get a Wi-Fi then I will show you some of the stuff And then the the third thing was obviously as I said that you know when this Institutions and enterprises and they all need their own instances The other the big thing that comes is a lot all kinds of integration services So then we built a whole set of APIs and how do we you know connect with other third party? We created you know LTI plugins and you know the many other ways to integrate through our own APIs as well as LTI so Yeah, I'm gonna fast forward a couple of things we talked about yeah, so let me finish this one or two slides and then we so what have we What have we learned so far, you know, so we've been in this business now for a little more than 18 months We started right before right after Davos and right before even edX went open edX and so we've been there for now for a little more than 18 months or 20 months and what we have learned is that you know ultimately Well first of all everything that you do has to be learner centric So it's it's a nice. It sounds like a cliche But you know everything that we see all the old systems of previous generation systems that were built They were all built with you know either institution centric or faculty centric or course centric Right, so if you see all those course management systems the moodles and the blackboards of the world They were all or course centric or they were very institution centric But nothing was built by putting the user at the center of everything Which is what if you think about if you look at non-education software in the consumer internet space They are all built with putting the user at the center, right? If you look at Facebook, right putting the user at the center if you look at what's a why What's ever such a high adoption because you as a user can immediately connect and use and all of that stuff So that's the number one thing that we learned that you know We got to put the mantra has to be that we have to put for everything that we think and do you to put the user at the center and the ultimately You know the rubber meets the road not just on technology, but we it's all about pedagogies because If you don't have all the right pedagogies implemented using technology Nothing's gonna work right because just throwing a nice video You know whatever put a quiz it's not gonna work You know and because you know it has to be done in a way that people can really learn So there are some new pedagogies evolving emerging, which is what we talked about like you know this whole such social learning Although, you know, I'm making it sound, you know something very Kind of casual that you know just you know make it entertaining and all of that stuff But there is a pretty deep research around it. There are some very deep research papers that are written around all these pedagogies, right? Professor Fartak talked about Blended learning and you know, I I wholeheartedly agree with him. He says that look online education can't work, you know on its own It has to be blended learning, right There is there is a really good research paper Can't remember the author but if I find it I'll send it and you might have read it already on active learning and there is a really good data presented where active learning improves Outcomes, you know, almost by 10x and This is not a rhetoric, but it's like a real they have real data to prove then the traditional, you know lecture-based Education, right? So a friend of mine at UC Irvine who is who is a vice who is a Associate dean he says that if lecture-based education were clinical trials They would have been banned long many years back So if you send the lecture-based education the same what the pharmaceutical industry does they would be banned by you know The equivalent of FDA, right? So anyway adaptive learning Team-based learning, you know, and then this is something that there isn't that much data or research around it But we kind of we could claim to have invented Which we call bite-sized learning or Slash nano learning or micro learning and this is a very cutting-edge stuff Which is saying that you know, how do we engage students in just what I like to call from my gaming world analogy is Snackable learning so you all heard in so when I first went into the gaming industry, you know I realized that there are three types of games, right? The hardcore how many of you play online games with us there are hardcore games And there are so you know like World of Warcraft type of them They're like hardcore games and there are mid-core games, which is you know all the Sony PlayStation and expo You know Xbox type of games and then there is called it There was a new category that emerged just a few years back, which is casual slash social games Right, I'm sure a lot of you have played games on Facebook like the Zynga games and Farmville and all that stuff, right? So realize that you know when we're I'm trying to think of the parallels of Education entertainment. What is the what is the equivalent of those three levels in education? You know, I when I was studying in college everything sounded hardcore The professors were hardcore the content was hardcore the assignments were hardcore, you know, so that's where I lost my hair So I was thinking why can't Why can't education have some equivalent of some mid-core and like, you know casual, okay? Where I'm learning, but I'm not feeling stressed that oh my god. I have to do this. I have to do this I don't get it. I don't you know, so so that's where this and and you know those casual games are invented Which is basically they are called like snackable