 Good morning. I am very happy to initiate this first face to face interaction with all the 7700 and all participants who have assembled at more than 170 remote centers. So, I would like to utilize the first 10 minutes to interact with few of the remote centers before I begin my formal talk. When I go over to any remote center, since I have not yet spoken, I would like someone from each remote center to quickly comment on what exactly they wish to gain from these 2 faculty development programs which are running back to back. With this I would go over to the D.Y. Patil Institute, Hune, over to you D.Y. Patil. I feel we expect that the students, how to help the students so that they can learn wherever they are and we can help them at any place we ask and we can solve their doubts, they can get their note and they can be in touch globally all around the world. For that reason, I think we have gathered here to attend this FDP. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I am the Institute of Technology. Thank you. Let me go over to another remote center now. Gitanjali Institute. Okay, okay. Hello sir, good morning sir. Good morning. Sir, actually we are expecting that, okay, by the end of these two workshops, we will be in a position to develop our own curriculums in a modern methodology such that, okay, we can make students to be more eager in learning and make them active in learning and gathering information and self-learning and peacemaking technologies. Okay, thank you so much. Good morning to all of you. By the way, I see a large group assembled there. Let me go over to the next remote center, Shastra University. Over to you, Shastra. Good morning, professor. I am Dr. Badrinath. I am the Director of Training, Placement and School of Management. And this is my first experience with MOOC and it's really interesting, fascinating. Though I am very busy throughout the day during my administrative work, you won't believe after 10 o'clock in the late night, I sit and read after 1 o'clock whenever I find time. So really interesting and in spite of all the arts we want to learn and it's very helpful. The pedagogy is also very useful. I listened to your lecture and other YouTube lectures. I also filed my course journal well before the time. And one thing I just want to share with you that I hosted my course journal but I'm not able to see the response subsequently because hundreds and hundreds of people have given their response. I don't know how to search. I'm very poor in computing. Let me ask, accept honestly. I'm not able to search about the responses I receive from my course journal. I think there is no provision if I'm right. I'm not very sure but there is no provision for searching and checking our own course journal's responses. Thank you so much. I should be visiting Shastra personally during the third interaction that is what tentatively I'm planning or alternatively I might barge in sometime in between. Let's go to the next institution that is Don Bosco College of Engineering. This is the fourth time I am interacting with you and very nice to see you. Whenever I see you I feel very proud as well as I feel motivated. So first thing I would like to say is that expectation from this workshop is used and especially how to think of innovative ideas to attract the students or to make the students motivated towards the learning not from the concept point of view obviously but from the different ways that we can attract the students to help them in their learning methodologies. Thank you sir. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's go to the Sardar Patel College of Engineering. Good morning sir. My name is Ajay Pujari. I'm from Vidyalankar College. Currently I'm attending from Andheri. So I definitely this is my first time interaction with the MOOCs and I definitely feel that this program will help not only students but also the faculty to a proper way of delivery of the content not only from the conceptual point of view but also from the application point of view and this all things is very much new for us. That is what I believe that will definitely help us to our personal growth as well as our career growth. Thank you so much. Let's go over to... Good morning. Good morning. I'm talking to friends in Namakkal. Yes sir. On behalf of our college we want to thank IIT Bombay for conducting such a wonderful FTP program. So we have registered all the newly appointed faculty sir. They are very freshers to this field. That's why we have registered all of them in this particular FTP program. Our main exception is that all our students are coming from the rural background so we have to really motivate them and we have to introduce them as a wonderful engineer. So I hope this FTP will give such an opportunity for us to develop our students into such a wonderful engineer sir. Thank you so much. Let me just very quickly respond by saying that rural background or urban background does not distinguish between people in terms of their capabilities and achievements. My own colleague Professor Kannan Mokgalya who is a co-PI of this project comes from the town of Namakkal. So there are people from Namakkal who have made their names every day in the world and I'm sure that charged with this FTP your colleagues and others will participate more vigorously in the educational process. Thank you so much. This Bharatwara Institute Aurangabad, over to you. Good morning sir. This is BG Toksha here. What I expect is that all the participants and the colleagues they should use a functional OER and spread this technology to all the students. That is what I expect from this FTP. Very good. Thank you so much. NMIMS Dhulia. Good morning sir. It's Amit Pagai representing the NMIMS Shripur campus. Actually we are all interested to making students more interested in teaching learning processes because one of the discussion forums in the first week represented or highlighted this point that students are not interested in this teaching learning process when we follow the conventional teaching system. That's why using this ICTs we are interested or we are motivated to motivate the students so that they can take part in the actual teaching learning process and they can use this or apply this knowledge to their career. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good morning BMS. Good morning sir. This is Uma Rao representing all the faculty enrolled in this center. So our main expectation is that at the end of the two workshops each one of us should be proficient in use of ICT and we should be able to transform the way engineering education is delivered to the students. Secondly, when we put up a lot of content in the web like in the form of videos etc in our personal websites I personally want a little bit of exposure and clarification on plagiarism aspects and legal implications if any if we post it in our personal websites. Thank you sir. Thank you very much. You make an important point. I might add that tomorrow I am visiting Bangalore and I will be going over to Nitte Meenakshi Institute in the morning session and I will be personally visiting you in the afternoon at around 2 o'clock for just about half an hour. So I look forward to this visit. Thank you so much. Let me go over to the next remote center. This D.Y. Patil Kolapur over to you. Good morning sir. The workshop is very very very helpful for us and it is completely very helpful for all the teaching learning process that we are carrying out here. Okay. Thank you. S.I.E.S. Good morning sir. Good morning. Sir we are very curious to use the technology and modern techniques taught to us in this program for making teaching learning more effective but we also require your help in preparing videos, video lectures in this program as well as one suggestion if you could conduct such programs during our vacation it will be very useful for us because we are finding little bit hectic during our regular schedule and one more request from communication skill faculty more focus on abstract topics such as later writing and comprehension which is an integral part of subject like business communication. Thank you sir. Thank you so much. We are going over to another remote center this supreme knowledge foundation over to you. I would like to thank IIT Bombay for giving us this opportunity to join such an FDP. We look forward to more FDPs in the future especially for these two FDPs we think that we can easily blend ICT with our teaching methodologies like earlier we were more concentrated on the chalk and talk, blackboard, methods of teaching now what we can do is that we can blend ICT online teaching into our course so that the students they can be at par with all other students not only of India but outside India as well. Thank you so much. We will go over to another institution. Valkan College, Solapur over to you Valkan. Good morning one and all good morning sir. I am Dr. S.M. Jagde Professor N.B.N. Sehagard College of Engineering, Solapur I am at Valkan Institute of Engineering and Technology, Solapur right now. Basically I want to get updated myself with the latest tools which are available online videos and whatever the contents are available online because now the learning trains in the students they are changing and we want to adopt these changes and basically we want to learn out of this workshop for coming these two days. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. We go over to Daavangere over to you Daavangere. The participants here expect how to what extent ICT can be implemented in the interdisciplinary team here and additionally the decreasing interest among students to watch videos even if ICT is implemented can there be any suggestions or ways and means of improving motivation amongst the students is also what we are thinking that we can learn something from them. Thank you. Thank you so much. Important point that you make. We'll address that. Adi Shankara Institute, Andhra Pradesh. Adi Shankara College of Engineering and Technology Go Doors are. Thank you very much for making us present on this national platform first of all and definitely it is a curtain riser for many of our faculty related to MOOCs and everything sir. And one of our small intention is like discussion forums and everything are very much helpful in sharing information and getting information also but a college which is placed in a semi urban area and nearly near to the rural areas we need students also to get updated for this sir. If there are any sessions which will be helpful for the students also it will be more helpful. Thank you so much. Important point that you make. Good morning Patak sir. Good morning. With this actually we have been already being very much involved in improving our teaching and learning methodologies through traditional aspect like preparation of lecture notes and all other aspects to the students but from this program using these participants our institution is expected to intake this teaching learning from the traditional method to the next level usage of online material, online teaching methodologies to those rural background students. So that's what we expect that students will be equipped with new level of teaching and learning methodologies. Thank you sir. Thank you so much. Let's go over to TheaGarajar College. Over to you TheaGarajar. Sir actually after the completion of the two FTP program the faculty who are the participant of TheaGarajar College of Engineering remote center able to make the classroom more interesting towards the students and makes the classroom as a learner centric mode. I hope the faculty of this program will use this ICT tools as a aid without losing their meticulous preparation of the content. So I need to share two more comments about the program that we are doing for the past one-half weeks. During the discussion forum the peer reviews are about only the recent comments. So is it possible to limit the peer review to 3 to 5 because most of the faculty they are commenting on the recent post. So that will be helpful to get the feedback of all the posts what we have uploaded in the post box. And as shared by one of the remote center these type of programs could be offered during the vacation. So we could able to do little better than what we are today. Thank you very much sir. Thank you so much. Let's go over to NIT Warangal. Warm greetings from God's own country and we are happy myself Dr. Ambili from the Biotechnology Department. I would like to say that almost all the faculty from our college is attending this program. Over hundreds of us are there here and this has been extremely interesting to us because it's quite unique and new to us. And what we expect from this program is that we can have a better mode of discussion and interaction with students in a better way so that they are not distracted so much by the regular book reading and PowerPoint presentation alone. And this will also help the students who are taking long term medical leave or something because of those reasons not to miss their classes. So and as somebody else and the other remote centers said it would be good if we can have it during the vacation so that we can learn better and that will help us to perform better. Thank you so much sir. Thank you so much. Let me go over to GRIT Kukutpalli. My God, you resemble the, it is as if the entire institute has come over here, over to you. Very happy to see a large number of people. Very good morning. I'm from remote center 1080 number. Myself Deepak, professor of mechanical engineering at Vardhaman College of Engineering Hyderabad. I have enrolled for this FDP program to know various techniques and methods of ICT based teaching learning process. I want to make teaching learning more easy and to understand the students much better, much better and the thing which I wanted I'm able to get here in this FDP. I'm very much thankful to IIT Mumbai that they are considering the needs of the faculty community to upgrade ourselves to come to the level of faculty members of IIT and the international universities and I'm enjoying this very much. Thank you so much. On behalf of all the participants in this remote center I would like to thank you for giving us this opportunity to undergo this faculty development program. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. Rajaram Bapu Institute Sangli, over to you. Good morning, sir. Sir, we are from faculties from Rajaram Bapu instead of Technivagi and it's a privilege and honor that we are listening you. Sir, we are expecting that as a newcomer in a teaching field how to make a class engaged in an interesting manner because when we think about the student's point of view they feel a little... they are feeling a little bored when they sit in the classes. So we want to make a class interesting and we want to engage a student as per that itself. Thank you, sir. Thank you so much. This is MANIT Bhopal. Over to you, MANIT. Representing all the faculty members attending this program, sir. Our expectation is this that we want to learn how to effectively we can integrate ICT in our teaching learning program. Sir, I want to share with you that I attended first program in 2011 which was conducted by Dr. Chetan Singh Solanki. Then again I attended second program on introduction of research. So they were very helpful and they helped me in completing my PhD. So in this program I am a doctor. Earlier I was not. So inspired by that we started a program called which was online lecture for all the polytechnic students of Madhya Pradesh in remote areas. So how can we strengthen that program and can make it effective. And I personally would like to share with you where I focus on you which are for the final students of IIT Bonway where you shared the stories of GSIT, Soutox, Lavers and so on. You could really solve the problem of MTA. So these are inspiring as a teacher I really listen and follow. Thank you sir. And I would like to say that I am also the National Executive Council member of IST India Society for Technical Education generally representing Madhya Pradesh and these are the reasons. So I am there. And I am there for all the teachers. I am thankful to you for this great initiative because I am pointing you are behind this initiative. Thank you so much. This is Birla Institute. Good morning. Good morning. From IIT Mesra. So on behalf of all the faculty members, all the participants in this regional center first we would like to thank you sir as well as your IIT Bonway X team. You all have really provided us a very good opportunity through this ICT program. Our expectation from the two FDP program is especially to facilitate our student from all, we want to facilitate all the necessary things related to their study, students' study. So it is really very much helpful for all of us. And especially those student who are not able to attend the classes means for absentee student or those students who are poor actually in study. So if suppose we are providing all the material through our IIT site, so these are very much helpful for those students also. So thank you, thank you very much. Thank you very much going over to Indoor Institute Maida. Over to you. Sir, you want to know how to implement new technology to enhance our teaching skills that students can gain more and more knowledge from us. Thank you sir. This is Rai Soni College is it? Over to you. Good morning sir. I just wanted to congratulate IIT Bombay for conducting such an innovative program and this is really very interesting for us because we have been learning new techniques here so that we can be in touch with our students in and out inside the class as well as outside the class. I just humbly request you to kindly do all these interactive courses in vacation period because really it comes hectic for us and at the end of these two week program I hope I will be able to create a very beautiful blog for my students and I will be able to create my own web page. Thank you. Thank you so much. Oh, hello. Anna University. Oh, is that Madurai? Good morning. This is Jeevalan from representing the Anna University of Technology and I would like my points related to the FTP, the two things one is what we experience and second what we expect from this FTP and first point is that the FTP comes under our BC schedule but the interesting point to be noted with FTP is that it invokes, it makes us to work even after our office hours especially I used to work after 11 o'clock so that is the major success behind this FTP I feel and second thing what we expect from the FTP is I used to have some ICT tools for my complex topics in the classrooms but I know how it works from the teacher's point of view but I am participating as a learner in this FTP so it makes me to know how a student will interact to the FTP so my expectation is somewhat higher that I see more interactive, more lively and more loveable interaction with the students to conceptualize my complex topics to reach to every student community. Thank you sir. Thank you. This is St. Francis Institute in Mumbai. This is a very great initiative from you all in order to conduct this information and communication technology workshop for us we are actually expecting a better and interactive mode of discussion with students and to learn how to make video lectures so we can even reach out students outside the college. I just want one suggestions like we are actually want you all to highlight on how to make online assessments and feedback for the students so that it is helpful for us even to assess them outside and even to get their response and feedback even if we are not in contact with them in person. Good point. In fact we will be specifically covering these aspects as well so let me go over to couple more institutions NIT Silture. Yeah it's nice to see you sir our regards from NIT Silture to you and sir we are very optimistic about this initiative I would like to orient ourselves about effective use of ICT though the participant from NIT Silture is not up to the mark but we are expecting it to start I mean the stone build over to you sir I do not know why do you say that they are not up to the mark I don't understand in which context you say that is it that you are worried that not more numbers are participating or is it that you are saying that they are not up to the mark in whatever is expected