 Good morning and welcome to this T10KT workshop on physics. In fact, it is after quite some time that we have been able to convince and request our colleagues in the physics department. So this is more or less the first T10KT workshop on a science subject. So far we have been offering workshops only on the engineering course subjects. I am Deepak Fartaj, the principal investigator of the T10KT project here and I have the privilege of speaking to you at the beginning of this workshop. But before that, I would like to welcome on stage the three colleagues of mine, Professor Deepan Ghosh, Professor Shiv Prasad and Professor Suresh to kindly join me. And thank you very much Deepan for agreeing to do this. Thank you, Shiv Prasad. Please welcome Suresh. Many of you would be aware that this unique way of conducting workshop was evolved over several years of experiments in the first decade of this century and in 2012 we launched the T10KT project. Essentially, the participating teachers in a two week workshop assemble at multiple locations which we call remote centers. In the morning interactive lectures are delivered from IIT Bombay or IIT Kharagpur which is our sister institution participating in conducting these workshops. And in the afternoon the tutorial sessions, lab sessions as required are conducted at each remote center under the supervision and direction of a workshop coordinator is located at the remote center being a faculty member of that remote center. To ensure that the labs and tutorials are conducted with the same rigor and penchant as we do them in the IIT system we invite all the workshop coordinators from all remote centers for an extensive one week interaction and orientation here. We had such a coordinators workshop conducted by the same colleagues of mine and I assure you that the entire workshop which not only includes interactive sessions with our faculty directly but also the local interaction with the workshop coordinators in totality will give you the same impact and ethos as if you are attended the workshop at IIT Bombay. As my friend Professor Dipankosh points out that the number of faculty members teaching engineering subjects in any engineering college are very many but number of faculty members teaching science subjects of maths could be very few and perhaps that is the reason why the total number of participants we have is about 2450. Let me assure you that 2450 physics teachers assembling together for a two week extensive program is itself a unique thing and therefore I am very happy to welcome you once again for this workshop. In next few minutes I would like to share with you our future plans which hopefully will be beneficial to not only all of you but all your colleagues as well. You will be aware of the intense development on massive open online courses and the extraordinary popularity that such MOOCs have gained all over the world. IIT Bombay has been at the forefront of this experimentation for past three years and earlier this year we launched our own extension online educational programs through IIT Bombay X which is a platform which offers MOOCs. We also use this platform to offer online component of our teacher's training program and additionally we did a new pilot program this July in which we offered the MOOCs courses in a blended model to regular students of sister institutions. Let me explain to you that model but before that let me tell you the inadequacies that we teachers have found out in the pure online model of education. The advantages of course are well known. Anybody can learn any subject from anywhere. You can learn at your own pace because the recorded lectures are there, video clips are there, interactive assignments are there, sample problems are there and therefore you are the master of your own pace, permitting you to study any subject at a time of your choice. The disadvantage is that a MOOC disintermediates all human interaction and you all agree as teachers that it is the human interaction between teachers and students which has the maximum impact on the learning of the students. We have been wondering how to combine the positive aspects of MOOCs and the positive aspects of the conventional education to provide a better learning experience to students. Some experiments which have been conducted exclusively in many institutions including at IIT involve the use of flipped classroom where no lectures are delivered during lecture sessions. Instead prerecorded lectures are stored on the server. Students are advised to view those lectures and come to a classroom where the entire class hour is actually dedicated to discussion and problem solving sessions. Many of us have conducted our courses in flipped classroom manner. I myself did that last year for a very large class. There is in fact a very strong solid research on the engagement with students conducted by two of my colleagues Professor Sridharayar and Professor Sarnamurti which indicates that the engagement level of students in such a model enhances from an average 40% in normal classroom to almost 80%. Now this is a phenomenal increase in engagement. Obviously it results in better understanding of the subjects being discussed. You require additional preparation to conduct such flipped classrooms. A lot of preparation is required to decide on which particular problems you want to discuss, what could be the questions during discussions that you should pose if students do not raise them and to coordinate groups of students encouraging them to discuss as individuals and groups so that learning is maximized. This is effectively a blended move because the lectures are online. However the students spend most of the time in the classroom discussing with their teachers and amongst themselves to maximize learning. The experiment that we did in July I will describe now. We wanted a large