games. So now we are calling snackable education, which is You just snack on it like, you know five times a day you can play the game, right? There's little games like you know on the phones that you play you have like ten minutes on the bus station You're waiting for the bus and you play. What is the big game that everybody's playing now on the Candy Crush, right? Candy Crush. Yeah, my wife keeps playing all the time And it's like crazy. You know, they're like addicted to it, right? Every ten minutes They get they play Candy Crush and then they're done. So the the beauty of the design You know if you think from an instructional design the beauty of that game is such that whether you have five minutes 15 minutes or 30 minutes you can enjoy as soon as somebody wants your attention you can close it and you're fine so that Sequencing you know that way of packaging the content and that way of even like five times a day So that's basically a new whole Pedagogy of how to create content and make it bite-sized learning and then this one is a very interesting new field inquiry based learning Which is you know, so my co-founder dr. Paul Kim. He says that You know the best way of teaching Is not to teach So this is the guy with 25 years of experience in Researching on teaching and learning and he says the best way of teaching is not to teach. Okay, so then how do you teach? And he says This is his thing. He's writing research paper on this. He says that Do not teach anything unless the student in your classroom asks you a question So what it means is inquiry based Unless your students don't have an in a feeling of inquiry that I want to inquire into this and they ask a question You answer another guy inquiry if you don't have inquiry don't come and just lecture So anyway, very very cool idea It can be obviously done very nicely in a classroom For folks like us in technology space. We have to think about how to replicate that in the online world Right because in the online world also, we don't want to just bombard them with content But we want to say that okay, what are their questions, you know, so so that's we've learned obviously We learned that you know, there's a lots of different use cases and lots of different user types They are way beyond even what the open edX Would look at it one of the interesting use case Which we coined this term that the media in the US loves it We coined this new term called multi-versity with trademark and people don't like it that you trademark, but you know We love to trademark some newer term, but so multi-versity is a really nice use case where one of our first customers was professor Jeffrey sacks of Columbia University who is a very eminent professor in the he's a he's a founder and director of earth Institute at Columbia and He is the global authority in climate change and sustainable development. So he's the advisor to the UN and And actually he brought us this use case and then we term turned it into a term So he says that, you know, he has built a sustainable development Solutions network, which is a group inside United Nations and he's brought in about 39 universities worldwide to become a member of that Consortium so UC Berkeley Stockholm University. They're all members of it. Columbia obviously and These are all the universities that are teaching this master's degree program called MDP master's in developmental practice You get basically it's a master's in, you know, sustainable development and developmental practices and he says that look There is no point for my network of 39 universities and he wants to expand that network and it's already by the way 200 universities have signed up to become a member says there is no point for 200 University each lecture instructor It's the exact same curriculum MDP master's in developmental practice and so has the exact same courses and he says I want make I want to make sure that everybody has access to the highest quality content I you know, I don't want too much variability and I don't want my fellow professors To spend the time in research creating the same content that's already been created So he put together a group in earth Institute because obviously and some of universities have more budget Some universities don't have that much budget. He has a lot of budget because you know, he gets You know, he wants money. He just calls Bill Gates and Bill Gates writes him a check, you know Because of his authority. So he put together a team at Columbia and he spent a million dollars per course literally million dollars very high Production value courses on age of sustainable development climate change negotiation and he said that look I want this course to be taken by all these 39 universities But not in a MOOC style in the blended learning concept, which means that I will run it in one instance Which is a central instance where this 39 university students can go in but there is a local flavor Because the individual is not trying to take away the empowerment of the the local instructor or local professor because they are also great authority But they should be able to interact with the local classroom because this courses are being you know, the actual on-campus students So we created this open attacks or in our cloud services we created a way where One course one instance of the course is a global course Which can be published as a MOOC. So anybody in the world can take it as well And then there is another instance which is only available to this 39 universities But also this 39 universities each one of them have their own identity So for the first time ever in