I would not like the efforts to be little let me tell you even one faculty member in any part of the country benefiting from this program will benefit hundreds of students subsequently so what matters to us is not a very large number of people but even a few individuals who take this effort seriously and use these learnings in their own teaching which is what we all intend to do so thank you very much don't be worried about small numbers let these small numbers act as a kernel I am sure that in subsequent executions of these FDPs when other colleagues see the advantages that benefit the participants they will also come and join definitely thank you so much thank you for encouraging once again sir this phenolics academy Ratnagiri good morning sir good morning nice to see you again in these workshops sir our remote center have also participated in earlier four week AICT approach workshop we feel that the sessions which were they were facing the problems of the videos which were shared on the IIT Bombay X and the corresponding quizzes to be given so I think this time our participants are getting more and more inside into the ICT based teaching learning process and we are very much happy to see that this hybrid teaching learning process which is a new concept that IIT is teaching us that is again helpful for us in our teaching learning process of our institute also and students are also getting benefited thank you sir thank you so much I will temporarily suspend this interaction now it is the Indian tradition to start such sessions with prayers the most important prayer for me is for the teaching community and teachers so I start with the invocation of that prayer he says Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu Guru Deva, Maheshwara Guru Sakshat, Parabrahma Dasmai Sri, Guru Venama I had my own share of great gurus but I would like to point out that the collective wisdom the collective commitment the collective passion that is represented by the 7700 participants of this FDP is far more than the great achievement of any individual guru I begin with my salutations to all of you please remember however wise you might be in the teaching learning place or you might be a greatly experienced teacher however different methods that you might be using for teaching all of you have been benefiting students and will continue to benefit students and I have no doubt in my mind that individual idiosyncrasies apart collectively the 7700 participants of this FDP represent the most gigantic guru in this country I am so happy that you have all agreed to participate in this as many people pointed out during the vacation time is easier for teachers to participate but in spite of the problems they are still participating so I am happy to see that let me begin by repeating a few statements which I have made in the recorded lecture where I have suggested that the teaching learning process is undergoing a significant change in the whole world so far we teachers were considered to be the main deliverers of knowledge but as I have pointed out earlier knowledge is now available to everyone on the internet in a form perhaps which is better than what even I can deliver after years of practice and that is because the digital resources now available and accessible to students including many in open source are far too many as a result our job as teachers is very clearly shifting from being deliverers of knowledge to the facilitators of learning and that shall be our main job the purpose of these two FDPs is too full one is to acquaint all our colleagues with the basic tools of ICT that are so useful in education but second and more important to also acquaint them of the pedagogy that has been evolving which is so different from the conventional pedagogy or methodology of teaching which was teacher centric where we delivered lectures and we expected students to do their homework at home the new pedagogy essentially revolves around engaging students and motivating them to do more work I will once again mention the very important point of the teaching learning process namely that a student learns or in fact any learner including us when we participate in such FDPs we learn only when we apply our mind and spend our time in looking at the concept and details and skills if we don't apply our mind if we don't spend our valuable time and effort we will not learn anything independent of how beautiful the delivery has been so this is the main difference now between the teaching learning that happened over last 500 years in the humanity and the teaching learning that will happen now in the 21st century and the objective of these two FDPs is to ensure that all of us not only learn these techniques but start practicing them having said this I would like to mention an important aspect of this teaching learning process that we have discovered over the years what we have discovered is one of the important ways in which you can actually enthuse or motivate a student is to interact with the student both on an individual basis as well as on a collective basis during the conventional teaching learning process such opportunities are there they are rare because I am spending most of my time in preparing for a lecture and then most of the class engagement in delivering that lecture but if at all I use a flip classroom then I am able to concentrate on discussions and on problem solving engaging students throughout that session many of us have been doing it for many years now I would suggest that when you adopt these techniques do not jump into doing it for an entire course at your end because that truly requires a much longer preparation my suggestion is take any one topic from the course that you teach and decide in advance that for that topic you will not deliver lectures but you will refer your students to listen to predefined set of lectures these could be lectures given by eminent teachers available in YouTube these could be your own pre-recorded lectures for which you will be appropriately enabled during the conduct of this FDP itself so you could pre-record your lectures on a topic and make students listen to those lectures ahead of time but engage them in a classroom only on problem solving and in discussion session let me tell you it is not as easy as it sounds I used to prepare 3 to 4 hours for every lecture that I gave earlier I started using the flip classroom I had to prepare for 8 to 10 hours for the first time and I did the flip classroom of course once you spend your time and invest in preparing for problems to be discussed in a flip classroom you could reuse these problems in subsequent years without any problem this course is a rather long course this FDP extends over many months and therefore conducting it in vacation period or