 Good morning and welcome to this interactive session on the eve of the launch of this important open course that we are offering online. I would like to begin with greetings for the new year. So, I wish all of you a very happy and prosperous new year. As all of you are amongst those remote centers which have been actively participating in our T10KT program and I am grateful to all of you for facilitating attendance of large number of teachers across the country who have benefited from this program. As you are aware, we have been constantly incorporating online components in our teacher training program. In fact, we ran a particular T10KT workshop for technical communication using one week of online work and one week of offline work. In a sense, this particular program which is primarily meant for teachers takes it further to see if we can do the entire training online. Of course, some interaction is important. This interaction is ordinarily provided through discussion forums in online courses, but thanks to all of you, it may be possible to arrange for some face to face interaction through the remote centers, at least those which are interested and willing to participate in this. First of all, I would like to thank all the heads of the institutions of these 39 odd remote centers who have taken time off from their busy schedule. In fact, one of you, Dr. Mantha is personally present here although his remote center is far away in Uttar Pradesh near Aligarh. The reason I decided to share my thoughts with all of you is to suggest that teacher's training in the conventional sense has been going on. IIT Bombay has been doing it for several years and you have been participating. All the courses in the past have been subject specific. So, the training program would be either in physics or in thermodynamics or in applied mechanics. Such specific subjects were taken up for training. We have realized off late that a fundamental change in the attitude of our teachers is required by telling them about the advantage of exploiting technology for education. Educational technology is maturing very rapidly and in fact has become the cornerstone of effective teaching learning processes today. I would like to inform you that we will soon be changing the shape of our T10KT program to offer very specific modules. We have decided on three modules so far. One of them is called a foundation module which will be a training program designed to expose all our teachers in different elements of educational technology. The second course is a pedagogy course which will train our teachers in use of online and blended education for their students because increasingly more and more learners will start adopting pure online courses. So, how to guide them in using the online courses and how to run a flip classroom in your own colleges so that the teachers can actually ensure that students benefit a lot more. This particular program is the preliminary designed teacher's training program. We are not offering this currently as a teacher's training program as you know and as has been announced by Professor Sridhar Ayer and Sanna Murthy that this is actually a MOOCs course primarily meant for teachers. A massive open online course can be attended by any people not necessarily teachers alone although the course is primarily meant for teachers. What I would like to emphasize to you is if you could encourage largest number of teachers from your own institutions at least and also from neighboring institutions to participate actively in this program we would begin this new year with a band reaching out to much larger number of teachers. Ordinarily you are familiar with our T10KT workshops wherein the participating teachers get a certificate recognized by ISTE which is useful to them in their own career advancement. Although this course was not announced to be a T10KT workshop I have just discussed with Professor Sridhar Ayer and Sanna Murthy and we have agreed that although this course will run as a MOOC for anybody and everybody and there will be of course assignments and online quizzes etc which must be completed to deserve a certificate which we call an honor course certificate as has been announced. But additionally we have decided that those teachers who A confirm that they are valid teachers employed or working with some institutions such as yours and we agree to submit an additional assignment including a possible AVU interaction at one of the remote centers would be eligible to get an IST T10KT workshop certificate also at the end. Appropriate clarifications will be put up on the site very shortly by my colleagues. So let me tell you my dialogue with AICTE particularly with Chairman Professor Anil Sastryapudde both of us believe that as I said earlier all our teachers required to be trained in these new methodology to be adopted in the light of emerging educational technology usage on the large scale both by students and teachers and towards this end we shall be creating three training modules. These training modules incidentally are expected to be delivered to over 5 lakh teachers across the country over next three years that is the vision of the new AICTE chairman. Of course the MHRD funding or AICTE funding will not be available for this all of these courses therefore will be self-financed courses where participating teachers or the institutions where these teachers were will have to food the bill for training these teachers. Why I am mentioning this is that when we will launch that program sometime in March April all the teachers doing these courses will have to pay for participation. This particular instance however is the first instance where there is no payment involved the course is completely free including the T10KT workshop certification which we are adding it will be completely free for those teachers who join. There is another important point that I would like to make in this context unlike in the past where we offered training programs for teachers and we left the teachers alone after the completion of the training program this time we have decided that we will also try and create a very large body of contributors and enthusiasts among these 5 lakh teachers who we trained. So that may be 10 percent of them about 50,000 teachers emerge as contributors to open educational resources to additional quiz quizzes problems explanations tutorials what have you. These will have to be edited these will have to be moderated and there will be a requirement about 5000 moderators or editors who will constantly view the large submissions being made from the crowd which will include not only submissions from teachers but even from their students. So that individual subjects will be enriched through the contents which are created not just by the few experts in IIT system but by teachers all across the country including teachers from your own institutions. I will soon describe the detailed plans to all of you including all those other remote center coordinators. I do expect remote centers to participate more actively in this there is a scheme that I have suggested to IIT chairman that special recognition be granted to those institutions from which largest number of teachers come forward and make meaningful contributions as a result not only these teachers but even their institutions will be recognized. I am very happy to note that 39 of our remote centers are participating in this endeavor and I have no doubt that all these 39 institutions if they casual their teachers to participate actively not just in this particular course but in subsequent years these institutions and their teachers will form the backbone of academic leadership of the entire Indian higher education system in the coming years. Before concluding I would like to mention that the concept of teaching learning has undergone a lot of change all of us for years have tried to improve our teaching without probably spending enough time to realize that whether that effective teaching is translating into effective learning or not. Of late you will notice that notions of active learning of discussion sessions of participation of students actively into all aspects of discussions on a subject has become extremely important because it has been proven there is only the active participation by students which enhances their learning. In IIT Bombay many of our colleagues have been trying the flip classroom for decades now and we know by hard research that engagement with students increases to as much as 80 percent from an average 40 percent when you use active learning when you use think-pair share and when you use discussion sessions and problem solving sessions rather than delivering lectures. It is therefore extremely important for our teachers who are all used to just delivering lectures because that is the standard mode of teaching to convert themselves into effective facilitators of learning it is extremely important that they all understand what is active learning what is flip classroom and what is the associated pedagogy. This particular course has been designed by Professor Cedar Ayer and Professor Sanamurthy after years of research years of participation and we believe that this course will go a long way in reorienting the mindset of all our teachers and train them appropriately in the use of this new pedagogy. I once again request all of you as heads of the institutions to ensure that the largest number of teachers from your own institutions to begin with and as I said from some neighboring institutions if you could casual them into action please ensure the largest number of participation. As I said it will not only help these teachers but these teachers and their institutions will have a chance of becoming early leaders of the entire game which will unfold in coming years. I will now request Professor Cedar Ayer to take over and continue this dialogue. Thank you very much.