the world this 30 than university students who are all learning the same thing are now able to collaborate with each Other and talk so think about even in 2014 We were with all the technologies around us and even in Silicon Valley two universities like Stanford and UC Berkeley Which are like less than 50 miles apart There has never been any collaboration at the student to student level even if you are learning the same thing And I'm talking about real collaboration of the education sure they can chat on Skype or they might find each other on Facebook And they might talk about the same robotics course or AI artificial intelligence course that's different But there has never been or even today a course that the same UC Berkeley and Stanford student is taking and now They are collaborating the faculty is collaborating and they are not all wasting time and reinventing and doing the same thing Because the value is not in all of those stuff the value is in actual rich interaction that you free up So we pioneered this For the first time with professor Jeffrey sacks and this 39 years and it's going on actually it just finished like the course just finished And those 39 university students got credit so We were also kind of pioneering MOOCs for credit because that was another big Focus for us or mission for us because we want MOOCs to be recognized or open courses to be recognized To be awarded credit because otherwise this MOOC, you know revolution is gonna slow down because if students don't see any value, you know So anyway, so so that's a very Interesting one the other interesting use cases are coming up is governments involving as you know professor Fatak is championing here, you know countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. There is a country level MOOCs happening. So, you know, I was talking about Japan. So University of Japan is a You Japan is a consortium member and they obviously want to create their own MOOC platforms Like you guys are creating but they also have a very similar vision They want to create a Japan level stuff and they want to bring in other universities So they love this Multiversity concept where they can bring in Osaka University and all of the other some hundred universities in Japan to come together And the you know, obviously the business model. So there is a you know, obviously everybody loves free So That's fine. But you know, there's a lot of use cases where it has to make sense because as we make it so MOOCs for credit You know, sometimes our institutions want to make sure that, you know, connect with the SIS the tuition is paid The tuition is not paid. They want to collect the fees directly for the course level. So that capability should exist You know paying for certificates You know, there are other business models where you can keep MOOC for free But you can have an innovation innovative ecosystem where you enable anybody in the in the country to say if you want to coach You know, like I've heard I mean that I had experienced 20 years back in India that private tutoring is a massive business in this country right and but you know, I also see that moms have to drag their kids and Take them half an hour to this tuition teacher that tuition is like too much. Why can't we make that automated? So that tuition teacher or tutor can come online on their edX platform and teach the students You know, some of those business models happening today on Skype as you know, there's a very big business where teachers from India make money Helping my kids in California do their homework on Skype, right? But but Skype is not a good means. I mean, it's a tool good tool But it has its limitations we can do enable that on open edX Right and that can actually open up a huge massive opportunity for instructors in India because now they can become a net exporter and sitting at home. They can make money. I Have a professor at at Stanford was a good friend and who is the the top math professor of the US He's actually by NPR radio the National Public Radio of the US calls him the math guru you know Keith Keith Devlin and he's actually had a course on on on Coursera not on edX You know, you can you can Google Keith Devlin Fantastic course on math on math. His course is about math thinking how to think like a mathematician and he said that you know, I Want to he's very much into this mountain biking and he's like a very sports fellow, right? So he says I want to retire from Stanford in about two years, you know And I want to go and live in my you know vacation home in Napa Valley in the mountains Go all-day mountain biking and playing golf and all of that stuff. So Carl Can you give me your platform and it's it will be called Keith Devlin? You know dot-com or whatever where he will put five or six of his courses and he says that You put all kinds of this different business model and I'm mountain biking and my cash register is ringing. So You know my retirement is getting paid off. I don't have to come to Stanford I don't have to come to the classroom. I don't ever do nothing everything that I have learned and I want I have known I put it up, right? So these are all the new things will happen, which is pretty cool. Well, it's you know He's earned his you know At some point he wants to live his own life and he doesn't want to teach the same thing again and again again or So solve the same problem or do the same tutoring. So he says I've done my part now I want you to follow my other passion, but I need income Create an income from this, right? So so there's a lot of those capabilities So that's something that we have