conducting it in the regular period actually does not make any distinction please note that from the traditional FDP which required all participants to spend 2 weeks continuously in a remote place to attend such a workshop although those workshops were arranged during vacation period and presumably participants found it relatively easy to come but there were a large number of participants who could not move away from their families we have received a number of emails in the past particularly from lady teachers from remote places who said that if we had arranged this FDP at IIT Bombay they would have never been able to leave their families for 2 weeks and attend this this was the reason why we first set up the remote centers 15 years ago but this is also a reason to further reduce the physical synchronous activity where people are required to participate by physical presence and that is why over the last few years we have been introducing the online content in the FDP you will notice that this is very much in tune with the kind of pedagogy that we are saying will emerge for our students as well so if we are going to train our students using a combination a hybrid combination of online activities and face to face interaction then we ourselves must be able to do that properly and useful that is the reason why these FDPs were conceived where a majority of activity is to be done online as couple of friends pointed out he enjoyed working after office hours after night because he could do that online from the present of his own the whole idea is that you can spend 6 to 8 hours a week by finding out part of your spare time during the week because you have full freedom to choose your time and place where you would do those online activities it is only for the face to face interaction that you have to come together we have planned the face to face interactions on Saturday Sundays so as to minimize the disruption that will occur in your normal teaching activity of course I notice that most of the people who talked about conducting such programs in vacation they did not mention that their normal work is not affected if the FDP is conducted during the regular semester which is the correct point however they mentioned discomfort to themselves you see it is a very interesting point if I take the stance that I can work only so many hours in a week and if I have to spend 6 to 8 hours more for doing this FDP then that becomes an extra work let me redefine the concept of work the work is traditionally measured in the number of hours that we spend on the work a teacher unfortunately is not privileged to have such notions in one's mind I submitted to you that we as teachers have an extra responsibility to the society I will go back and repeat the statement that I had made long time ago and some of you might have heard them please note that human species are the only species in the world who have created an institution called a teacher no other species even the intelligent species like monkeys or elephants etc they are not known to have an institution called teacher this was created by humanity and this teacher was given the responsibility of codifying existing knowledge of communicating existing knowledge and training the young of the species and of enhancing that knowledge now this forms the crux of the teacher's life of course a teacher is a human being and like all other human beings have their families and have their other responsibilities we also have exactly the same kind of responsibility however please understand that we should not consider ourselves to be conventional employees of institutions as most others do we may be employed by an organization called a college or a university or something but we must never forget that we are teachers and therefore we have a little bit extra responsibility imposed on us by the entire society whether society today recognizes that whether society today respects that I think that is immaterial we are teachers we must take it upon ourselves to behave like an institution and an institution does not count the number of hours that one has to spend does not count vacation period and does not count normal period an institution like a teacher learns to enjoy life in every moment of it whether it is vacation period or other period I would strongly request that all of you should try and imbibe this philosophy like all other humans you and we must enjoy ourselves we must spend time with our families we must spend time like others do in the daily chores that is our requirement as human being but as teachers if we learn to optimize and manage our time better one of my gurus, professor Isaac used to always say that if you manage your time well you can make the day consisting of 25 hours I used to call it and I still call it the mythical 25th hour of JR Isaac what it means is by properly managing my time I can actually steal an extra hour every day if each one of us learns to do that such FDPs and extra efforts etc will never remain any extra effort after all we are all doing this primarily to benefit the mankind and the mankind which comes to us in the form of students who learn from our institutions under us unfortunately we have managed to break our education system in many silos where people in different disciplines have stopped communicating with each other and therefore are not benefitting from the advances that happen in other areas of work I believe that this FDP provides an opportunity where people from different domains will come together as the FDP unfolds you will find out that we are going to strongly suggest that people should work across boundaries of discipline let me say a few words again about the importance of interaction after all that is what we are going to emphasize in the modified teaching learning process for the next century namely that we should spend more time in interacting with students in exactly the same way we must spend more time in interacting with each other and in interacting with the associate faculty in this FDP this face to face interaction is only one such mechanism here if I am a participant in one of the colleges I get two opportunities the first opportunity is I interact with the faculty members from IIT Bombay through AVU I get to listen to their viewpoints occasionally I get to talk to them interact with them just like I have collected one page full of comments from all of you which are very useful to us to make modifications in our processes and also very useful for other people who are participating please note that when somebody in Shastra University asks a question or makes a comment that comment is heard and seen by all 7700 participants so all 7700 participants sitting in some kind of virtual classroom are benefiting from this interaction but that