number of teachers teaching a subject in sister institutions to try and follow this model where their students would be able to study the same course online from the experts and additionally they should be able to be taught and they should be able to learn from their own local teachers. We would in the process encourage the local teachers to at least have some scheduled sessions during their semester where instead of giving the conventional lectures, we actually engage students in the flipped classroom model. The caveat was that the final grade that the students receive in the subject must come as a combination of their online assessment and the local assessment thereby ensuring that students take both the online component and the local component with equal seriousness. Obviously if this has to be accepted then this can be accepted only at the level of university to a large number of deliberations within the academic council, senates, committees etc. We therefore decided to concentrate on autonomous institutions which are full of academic autonomy to decide the way in which they offer courses, the way in which they assess the performance and give the grade. Amongst our remote centers we found out that about 96 institutions are having such academic autonomy. I wrote to them and in the month of May I was very pleasantly surprised to find 55 sister institutions agreed to experiment with this model. We had by then perfected three of our courses through multiple offerings both to the global learning community through our partnership with EDX and two local Indian students through offerings from IIT Bombay X. These three courses were a course in computer programming, a course in thermodynamics and a course in signals and systems. We offered these three courses and out of these 15 institutions those institutions which had these courses in their first semester agreed to do this experiment. Consequently instead of offering these courses for shorter duration as MOOCs are normally offered for 4 weeks or 6 weeks we decided to offer them for 15 to 16 weeks covering the entire semester. Curiously this resulted in the reduction of the total number of learners who would otherwise have enrolled for this course as we had found in January earlier and that is because most of the learners were not regular students would like to finish such courses in 4 weeks, 6 weeks and 7 weeks and they did not have patience to enroll for a course which would run for 15 weeks. As a result we had about 35,000 enrollments for all these three courses as against 65,000 in January but out of these 35,000 learners 11,000 students 11,500 students are regular students from amongst these 50 institutions. All these students have undergone their education in these subjects using both the online course which was running parallel to their own regular course. Many teachers have actually experimented with the flip classroom. We have got amazing feedback both from teachers and from students directly to surveys on IIT Bombay X where students have wholeheartedly admitted that overall they have learned much better in this mode rather than in the conventional. The Chairman of all India Council of Technical Education wishes that we should extend this pilot to at least 500 institutions in the next academic year and hopefully to all professional colleges in the subsequent academic years because clearly this enhances the actual learning of students. Of course that requires tremendous preparation by all of us as teachers because we have to do, we have to learn a completely new way of teaching. All of us are accustomed to delivering lectures, all of us are accustomed to conducting quizzes and assessments etcetera at normal intervals but the notion of a flip classroom where the whole class hour is spent only on discussion sessions, only on problem solving sessions is something which is different and all of us need to understand the pedagogy or the methodology to be used when courses are delivered both online and face to face fashion. As a result of that since IIT Bombay has a certain expertise and experience in conducting last scale teacher training program we are asked to formulate a possible scheme which we are currently doing. I am happy to share some contours of that scheme with all of you so that you can speak about these amongst yourselves with your other colleagues and give us a feedback before we put this scheme in operation. The scheme is as follows. Our target is to reach out to every teacher in every professional institution in the country which includes all engineering colleges, all pharmacy, MCA management colleges, all polytechnic. There are about 9000 such institutions. We estimate that there are about 500000 teachers. All these teachers are to be given basic training which we have currently thought of in three modules. The first is a foundation module in which we will expose all the teachers to the technology for education. So technology that is used, you are familiar for example with the AVU that we are now using here. Many of you would be using tools like Moodle to manage your own courses. There are so many things starting with the basic approach to efficient surfing of web for handling discussion forums, the e- etiquettes as we call them or netiquettes, so many things that need to be understood by all of our teachers. This would be followed by another module which we have Christianed as effective communication for teaching or you can say communication for effective teaching. We have not yet come up with the name but all of us understand that while we might be good communicators generally, there are several specific things in which we are constantly learning mostly from our colleagues. We wish to put together a training module explicitly designed to address the particular issue. The third model which is perhaps the most important