 Good morning everyone. It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to this 10-day IST workshop. It's unique because we are doing it over five weekends so that everybody can manage to attend it at their own convenience. I have with us here the faculty members who are going to be conducting the course and also Professor Fatak, who is the project coordinator for the entire project of Teacher Thousand Teachers. I will introduce you to Professor Madhu Bailur. Would you take your seat please? Madhu Bailur is from Electrical Engineering Department and Professor Prabhu Ramchandran, Department of Aerospace, IIT Bombay and Professor D. B. Fatak, Department of Computer Science. He is the, as I said, the project coordinator for the project and now I request Professor Fatak to introduce the project and also give the welcoming remarks. Thank you. Good morning all of you and welcome to this workshop under the project of empowerment of teachers across the country. Some of you might have already participated in few of our earlier workshops, but many would not have. So, I would take this opportunity to briefly introduce the objective of this entire project. As you know all of us are concerned about having an adequate quality in our professional education. When the number of institutions are increasing, the number of students are increasing in these institutions, but corresponding increase in the faculty strength, both quantitatively and qualitatively has not come about. Primarily, because we do not have adequate facilities for people to pursue their PhDs in required numbers and therefore, many of our faculty colleagues have not been able to pursue their PhDs. Many join the teaching program, try to do some research and some learning while they are teaching and under these circumstances, it becomes important that at the national level, we undertake programs which will empower these teachers to perform their duties better. Traditionally, the mechanism of such empowerment has been conduct of IST, QIP, workshops or UGC workshops of two weeks duration, wherein about 30-35 faculty members would assemble at a particular place and the workshop would be conducted by some expert faculty. It is an extremely effective tool as was agreed to by all the participants in such workshops over the last two decades. However, it is not possible to scale up this model and given that we have now lakhs of teachers all across the country wanting to participate in such endeavors, it was necessary to enhance the scale of these efforts. At IIT Bombay, we had been conducting these distance education using information and communication technology since the year 2000. We thought that we could utilize this technology to try and collect much larger number of participants assembled at different places, but where the lectures are conducted from one place in IIT Bombay and the afternoon tutorials and labs are conducted at the remote places which are selected for the teachers to physically participate. We tried this model and were thankful to government of India, which under the MHRD's national mission project on education through ICT, approved the conduct of such workshops through a mixed mode of remote lecturing and physical interaction during tutorials and labs. Needless to say, in order to have cohesiveness and commonality of the entire workshop conduct, we actually carry out a one week program for all the coordinators from selected remote centers who come here physically to IIT Bombay. They discuss with the faculty members who are going to conduct that workshop as to what should be the syllabus, what should be the modus operandi of conducting labs and tutorials and it is upon this agreed common syllabus sort of that the workshop is then planned and prepared for. Subsequently, when the workshop is conducted, teachers and our ambition is that every workshop should have thousand teachers so that the benefit really scales up significantly. They assemble at these 20, 30, 40 remote centers and that is how the workshop is conducted. So to all the participants, I would like to say that great effort has been spent by the coordinators at the remote centers where you are physically attending by their own colleagues who will work as teaching assistants and technical assistants to them while they conduct the labs and tutorial sessions as also by the faculty members and a large team here at IIT Bombay for preparing the course material and deciding on the kind of tutorial and lab problems that would be done. As should be usual in any academic endeavor of this kind, we generally insist that there should be some evaluation in order to primarily get a feedback to participating teachers themselves and also to the coordinators and others as to what has been the effectiveness of this course and this particular course also, I believe will have its own components of quizzes and tests and assignments. Naturally, this is important because we expect the participating teachers to go back and when they conduct a course they are ready to set questions, quizzes, tests of similar nature. From the past experience where we have already conducted several such workshops, we are indeed glad to report that the workshops have been a great success. The main difference between all those previous workshops and these workshops is that previously we used to conduct these workshops for 10 consecutive days or 2 weeks at a particular remote center. There was one problem with such workshops namely that people had to stay away from their place of work or place to stay for as much as 2 weeks which was perhaps not very comfortable to many teachers. The second problem was that we could not conduct many such workshops because such 10 day periods had to be found during the common vacation period that teachers had and which was limited to perhaps about a month and a half in summer and about 20 days in winter. To overcome this we were thinking of conducting such programs over multiple weekends. Obviously people would have to travel from their place of stay to attend these workshops every weekend. But we figured that if we have sufficient remote centers and if there are large number of teachers in and around those remote center cities then it should be possible for them in their long term commitments during the working days they could perhaps come and participate during the weekends. I am very glad to note that thanks to your very encouraging support this workshop participation has touched about 900 people. 