is only one part of it the second part is during the face to face sessions all of you come together physical please note that synchronous physical simultaneous present is the costliest investment that people can make in time effort and money in fact our entire education is a synchronous process today and as you will notice through ICT it would be made semi synchronous semi asynchronous but please use this opportunity of synchronous interaction when you are at the remote center spend time in talking to each other over tea break, over lunch break subsequently you will be forming yourselves into team at the end of second FDP even at the end of first FDP where you will be required to do some team work we have done one more very interesting experiment this time I believe this for the first time I have been attempting anywhere globally in fact 7700 teachers attending a single FDP itself is very rare and I am very sure globally there is no comparison and there is no equivalent effort anywhere including in the western societies but I digress what we have done is we notice that people who come physically for face to face interaction to the remote centers are invariably people from either that remote center or from colleges nearby now what happens is suppose I am an electrical engineer or somebody is a computer science person or somebody is a commerce teacher or somebody is a lawyer I notice that in one of the remote centers there are large number of law teachers participating which is very good by the way then I would like to be associated with someone some faculty member or associate faculty member who has undergone this course but who understands my domain better similarly I would like to have an opportunity to interact with some other people who may be in my domain or in some other domains but in a group which is different from the grouping at the remote center itself we have perceived of a parallel track of interaction with this FDP and this opportunity is provided to us by the predecessors who did this course earlier as I mentioned when I was interacting with Walton Institute Solapur for sending the largest number of top performers in the previous FDP well you might not know the exact details but out of the 200 top participants of the FDP over 35 participants have agreed to become our associate faculty and we have gladly incorporated them as associate faculty for this course these 185 people are not necessarily located at any physical place in fact some of them may not even be in any remote center so we are disassociating their participation from the concept of remote center all together what we have done is we have allocated or we are in the process of allocating a set of 40 to 50 participants based perhaps on their field of activity or based on the location etc and we are going to allocate them to one particular associate faculty who will act as a mentor so this is a completely independent grouping that is coming out of the 7,750 people one grouping is of course you attend the face-to-face interaction at the remote center and do those activities which are mandated there the other grouping is if I am one of those 50 people and I am associated with one mentor then this mentor and the group of 50 people will interact with each other electronically so they will interact with each other emails using any other means but more importantly we are providing for a view connectivity between each of these mentors and all the 50 participants who are allocated to this particular mentor will be defining certain slots during those slots these 50 people can individually connect on a view for a face-to-face interaction with the mentor faculty is a new experiment that we are doing we do not know how well it will work we are hopeful that it will work but it is important because we believe that that way we are actually providing for an additional opportunity of interaction between the previous participants who are our associate faculty and the existing 7700 participants I cannot stress the importance of the interaction and remaining engaged because the interaction causes the engagement to enhance significantly traditionally we talk of engagement only when we talk person to person but the engagement through discussion forum engagement through emails and of course face-to-face interaction through a view are additional mechanisms which we want to further buttress through this arrangement of associate faculty needless to add out of these 7700 participants the top performers will be honored again we do not have CSR funding to provide any cash rewards but we will announce with great pride the names of those individuals who perform at the top and we will be requesting the top performers of this batch again to work as our associate faculty for future execution of these FDP please do not forget that just in the professional education stream we have more than 350,000 teachers teaching if you take the entire higher education the number of teachers engaged in higher education in various branches of studies such as arts commerce law of medicine architecture well architecture is part of the professional higher education the point is there are easily about a million teachers who could all benefit from the proper use of ICT in education and from the new pedagogy because as the nation becomes digitally empowered more and more students even in remote areas will be able to access internet will be able to at least access intranet in their own college and it is our job as teachers to provide them both facilities for online content which they can access freely and provide them with an engagement model which is so different from the conventional lecture model that is the intention with which we are proceeding with these FDP let me very quickly answer a few points that were mentioned here one point which was mentioned was that this process of teaching learning will facilitate students who are poor performers or students who are absentees I am very happy that the teachers who made that comment represent the common streak in all of us namely to be sensitive to be the needs of relatively poorer students a student is poor not because a student is significantly less intelligent than the other but a student is poor because of the poor background that the student have there are many students who come to our colleges who actually have not studied in English language when they come and join a first year program whether it is in engineering in science or commerce they find it extremely difficult to understand lectures delivered in English for no fault of theirs they are put at a disadvantage now that is the time when a teacher using ICT tools should be able to give them let us say open educational resources which are available in their own native language and tell