built a lot of e-commerce and payment platforms that we have built in my previous company at visa we brought in on the on the open ed X and Then the fourth thing that we've learned is that Deploying operating maintenance and support You can't underestimate that it's not a small thing So it's one thing we we see over and over again in the US where you know some Organization somewhere in middle of America says, oh, you know six months back. We downloaded the edX code We try to do our own we put it up on Amazon and now, you know, we are not able to do this We're getting this problem that problem So it's one thing to have open source and it's another thing to have two engineers in a in a department Who can download something and play with it? Completely different thing to operate at scale the level of deployment engineers that you need and having database expertise and DB expertise And MongoDB and all kinds of you know my SQL square scaling Very very different, you know scale. So so that's where obviously Anant was very visionary That he realized that this is not that something that he can leave it on to some consulting firms Who will just come in and help you consult? You know consulting doesn't work, you know Because that's like if in the in the middle of the night if your servers are down That consultant is not gonna take your phone call. Okay, because he's a consultant He you know, he built you by the hours and he's gone So you need dedicated staff and you need a tremendous amount of expertise. So we are going through currently we have like over 65 Instances of edX running for 65 different institutions more than 65 an hour of almost close to 100 so I'll show you some of the sites, but we have currently a hundred different Institutional, you know multi-tenancy edX running and the level of deployment and every new release that comes out and pushing that Operating it maintaining it and then supporting both faculty support and student support enormous So these are the four Key things that we have learned and none of this are simple None of this can be taken lightly each one of them requires tremendous depth Expertise and people and investment So in terms of you know kind of Picturizing this what we have built is on the left side is what we call the cloud service So we named it knowledge cloud and so these are all kind of as you say this is all the hundreds of instances And and we we run on open edX But the way we have designed our architecture is that within our cloud service we can swap I mean, you know an open edX with a canvas With a blackboard with a d2l with a Sakai with an e-college or when we go into a corporate market, you know They have the cornerstones and the SAPs and the people soft So it's a containerized, you know architecture where the container Underlining the inside the container it can be anything and we talk to them Through our set of APIs that we have built and then we have built a lot of different applications including a faculty dashboard Collaboration suite and all of that and then there's obviously a lot of multi-tenancy capability built here and then on the right Inside we we realized that you know the mobile phone is the best user You know is the is the is the number one device because in a lot of countries Most people don't even have a laptop So it's not even that mobile is the second device or even the first device mobile is the only device So we did mobile first and you know all that social learning and you know Capabilities that's all built into what we essentially in a high-level term We call it peer-to-peer learning right so Instructor is there to give you high quality content But what is going to motivate you on a day-to-day basis is the peer-to-peer because it's your friend So yeah, I was about to tell you the metaphor. So the metaphor that we had used for this is like fitness, right? So education and fitness is very similar Everybody wants to keep fit right who wants to add on more weight to your body We all want to look nice and slim and all of that right so the motivation is there in I mean It's a slightly overlapping thing the motivation is there But you know how many of us like 95% of the people requires I mean sorry the intent is there to stay fit and Do exercise daily, but the motivation to go to the gym every day is not there Right because if we're all motivated we would go to the gym every morning first thing six in the morning We'll hit the gym before even drinking the first cup of tea. That's what they say You should go hit the gym before you drink the first cup of tea How many of us have the discipline or the motivation to do that, but how many of us wants to do that? Everyone everyone right you'd love yourself more if you can hit the gym at six in the morning So same thing in education the intent is there. Who doesn't want to be educated? Sure. Yeah, it brings you more You know Quality of life more knowledge more fame more money whatever right, but how many of them have the motivation? So then we realize that in the fitness world The one thing that is keeping people to go to the gym So the solution to this problem actually lies with not the best PhDs Sorry to say this or the or the greatest scientist in the world the the solution to this lies with the gym operators If you ask the owner of a gym, he knows the answer is The person who has who forms who has a gym buddy is The one who can keep to the keep coming to the gym more often Right because if you have a buddy who's gonna bug you at six in the morning and say get out I'm waiting downstairs for you Now you're gonna leave your cup of tea