864 is a very large number given the special and peculiar nature of this workshop which runs over several weekends with the fifth weekend being the buffer weekend. I would only say that there are two things I would like the colleague participating teachers to take back with them when they finish this course. One that all of us have to be completely committed to continuously enhance the quality of education that we offer to our students. Second that the IIT system the NITs of this country and a few well-known institutions across the nation who have perhaps evolved their own pedagogy, their own methodology their own approach to teaching their own approach to challenging students with hard problems all of this needs to be spread across the country. It is nothing difficult after all if some human beings in some institutions can try then all other human beings in all other institutions can also be able to try. It is our endeavor as an important objective of these workshops to try and convey to all of you the ethos that prevails in these institutions and request you to try and imbibe that ethos if you find it useful. Simultaneously we also hope to learn from you. It is no-brainer that when 800,000 teachers assemble from across the country there would be several amongst them who have done great things themselves in terms of developing teaching methodologies or in terms of mechanisms of giving examples setting problems etc. Needless to say we hope to benefit from such expertise because these expertise is based on individual efforts and has absolutely nothing to do with the institution to which that individual belongs. I do expect therefore that out of these 850 or participating teachers there would be at least 10 percent teachers or let us say 85 which is not a small number by any means would be able to contribute to the entire effort by citing their own experiences by putting across their own kinds of problems that they would like us to consider for setting up their own method of challenging students and so on. In short this is a great opportunity for doing an extraordinary collaborative effort in enhancing the quality of education in our engineering education system and to buttress this collaborative effort what better subject to consider than the subject of open source. All of you would know that open source software has been predominantly an outcome of large collaborative efforts by a very large number of volunteers across the world. We have all benefited from it we continue to benefit from it the only concern that I have I would say not concern but a nagging shortcoming that I find is that while in our country a very large number of users of course we are one of the largest downloaders of software from all across the world size the contribution made by Indians to the open source however has been drastically limited you will notice this in the domain of software you will also notice this in the domain of open source contents while we all benefit from Wikipedia and the great contents that Wikipedia has we still do not have adequate knowledge contents say for example school children in India who are studying science subjects mathematics other subjects in their native languages they find that most of the useful contents are unfortunately still in English we propose to in fact start conducting a larger nationwide project for addressing that shortcoming as well coming back to the present course ordinarily we conduct workshops in subjects which are considered part of core courses in engineering curriculum across the country you will notice that many universities in India have not yet adopted the free and open source software related course as a part of their curriculum except perhaps Anna University Chennai which has a very large number of courses centered around open source we and IIT BHU at IIT Bombay we have a senate approved elective in open source and that elective is taught in fact the faculty members who will be conducting this workshop themselves have been involved in this I would think that in coming years one by one most universities in the country would be expected to introduce such a course in their regular curriculum it is in this anticipation that we decided to have one workshop on this important topic with this introduction let me welcome my faculty colleagues who will be conducting this workshop I do not know how many of you have interacted with them earlier certainly the co-ordinators from the remote centers who had all come here would have interacted with them so Prasamadu Belur can you can you focus and Prasamadu Ramchannan ok, Prabhu has interacted only through AVU I would also like to observe that Prasamadu Belur comes from electrical engineering department and Prasamadu Ramchannan comes from aerospace engineering department I mention this specifically to emphasize that the work in open source is not necessarily restricted only to a few from the conventional computer size departments it is used by all and it is also contributed to by all indeed in IIT Bombay while we have open source adherence in our computer size department faculty but the greater exponents of open source software both in terms of contributing and in terms of using happen to be outside computer size department in IIT Bombay two of my colleagues are joined by several other people the most noteworthy of them perhaps is Kannan Mawgalyan who has been trying to he also by the way is a co-investigator in this particular project and he is actually the coordinator of all national mission projects of MHRD at IIT Bombay he has been conducting workshops on sila for example he has created a very unique mechanism of constructing spoken tutorials short time tutorials which are actually video slides and spoken words which he has been translating into multiple Indian languages there are several interesting things that are happening perhaps through this interaction and later through interaction with our site related to this project many of you would come to know more about things that are happening here in these things I will conclude by saying that at the end of this workshop like at the end of all other workshops we create edited versions of the recorded audio video lectures as also the edited version of all the teaching learning material that has been developed by the faculty colleagues all the problem sets all the sample solutions that are created not only by our faculty colleagues and your coordinators at remote centers but this will also include the contributions made by participating teachers during and after this workshop and all of this material will be released in open source this is not something special to this particular workshop which is about open source but this is a common theme for all our workshops sadly we are not being able to put together the large hardware infrastructure in a single common site through which we could release all of this in a single portal that work is going on and we hope to finish that by December after which a single portal containing different subject sub portals would be available for active interaction by all thousands of students and teachers across the country through which we expect that over the coming years we expect at least would increase significantly from the Indian diaspora I once again welcome all of you to this workshop although you will be hassle to travel to your remote center once every weekend and go back again I assure you that the coordinators have tried to do their best to provide whatever limited facilities that they had but I can assure you that this trouble will be worth it you will benefit tremendously from this workshop my only request is that the benefit will be directly proportional to the amount of effort that you yourself put in as is true with any learning teaching process so I request you to kindly put all your heart and mind in this workshop try to gather as much and leave the entire community more empowered than the community was before and this includes all of us here as well all the best thank you very much