them look kid you need to learn English however you clarify the concepts of this particular subject by looking at these resources and simultaneously learn English as you progress further now these kind of mechanisms are not possible elsewhere and that is what will be made available and these FDP will definitely help you doing that however I would like to add a third category of students for whom we ought to do something the first category where you spoke are the poor students who are not performing very well or students who are absent or students who come from rural background the second category of course the majority of students who take care of themselves so they study on their own they are reasonably good they pass their courses and therefore we do not have to specially concentrate on them except for designing the proper syllabus by giving them an appropriate challenges in terms of questions assessment etc. the third category I speak of are the students who perform very well in your classes do we do anything special for them do we pay any special attention to them the fact of life is we generally do not it took me first 10-15 years of my own teaching career before I realized that the smarter students and believe me in IIT Bombay I am privileged to get very very smart students okay even though I must mention that we also get students who have studied in their native languages up to high secondary they are very smart students they have crack joint entrance exam they have joint computer science electrical engineering mechanical engineering or whatever it is but they also face problems in the first 2 or 3 weeks because they cannot understand English language lectures so I digress but I come back to the point that helping poor students here for example I used to conduct classes in Hindi for the first year students because many of them could understand only Hindi there is a bunch of students who said they do not understand Hindi they understand only Telugu since I cannot speak Telugu I requested some of my mtech students who are Telugu speaking students and my teaching assistant they conducted special Telugu lectures for them so this is the kind of help that we traditionally give to the poorer students and that is well taken but consider this you have 10 or 15 students in your class who are performing at the top do we pay any special attention to them we do not why because they are the top performance they will take care of themselves but let me mention this if you spend a little bit extra time on them they can perform much better than what they are performing now because they probably have not just an additional talent but that extra drive to do something that extra passion to do something extraordinary these are the people who are likely to contribute non-linearly to the society when they pass out of our colleges and it is absolutely important that you do something for them in the context of the teaching learning pedagogy I would like to share an experience that we had in addressing the students of both the categories the top performers and the bottom performers through a single course which a colleague of mine conducted recently Dr. Sameer Sasarapudde he is we are introducing skilling courses but I would like to mention these instances which occurred when he was teaching an online course partly in a hybrid or blended model which was called the animation course the animation using blender this was a skilling course is not a regular course in our syllabus and well more than 10,000 students have enrolled and more than 3500 students have successfully cleared that course but the two important things which I wanted to quote go as followed one is about the problems that are faced by the students so he came across in a discussion forum somebody had raised a issue he had given a team project where the team size was restricted to three members so somebody had raised the question why only three members we would like to form a larger group and one teaching assistant brought this to the notice of Dr. Sasarapudde so he went in some more details wrote a mail saying why do you want to have a larger group and one girl replied she said that we are five girls who all stay in one village near the engineering college during the week days we go to the engineering college but during the weekends we have to work from our village we have five of us but we have only one computer amongst us we cannot do exercises in the team if two of the people are left out and that is why we have requested that permit all five girls to form a single team Dr. Sasarapudde made an exception permitted that and they performed wonderfully well in the course we call them the Panchakanya of Borama Borama is the place which is one of our remote centers where these kids were working the importance of communication to the students is actually illustrated by one more incident that happened in his course and that was one place called Rajkore we have a couple of remote centers but this particular college I am mentioning is a different college and there more than 100 students were doing this course on animation when we were going through the performance of the students Samir Sasarapudde came to me and said sir all the students are their scores in their online quizzes is more than 87 88 percent now please note that if 87, 88 percent is a very high score and where large number of students are getting that score it means one of the two things one they are all learning very well which is good news but the other is they are possibly combining plagiarizing helping each other and that is how making a score so I requested Samir to physically go there to that center he went there he met the coordinator who was doing the hybrid portion that is face to face interaction and asked him about his doubt so that fellow laughed and he said sir tomorrow I have called all the 100 students to this center to the college please come and participate with us the next day the local teacher's modus operandi was very simple he started playing Dr. Samir Sasarapudde's video on animation which all 100 students were listening to and Samir himself was sitting in one corner and watching they were all watching the video but after 4 or 5 minutes this local teacher paused the video and explained the same thing in Gujarati Samir says he was astonished to understand suddenly all 100 students becoming very active started making notes etc etc and then he realized that while he had spoken in English not everybody was able to understand but the moment somebody explained the same thing in Gujarati all of them were able to understand later on that local teacher told Samir sir it is not that they don't know English further your English accent is much better than the English accent of the Europeans and