because you can't keep that guy or girl waiting downstairs Right, so that's where the you know, you know, we can learn a lot from that that you know if we can have that kind of a Social learning mobile, you know peer-to-peer learning environment where there's a group-based learning that is team-based learning Then there is a level of motivation Yeah, and then you know finally obviously what we've done is you know we create in 15 minutes We you can we can we can instantiate, you know an addicts instance We talked about all of this and then you know more importantly is ability to do at 180 countries and then SLAs are very important So what we are finding is that when we are working with institutions, they want 100% SLA, right? So because without SLA, you really don't know what you're doing So I would skip a little bit, but you know, these are some of the maybe, you know If Vijay needs to talk about but you know, this is some of our this is our new Open edX docker deployment. You want to say a word about this? And there's another exciting way where you actually package your application So the container is more like a ready-to-run Cloud application, for example, and you can really deploy it very fast So you don't have to worry about the underlying operating system underline Hardware interfaces storage, whatever It essentially creates multiple patterns. It's just like a ship docks at a harbor Ship comes and the docking arrangement is all there. Similarly, you put your application in a docker and it docks That is something that we need to investigate. No, it's a it's a very powerful Can I do Is it connecting? Okay, can you put this on? Oh, update settings Oh, it's coming up. Nope. Is it too slow or what is it? Okay, now this is another thing. It says success It says success here. I think we have the next thing to go. So maybe I'll send out Professor Farrakh has some links, but I'll send out a number of different links where you can see a lot of different variations about those Cars that you send on the mobile. Yeah, that is something So here Sorry, I was trying to do the airplay. So actually you could have seen our mobile app, but we'll get you out Yeah, how much you can see? Oh, you got it. Yeah, so Essentially on a mobile app what we do is this is like the bite-sized learning. So any course that you're taking it brings up in kind of small little cards and Just like, you know small bite-sized content and you can watch this video, which is you know eight minutes Max and but it's all around. Okay. So we got it You have it there Okay Okay, and can you get internet on this? Oh No, it's working on the the T the T-Mobile network, but it's not I need the Wi-Fi Okay, let's go Can you do airplay? So I think it's a little bit slow and the resolution is a little bit messed up, but okay What I wanted to show you was so this is the this is a SDSN is a Organization of United Nations sustainable development solutions network. It's the leading They are the leading experts from 39 universities on sustainable development And so this is one of the hundred sites that we are running and as you can see It's completely branded with their own URL, but it's you know it's run on our platform, which is the the knowledge cloud and I can go here and let me just You know log in as a faculty. Oh This is that keyboard. Okay. Yeah, so I'm gonna go into this climate change course and Okay No, no, no, it's all it's all it's all edX. Oh, it's all edX. Yeah So the elements in the CMS is edX. Yeah, and then we have the container technology To to run it and then we build the APIs for all our apps Which is the social and the mobile and e-commerce and all of that. So I don't know sir is a Firewall blocking. Yeah. Yeah, we have found that problem When we tried to run this open edX for other outsiders My people would not open certain ports. They said is firewall. So what we did is we actually Obtained an External facing IP address directly from NKM and a direct wire from NKM goes to his server room But only in his room in his server room. Those servers can be accessed from outside because those ports are open Yeah, in fact only yesterday Dr. Aghwan the creator of NKM was saying that while we have reached so many universities The universities have not integrated in NKM with their own campus networks He said the only people have done it is IIT Kharagpur, but IIT Bombay has not done it IIT Madras is not there. So maybe what we can do is at some other point in time Yeah, I will be able to demonstrate. Yes, so absolutely separate But you see you would be a better demonstrator than me The beauty of that notion of a card, you know, you heard his bite-sized learning Actually that mobile app is so fascinating that you in fact get just one bite at a time That is just one car and they have interfaces by which if let's say somebody raises a question You can either answer it. You can even say like so you can post your words directly on that card And it gets updated on to the edX platform. It shows everywhere else so you see the Imagination and interest of the student has to be captured by that app That is exactly what he means by taking education nearer to entertain the entertainment captures your interest That is the primary mode And we we have it's it's almost the interface almost feels like you are on WhatsApp or Facebook So essentially you gonna see a card that one of your friends have sent you and Then you sometimes, you know how on Facebook we feel very we feel obligated to like sometimes Even if you don't like something you would hit the like because just to make the other person feel good