 Good afternoon everyone, it is a great pleasure for me to be here addressing you all and telling you about our workshop project that we conduct in IIT Bombay. I am Mukta Atre, I am the project manager for this Teach 1000 Teachers program at IIT Bombay. This is the outline of my talk today, I will be introducing the project and also telling you about some facts that went about in the happening of the project. And then I will talk a little bit about the workshops and the methodology that we use and the people that we need at remote centers and coordinators workshops etcetera. To begin with, I would like to start with a small story here. In about 2002-2003, Professor Fatak who is the project leader of this program went on a mini Bharat Yatra and he discovered that the situation, the condition of students and teachers in remote areas, students and teachers of engineering colleges in remote areas is not a very happy situation. And we find that even today the situation has not changed very much. The situation was basically like this, there was a very high number of engineering colleges, at that time it was something like 3000, now it is increased to 5200 approximately. And there is a proportionate increase in the number of students who are opting for engineering courses. There is a severe lack of good quality education to be had at many of these engineering colleges and which is often a result of lack of a good faculty, lack of infrastructure. The teachers teaching in these smaller institutes and remote centers do not have opportunities, they do not have good openings for enhancement of their skills. So, Professor Fatak found that there was a need for skill enhancement for teachers in different subjects. And so, first we came about with the E-outreach program that has stopped now. But in project E-outreach, we mentored a lot of engineering college students online with their final year projects. And in 2009, the NME ICT gave us the grant to begin this project Teacher Thousand Teachers under the empowerment of students and teachers through synchronous and asynchronous instruction. When it started in December 2009, there was no A-view, we did not have a collaboration with Amrita at that time, we had the EDUSAT and EDUSAT could connect us only to a limited number of places, the places that had the EDUSAT facility and those who were connected to EDUSAT. But then in 2010, EDUSAT collapsed and we had to look for an alternative, an alternative program that would give us a wider reach, it would bring us closer to a larger number of teachers and students. And so, we started a project called Teacher Thousand Teachers and through that, we decided to reach out to as many teachers as possible. We thought we would start with the teachers first. And the question that arose out of a lot of discussions at IIT was that many teachers do not have access to good quality teaching themselves. So, we decided to make a list of core engineering subjects and give a kind of a refresher course to teachers across India. And these workshops are on various engineering topics. We focused on core engineering subjects like computer programming, database management, again couple of programs in mechanical engineering, for example, thermodynamics and heat transfer. But then, we also did some very unusual courses like free and open software for teachers. The Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission and the National Center for Photovoltaic Research and Education here at IIT Bombay approached us to do a workshop on Solar Photovoltaics which would kick start the teaching of Solar Photovoltaics in Indian institutes. And we also did a very interesting but a very effective program called Writing Effective Conference Papers. This was a two day program and we so far we have had the highest number of participants for this workshop around 3000. These workshops were attended by around 9900 participants so far and they were distributed across this say 78 remote centers but we did a recheck in its actually 83 remote centers. Let me talk a little bit about the methodology that we have used for these workshops. We have identified certain institutes across the country which will act as remote centers and these remote centers would then use A-view to transmit the workshops that are actually conducted in IIT Bombay. These remote centers would act as receiving centers and since A-view provides a virtual classroom kind of an environment it was the workshops were totally interactive and we could really manage to reach out to a large number of teachers. Now the methodology that we followed to identify institutes where their proximity to a number of other colleges that were situated around it so that more and more teachers could attend the workshops at these remote centers. The remote centers should have a good infrastructure, a good facility for having a workshop for a large number of people and also of course most importantly good faculty because that is one of the very important roles that a remote center would play. We have two people who are very important at the remote center, the remote center coordinator and the workshop coordinator. The remote center coordinator is an experienced faculty member who is in charge of overall management and a smooth conduct of the workshop. This faculty is nominated by the head of the institute and then we have for specific workshops we had the workshop coordinator. This workshop coordinator would essentially be a subject expert, he or she would have the capacity to act as a kind of a teaching assistant of the faculty in IIT Bombay and would guide and solve the doubts of the participants during the workshop. Once the remote center coordinator is identified and we have decided on a topic of the workshop we look for workshop coordinators at our remote centers. What we are looking for in a workshop coordinator is of course that he