module of the three modules is on online and blended education or pedagogy for online and blended education in which our colleagues who are doing research in ET and have come up with a large number of best practices many of which we have started following as I just mentioned some time ago and we wish to share all of these with all the teachers. All these modules will run primarily as online courses and we will buttress that with such interactive sessions using AVU. In short, the entire approach to this large scale training program which we are trying to put together involves both online and face to face learning and such a scheme will be put together very shortly. Of course, the funding for this scheme cannot be made at the same level at which the current efforts are funded. So, these will all be self funded or self financed modules. The details will be communicated later once these schemes are approved, but essentially we expect all teachers who will benefit from this to be able to spend money from their own pockets to attend the face to face portion of these modules which will be conducted in our remote centers. We are now in the process of enhancing the number of our remote centers from roughly 300 to about 500 so that we should cover practically every important part of the country. So, that people who attend such face to face sessions do not have to travel very far from their place of stay or place of work. We believe that unless all of us are well equipped in efficiently and effectively handling this technology to maximize our contribution to education, we will not be able to enhance quality in our education at the scale at which we are required to achieve which is about 1.25 million students entering our engineering colleges every year just engineering colleges. You can imagine the number of students who enroll every year the total number of student population incidentally in higher education is currently estimated to be 2 crores and this is likely to increase to more than 3 crores. A significant chunk of this does attempt to study in professional institutions and therefore it is vital that all of us share this new emerging knowledge and practices. Please note that it is not as if we at IIT Bombay have become experts in handling this entire technology the whole MOOCs phenomena is a very recent phenomena started exactly 3 years ago but please remember it is almost like the world wide web. Internet descended on this world in 91-92 when the first mosaic browser was built web descended towards the end of 90 and look at the way it has completely revolutionized human life. We believe that in these days of internet and web we do not get the conventional time frames to discuss new policies and implement them which have the time spans of 20 years, 30 years and 50 years. We have to adapt these technologies within 2 to 3 years to really reap the advantage of reaching out to a very large number of our student population. I am sorry to have digress from your main activity in this workshop which is to learn physics but whether you are teaching physics or chemistry or engineering or for that matter history or economics or accounts what is important for all of us is not only we enhance effectiveness of our teaching but we ensure that such enhanced effectiveness actually results in effectiveness of learning. I am very frank to admit that as a teacher I spent decades to improve my teaching, improve my teaching, improve my teaching till I realize that such improved teaching may not necessarily result in improved learning where learning happens through application of an individual mind spending quality time on that subject. In our quest to improve ourselves do we really ensure that such quality time spent by the student is actually increased? If we ensure that then and only then our better teaching would result in better learning. These are some of the finding of the pedagogical world that is happening not only in IIT Bombay but at many other places not only in India all over the world. In fact active learning, discussion sessions, think-pair-share or methodologies which are now well accepted because it is possible to use modern technology to implement these methodologies easily earlier it was not easily possible. I am very happy that through this workshop you are getting the first hand exposure to use of technology. All of you would be registered on Moodle so you will be already familiar with using Moodle. Please take the Moodle assignments, the Moodle surveys, the Moodle discussion forums very very seriously. Are all of them also registered on IIT Bombay X? No. So you are not using IIT Bombay X but as I said very soon perhaps within the next few months you will get an announcement from AICT, IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur jointly. I am sure many of you will be looking forward to such an opportunity. Meanwhile please do discuss these contours that I have described with all your colleagues not necessarily only from the physics department but from all other departments. Do read about MOOCs and the blended model. Do read about the flip classroom. A lot of material is available very easily on web including Wikipedia articles and do reflect upon these. In case you come up with any suggestions or any specific observations please do send those to us. We will be very glad to factor all of these while we prepare our detailed program because as I said this is not an effort to be done only by IIT Bombay or IIT Kharagpur alone. This is not an effort to be supported by AICT alone. All of us the entire teaching community of the country has to participate wholeheartedly which means to begin with you must contribute in formulating the policy itself in formulating the plan itself. Thank you so much and I am very happy to request my colleagues to take over from me now to carry on the next one.