So they but you know, there is a nice social dynamics in this right even in that new socially awkward situation that Facebook has brought for the first time in the human, you know psychology So what it does is if you use it now positively in education if I have to make you like something that you don't like You solve the problem Because in education there's a lot of things that we don't like You know slowly you're like, you know your like will make you Connected and then there's all this what-step type stuff So you know there's a chat going on and then the other thing is that you know it's fully integrated So you know you you write something or you see something you post on Twitter Facebook that data can that con that content can come back here So he has actually acquired a couple of companies which develop these technologies and has integrated all that Sadly that part is not open source So But we have a blessing from edX so Ned who runs the net bachelor who is the head of open edX He actually told us that you don't have to make it open source We in fact he came up with a policy which says that you know, just keep it as an X block Because it's much more faster Innovation if you just keep it as an X block or an even an LTI to begin with because we can bring it in quickly And you can start seeing the adoption and the deployment because you know in the new startup world You know age you know agile methodology is the is the number one thing in software development And if we're gonna get blocked into all kinds of reviews Let's just get it out and then if everything works you can always bring it into the core edX code So they don't want too many requests Coming in into the core edX code because they have a long roadmap to fix So in fact this so because it is an LTI app You've been able to get adoption so fast when you get into a you know hundred institutes that we want to do it So yeah, so instantly he has kindly agreed to make all of those available as Free usage for our experiment Absolutely No, we don't need source code because of the LTI and X block we can just use that X block and no But you are you are welcome to work on the source code. We will take all your free bandwidth So I don't have to pay a software engineer in Silicon Valley. Why would I not do that? Please Good well, thank you. I'll conclude here, but if you have any questions happy to answer Any quick questions because he I also want him to see some of our facilities and then he has a Lunch appointment, which also is equally exciting on the environmental activities. He's working on too many fronts But couple of questions or observations very quickly By the way Avina Shaute is another advisor We have two advisors Avina Shaute is also an alumnus and He worked in TCS for donkey's years. He led teams of 1500 people But he retired to do social service many years ago. I requested him to do social service for my I So we have been very fortunate in fact he leads The entire software development team effort in whichever way he has because of his experience of things Of course, he's a hard test master Not very like if you put a Google I mean if you put a Facebook Open edX course on giving likes, then I don't know what will happen to Avina Shaute Close this but let me let me conclude this by saying that I Think it is one of those fortunate providences that I happen to bang into him He and I share the same passion you heard his initial remarks why he's into it because and if US has a problem They have only a cost problem, but we have a rich problem. We have a very large and The fact that they are working on open edX. They have enhanced and enriched is so much and They are in the same page as us. We want to work together Let the technology problem be solved by the people of best capable of solving technology problems Let the teachers and the pedagogy expert concentrate on how best to provide that knowledge And that is the model that we're working. I'll be discussing in future months with the Government we had if you some of you will know that we have suggested setting up a section 8 company Which is a not-for-profit company like edX, but instead of having only university consortium partners If we could involve private partners particularly private partners whose passion is in education She has agreed to consider that that it's sad could be a partner into that company and He's good at finding out revenue models. So you'll fix it later. We'll also fix it But as he says the primary ambition that he has is same as ours first to do public good Then to earn money So we are I think moving in the right direction And I'm I'm so happy and so pleased to work closely with him and now with his team here in coming months I would like to thank him on behalf of all of you and on my personal behalf for sparing his valuable time Well a person who moves with the delegations of Secretary of State and the president of the country To to spend two three hours in coming here and and sharing with us But I think he does that primarily because he carries the same passion that we do So I do not know how to thank you well enough, but thank you Carl We we have a Small momento it is it is merely an IIT Bombay X which is the edX mug for you to drink coffee My colleague professor Kannon is here. He's the copia and People call us complex conjugate pole pair With he has the real part and I the imaginary part because he is mostly here in the ground But all the projects that we drive we drive together Apart from being a copia. He's also the Institute coordinator for all national mission projects So, thank you so much You