has expertise in that subject and that he is capable of handling queries of participants. And then we call these workshop coordinators for a five day coordinators workshop to IIT Bombay. And it is at this forum that the IIT Bombay faculty who is going to be doing the main workshop, the faculty and the workshop coordinators sit together and jointly design the contents of the main workshops which are based upon the needs of that particular university or institute or the syllabus of that region. Then they come to a sort of a common content and the faculty then decides upon the entire course of the main workshop. The workshop thus provides training on the subject, then it also we also provide training on how to conduct the workshop at the remote center. We try to teach them the A-view, how to operate the A-view and the clicker, I will be talking about the clicker a little later. And handling the participants at the remote center, what kind of rules they have to follow, what kind of facilities will they be giving to the participants etcetera. And the last point is risk management like power failure, we have had a couple of cases where remote centers have not been able to have sustained power facility or internet, what should the workshop coordinator do in this kind of a situation. Also, there is another very unusual or maybe in the circumstances I should say usual kind of a happening. And that is when a workshop coordinator comes for training and goes back, there is usually a gap of about 2 months between the coordinators workshop and the main workshop. Many times it so happens that the workshop coordinator by the time the main workshop comes around has left and gone to another college. So, what is to be done in that situation, we normally provide a recording of the coordinators workshop and ask the remote center to nominate another experience faculty in such a situation and he or she would be able to take up where the last person had left. Now, we come to the logistics of the main workshop, once the remote center coordinator and workshop coordinator have been trained, we begin our advertisement for the main workshop, we advertise on our website, we send emails to the 2000, 3000 or teachers and students that we have in our database, we send out brochures, we give brochures to remote center coordinators to distribute in their area. And from this point onwards, all the activity is then done online, we have online registration at our website. Coming to funds, IIT Bombay funds the workshop at the remote centers, the funds are transferred to the remote center after the participants are confirmed, we do ask for a certain letter of permission from the participants. The reason we do this is because these workshops are mainly held in vacation time, so that lot of people can attend these workshop, but sometimes there are some people who are recalled to their institutes because of duties in their institutes or something like that, but then these people are unable to you know complete the course. So, we ask for a permission letter from every participant on the letter head of his or her institute saying that he or she has been permitted to attend the workshop. The funds obviously include all the things that you are seeing on your screens there, the food, there is travel allowance for the participants, there is lodging and boarding, there are sundries, institute overheads, then honor area for the remote center coordinator and the workshop coordinator and all other supporting staff. We use Avue primarily and we also use the Moodle which is again a unique feature in our workshop program. This is a free open source e-learning software platform where we register every participant and every workshop coordinator and that is where the interaction, the main interaction between the IIT Bombay faculty and the participant takes place. The participant can load the queries on to the Moodle and as I have said in the next point it can be used to discuss topics as doubts, interact with the instructors etcetera. And it is also used to conduct online quizzes and give assignments. It is very much like a forum, then we come down to the actual main workshop, we have a rigorous testing schedule for Avue because if Avue is not loaded properly at the remote center then the workshop at their end is I would say a flop because if the institute in question cannot hear the instructor or see him or interact with him then there is no workshop. Now we also have the creative commons license since we are dedicated to releasing all the content that we generate in this project into the open source, we have the creative commons license and a permission slip. These are signed, the permission slips are signed by all the participants agreeing to release their participation in the open source. We hold the inaugural and the valedictory functions at IIT Bombay relieving the remote centers of you know trying to look for a chief guest and we try to keep their work at the minimum at this point. And then we have a whole lot of helplines, we have a helpline for Avue for the Moodle and then for the administrative problems for the funds for everything. We provide the remote centers with helplines and the main workshop other than having lectures in the afternoon they also during the workshop we also conduct quizzes and assignments, solve assignments using the Moodle. Now after the 10 days of the workshop there are several other things that we need to do. We have the final assignments, the participants are given an extra 15 days to complete these assignments. These assignments are usually some sort of a question bank or analysis or multiple choice question paper, these kind of assignments we ask the participants to give us so that we can add them to an ever growing question bank and faculty, teachers, students across the nation can use them. And by this time we would have got all the