Americans of whom we might have video recorded lectures your accent is like Indian accent and people can at least understand a bit however our students come from rural area and they are far more comfortable in listening to you in Gujarati or speaking in Gujarati therefore all that I do is I spend 1 hour listening to your videos I make my own notes and I explain to them in Gujarati the same concept and the results are with so please notice that just making available educational resources online does not necessarily mean that students will assimilate this requires that additional thread and additional communication and that communication will be different in different cases what the fellow in Rajkot did will not perhaps apply somewhere else where all students know English very well but they are demotivated for some other reason so motivating people through communication is the most important I will conclude my initial talk with one last example again from the same course where the communication proactive communication from the teacher how it goes a long way so in this course Dr. Samir Shastrabudde was again analyzing the performance of students on the online test and he found that some 10 or 12 people had topped the quiz one and quiz two of his course but they had not appeared for quiz three and quiz three was ending in just a few days time the quiz was open for almost a week but these 10 people had not attempted it at all and these were the toppers of the previous performance so what he did he found out their phone numbers and email IDs he wrote an email to all 10 of them and he started contacting them the person who was actually the course topper was a lady she was actually a teacher in the army institute in Pune somewhere I forget the exact details he could not get her phone number she was actually the top performer not only in quizzes but even the other assignments etc that he submitted so he contacted the principal of that college where she was working and asked for the contact details of this lady the principal was quite surprised why Dr. Shastrabudde of IIT Bombay is calling me of all the people he said that this lady is on maternity leave but he gave up Sameer the contact number Dr. Shastrabudde contacted that lady late evening and that lady said yes I could not do it because as you know I had taken maternity leave and I have actually delivered a baby Sameer Shastrabudde could hear the baby crying in the distance and Sameer said that I understand your difficulties but I would be very happy if you could appear for the remaining quiz and complete the assignment because you have done best so far in the course and he kept the phone 5 minutes later that lady called him back again and she said sir thank you for calling me I had a long chat with my husband who fired me he said I had promised to look after the baby so that you can concentrate and complete that course and you will not do that so he has told me that over the next 2 days he is going to take care of the baby and I am supposed to spend my time completing the quiz and the remaining assignment it was so heartening Dr. Shastrabudde told me it taught us a few important things the most important thing is the need for teacher to proactively communicate had Sameer Shastrabudde not made a call the lady would not have felt like doing anything because she was busy with the child second and most important thing the Indian family system is still intact the husband of the family is willing to support the wife telling her that don't give up I will take care of the baby this my dear friends is what makes our country unique and different but all of this has to be initiated by proactive and timely communication from us teachers how to do that in the world of ICT is what we are going to experiment with it in the next FDP in conclusion let me put it this way the field of use of ICT in education is yet evolving the last word has not yet been said already people have commented that in the discussion forum they find thousands of posts they find it impossible to locate which particular post means something to them and which particular post is generic after all I cannot effort to read thousand posts to understand what is relevant to me our team is already making efforts to ensure that the discussion forum is classified under different tags so that the relevant tags can be made available but it is very clear that if smaller communities wish to interact with each other in a focused manner the general discussion forum of IIT Bombay X is not very meaningful we are trying to modify this platform to provide additional facilities let me also tell you what we are trying to do we are setting up a portal we are developing a portal on Drupal called the portal for collaborating community in this portal for collaborating communities individuals can form communities and people can actually join a community I expect this portal to be used in the subsequent execution of these FDPs where 30, 40, 50 people or even 10 people could form a small community they will get their own discussion forum they will get very focused questions and answers and they would benefit from this effort let me conclude my initial talk with the following the effort here is obviously to empower each one of us in order to use the modern technology for better teaching learning processes do not forget the most important point that we make students learn when they spend their time when they are actively engaged they do not learn only because we provide the best material or the best quality material that is first thing of course we must provide the best quality material but we must ensure that the learners are engaged maximal this is exactly the effort that we are doing here with 7,750 participants all our 7,700 participants will not benefit just because I deliver a great lecture or just because a great effort is made in some OER that is made available but they will benefit maximally when they spend their active time and I would once again request I understand that you will have to spend time during what you call normal days of hectic activity in your colleges well I would urge you to consider spending 6 to 8 hours a week and spending just these 3 weekends 4 months how so ever strenuous it might be please do spend that time with the intention of relating to others with the intention of absorbing and then attempting to use it in your own course please remember the net result of this FDP is not just a proper certification which only ensures that the participants have learned something useful and the net end result of this FDP has to be that hundreds and thousands of students whom you teach in future actually benefit from whatever mechanisms that we learn here I will conclude this session with once again thanking all of you