attendance from all the remote centers and we distribute, we prepare the participation certificates and also recently we have started giving the certificate of excellence to selected participants who have performed extremely well in the quizzes and the assignments. And then of course, we publish all our contents like slides, assignments, quizzes on our portal in open source. I had given the link to our website in an earlier slide, I will be repeating it at the end again. And then finally, the remote center has to submit the bills and the receipts to IIT Bombay for checking. Now during these workshops there have been several other developments as well. At IIT Bombay we have made the, come up with an innovation called the clicker which is a student response system. It is a small hand held device for collecting responses from participants during a lecture. We thought it was very necessary because these days classes are growing in numbers, there are about 60, 70, 100 students in a class and it is very difficult for the faculty to collect responses during a test. So Professor Fatak had thought about this during his course here in IIT when he had to teach something like 750 students in a course. And these student response systems work very well at that time. They have a number of features, they are all on the slide. Another innovation was the proximity which is a proxy multimedia integration tool for you. It is used to create rich media lectures and again several other features are there. Like slides, images, lecture videos can be synchronized on a timeline and learners can choose specific topics for you know further expansion etcetera. The most important fallout of this entire project is the Akash tablet. This is the affordable Android tablet which has been launched by MHD. The project had been with IIT Rajasthan but it has been recently transferred to IIT Bombay. The aim is to develop open source application and contents and also to integrate existing applications like the clicker and the proximity and the e-learning animations which are being done here in IIT Bombay under the NME ICT. The Akash would also optimize performance and storage and our plan for the future is that we will distribute the tablets to our remote centers to start with and for field trials which will involve the faculty at the remote centers as well as students to be tested for specific subjects. These are details of the workshops that we have conducted till now. We started in 2009 and till February 2012 we have conducted nine main workshops and at many co-ordinators workshops here in IIT Bombay. We have also done some innovation for a workshop on software development techniques for teachers and engineering and science institutes. This was that since this course was held during a term, we decided to make it instead of a straight 10 day kind of a program, we decided to make it into a weekend program. So, we had this workshop spread across five weekends where participants went to their remote centers on a Friday night or reached early morning on Saturday, attended the workshop on Saturday and Sunday and went back to their teaching during the week. So, again that was an innovation, we hope to do many more such in the coming months. These are our forthcoming workshops, we have already started enrolling participants for the 10 day IST workshop on computational fluid dynamics. It will be held between 12th and 22nd June and it is being held at 48 remote centers across the nation. You will find the details of this workshop and the enrolment form on our website. We are also planning a 5 day IST workshop on research methodology. It is tentatively slated for December 2012. We plan to have this workshop for 2000 teachers at a go and we hope to conduct it at around 200 remote centers. So, that is our plan for the next 6 months or so. Now, this is a slide on our project team. We have Mrs. Jaishila Gayathunde who looks after our funds and accounts, Sajjan Dixit and his team look after the E-Studio and the A-View. Mahendra Paraman and I look after the overall administration. Ms. Kalpana Kannan looks after the content and the research team and she also designs the quizzes that are held during the workshops. Abhilash is another important person. He is the system administrator and he and his team look after the Moodle and Dinesh Ramji and the software team look after the enrolment. So, without the project team it would be very difficult to say that you know that we would do everything, but it is really because the efficiency and the way everybody works together that we have been able to come so far, of course, under the guidance of the very inspirational professor Fatep. I would like to take this opportunity, a big thank you to MHRD Government of India, Amrita University for A-View of course, and a lot of other things. The Indian Society for Technical Education ISD, we have collaborated with them for the certification of the participants. The ISD participation means a lot to all the faculty who attend the workshops. And of course, thanks is due to IIT Bombay and of course, and the most important all are remote centers. Thank you very much for attention and please do visit us at our website. And if there are any questions, I will be happy to take them. I want to know that is any e-content available on bioinformatics and if any training program is going to be held on this topic bioinformatics. Sir, at the moment we have made plans only up to December and these are the two workshops that we have planned. The workshop on computational fluid dynamics and the bigger one in December on research methodology. We do not know yet if we would be conducting courses in other subjects as well. But please do watch our website, we will of course inform everybody. Thank you. Yes sir. Hello. Yes sir. Good evening madam. I am Swami Azulu from NIT Varangal. Can we use this AVU software to teach for our first year students? I think you will have to ask AVU, the Amrita team for their permission. Since they are our collaborators, we give it to our remote centers. But for you to use it in your teaching, I think you will have to take permission from Amrita. Sir, my friend from Amrita tells me that you can use it, but for the setup you will have to contact Amrita University. They will help you with the setup over and out. Thank you. Yes sir. Good evening madam. This is related to the topics of the workshops that we have been conducting. Is it limited only to science and engineering or can it also involve languages? Sir, it was not by any design that we selected topics from science and engineering. It is because we are in IIT Bombay and we have talent very easily available for us that we chose science and engineering. But yes, definitely in the future we will have courses on languages as well. I am basically interested in, we have created some content under NME-ACT for the Sanskrit teaching online. And I also find there is a team in IIT Bombay, maybe Professor Pushpak Bhattacharya and his team, they seem to be working on the languages. So I would like just like to explore in case there is a possibility we could do some workshop on this line. So that is for you to consider. Yes sir, thank you. I will definitely keep that in mind. So I will talk to Professor Pushpak Bhattacharya myself about this and we can explore the possibility in the future. Of course, sir, Kanpur Mokulia knows about this project. So probably we will just see if it could be taken further, we can experiment that is what I felt. Yes sir. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Over and out. Hello. Yes, Central University of Bihar. Yes, Myself K. K. Ujha from Central University of Bihar and my question is regarding the participation in the workshop which is being conducted under your name, this is the ICT project. So is it open for the university, faculty are restricted for only those institutes which are being funded by ICT? No, no, no, no. It is open for all teachers whether they are funded, aided, non-aided, polytechnic teachers, part-time teachers, visiting faculty, everybody. All teachers can participate in our workshops. Because last time I think there was a workshop on Python which was being conducted by IIT Bombay. So they were restricting saying that this is open only for the institute which are being funded by ICT. That Python workshop was not part of our project. So I really do not know about that. It was much earlier. This particular project is open for all teachers as I have said before. And this, the link which you are giving in your slide, can we get all the workshop schedules which have to be occurred in future? As I said, all the workshops that we have conducted so far, they have all been recorded and we have uploaded actually after the workshop they are recorded and edited and then we upload them on our website. There is a list of, long list of workshops that are available for anybody who, whoever wishes to may download them and view them and you may use them in your teaching as well. They are under the Creative Commons license over and out. Central University Bihar, there is a question, how can we know when these workshops is being conducted? These workshops are advertised on our website. It is being displayed on the screen at the moment. It has all the announcements about the current workshops as well as the forthcoming workshops. Please do visit the website for information. I have a request to make to the institutes from North India. We have a very, very small presence in North India, north of Jabalpur, actually Jabalpur and Jaipur are the north post that we have gone so far. We do have a center in Jammu and Kashmir, but they come only for the computer science and electronics workshops. But we have a very small presence in North India and I really appeal to universities from the north to participate in our mission and become remote centers. If you write to me at eoutreach, eoutreach at it.itb.ac.in, if you can write to me at the mail address that I have just typed into the chat window, you are saying that you were not aware of the workshops and now we will surely, you are surely going to participate. May I ask sir, which university do you belong to? Jaipur. Jaipur. Rajasthan, we have two centers actually. One is in Udaipur that is Techno India College of Engineering and in Jaipur, we have the Jaipur Engineering College at Kukas. So you can definitely attend our workshops in either of these places. I would just like to take you back to an earlier slide, Akash. We will be holding another interactive session like this a little later, maybe a month or two down the line, where professor Fatak himself will be talking to you about ways and means that we would be using to deploy Akash in our education system. We request that all of you participate in it and make it a huge success. I belong to Patna University. We sent a requisition for Akash Tablet PC. We want to see that whether our request is being considered or not, how to see it. It is too early for us to answer that question because at the moment the formalities are going on and the process is still going on, I will not be able to answer that question at this point. How to track where is this matter is under process? Sir, if you have ordered the Akash Tablet from the vendor directly, then you should be contacting them. No, no, we are not in contact with the vendors directly, but we have sent a proposal to MHRD and we want to track whether our request is being considered or not and what is the position that we want to know. Sir, all these matters have not yet come to us. So I think the best option for you would be to track it at MHRD. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. If you, if there are no more questions, can we stop here? Thank you very much.