 So, we will begin with a brief, very brief catch up or just a report on how NPTEL online certification is being received, some numbers basically of the previous runs of courses to give you a perspective of where we are and hopefully that is interesting to enough of you. After that we will go into specifics on running courses and details of what you have to do. Anyway, this side I will skip, so the NPTEL YouTube channel crossed 200 million views a few months back it was a big achievement I think, but interestingly the views here do not include the recent videos and all that the online courses which are actually very important we do not count that into this, no? Yes, unfortunately. Yeah, so we have to figure out how to count it, so all these are big numbers thousand plus courses to a total 20,000 plus video hours YouTube subscription this that you know the most visible education channels in the world no doubt about it, it is something one can be proud about and even I think somebody else was mentioning that in terms of multi institutional projects, in terms of projects by IIT's themselves, this joint projects by several IIT's should definitely rank as one of the most successful ones in the past so many years I think that is great to see and since 2014 we have been doing this model of online courses followed by Procter exam and giving a certificate from March 2014 we started it has been more than two and a half years now and we have come quite a ways still this long more lot more that can be done hopefully it is interesting. So for those of you who have never done this before there is a fundamental difference between a campus course that many of us are used to and an open online course the first big difference is anybody enrolls in the open online course they just come to the web page they mean for instance Jayathan is here believe me I mean 90 percent of the people who probably click on enroll wouldn't know what algebra you're talking about or what commutative algebra means extra they will just click you know that is to be expected it is not unusual for this kind of a thing but then after first or second week you would know the real people will get used to it so do expect that kind of a thing I mean don't be surprised by it it's there another significant difference is recognition mechanisms they are evolving we're giving certificates we're working very closely with colleges to do credit transfer etc all of that will go a long way in recognition as well so a lot of differences are there but at the same time it's being adopted by a lot of people all across the country several colleges are coming forward to put their kids through this so it's it's a very positive thing in that respect so one question that's often asked is a lot of portals all across the world why should NPTEL do something these are some of the unique things we do which adds value in the Indian context of course the faculty who know the Indian system who know students here what what what would they would what they would have learned what they wouldn't have learned so that we can tune our courses better we have accent which is more understandable by a lot of Indians I think and we offer a proctored exam with the certification which carries value which I think again it's something unique at the cost at which we offer it is much much lesser than anybody in the world and we engage with colleges that's a huge thing I think some of you wish were here on Saturday morning when the college representatives had come the CLT was full could see so many people asking questions there was a suggestion for courses we had a small section called suggestion for courses it just wouldn't end they were going on and on and on with so many course titles it was an amazing event with a lot of energy and very nice to see and we we timed the call courses along with the college semesters a lot of faculty write these exams about 10% of people who write these exams of faculty in the last July semester from 3700 faculty wrote exams so it's a huge number so it's being used for faculty training it's having tremendous impact with colleges at least the colleges that are active that connect with us it's going a long ways and also we offer courses in so-called boring disciplines also I mean we don't shy away from that we do rigorous courses full-fledged courses in all disciplines any disciplines you discipline you take a typical portal would usually do computer science maybe a few general interest courses we do a lot of courses everything has value in our country with so many colleges there we engage with industries with authorities influence policy all these kind of things we do try to do so the core portal itself for those of you are seeing it for the first time the portal has several parts the main part is the course content which is your video lecture and another important part is the discussion forum where students ask questions and you have to answer and another very important part is the assignment assignments various types objective types objective type programming assignments for those of you want to do that and also mentors from colleges can be part of the portal I can mentor students etc but to me the three main things are course content video lectures assignments and forum so I'll talk in more detail about how to run these things but this is just an introductory one for people who don't after the online course is over we do a certification exam there's a sour exam halls look for those of you probably gone for gate exam or so you would have seen how it works the same partner runs the exam and after the exam for those of those students who pass there is a passing criteria for those students who pass we get a give a certificate that's how it works and you know sometimes we have partners whom we associate with for giving certificates etc so in terms of numbers this is again if you come look at the bottom in March we started with one course in the July to September semester just the last semester we had 73 courses in July to October we had 31 courses so from one course we moved on to more than 100 courses in a single semester so so this shows definitely that faculty are believing in this and not only that students of course across the country are believing in this so we've finished 225 courses it's a big number and little more than two years and that's tremendous and in January again we are looking at at least 100 courses or more in fact 130 is what the number is we'll count the chickens after they hatched but that's 130 is the proposed number as of now and once again like I mentioned as far as disciplines are concerned we have done 226 courses that's a huge number and you can see the it covers the entire spread I mean any nanny anything you want to name it would be there of course the computer science and humanities social sciences tends to be the largest because it cuts across various disciplines but you also have other areas I mean if it's civil engineering there are 15 courses and believe me civil engineering courses are very very popular I mean so many colleges like civil engineering courses because they don't have teaching areas some of them include reruns yeah 2 out of 226 199 are unique so so so I mean the big big departments tend to have lots of courses but anyway that's how it works and in terms of faculty where they come from IIT Madras has been leading in a big way but I think soon other people will catch up other IITs are coming in we also work with a few institutes outside of IITs with courses but that's the number once again it reaffirms what I said about NPTEL offering courses across the spectrum not just sticking to what would be popular etc in terms of numbers once again there's been phenomenal growth in every measurable number that you look at it's been very impressive growth starting with one course to 225 courses we had more than we've had more than 10 lakh course enrollments and some of you may know that there is a the government does not allow us to publicize you're not supposed to take out press articles etc etc for some bizarre reason don't ask me why but in spite of all that the numbers are growing and I think they will continue to grow in January as well we are engaging with so many colleges directly many of them are interested in the last semester you can see more than two and a half lakh students were in the courses in the July September time and close to one and a half lakhs so that's a huge number not all of it translates into exam registration so you don't have to be worried you won't have lakhs of students writing your exams okay so that won't happen the number of people who write exams is usually of the order of 5 to 10% of the number that enrolls so you don't have to be you know to panic too much but still the number of people writing exams is also becoming large it's it's becoming very very big in some sense so so whenever numbers grow up like this we have to be very mindful of quality I think that's the that's the first thing I would emphasize here quality in various senses you know in terms of the correctness of the content the way it's delivered how good the video is done are there any bugs are there any typos in the text you put out most it's so visible right everybody is seeing it so even a typo just reflects very badly they'll say oh this is IT how can they do this I mean this this this tends to happen a lot so I would definitely urge you to look at every single content you put out everything you put out particularly assignment questions any mistake an assignment question any mistake an exam questions reflects really really badly so you need that diligence to make sure quality is not affected the numbers have been huge so 65,000 people have paid thousand rupees and enrolled in it they registered for exams it's in just two and a half years it's in terms of even just money coming in it's a huge amount of money for handling certificates going out I don't know if you step into the office you'll see some huge piles of certificates we tried convincing everyone that maybe you should shift to an electronic certificate nobody is willing to accept it they all want the printed version and it's just being able to scale is really really hard more than 30,000 people wrote exams last semester we are forecasting close to 50,000 for January okay that's a big number we're trying very hard to match that and like I said we are not really pushing it or advertising in a big way this number is just growing just by word of mouth through colleges which is again a very interesting thing See I am a member board of studies with NIT in the recent senate we have approved that NIT courses can be also credited oh wow IIT Madras also we did NIT also agreed upon now there is a big botheration here they say that they should be an authentic proof that the person has undergone this course many titles there should be an authentic proof that you have to register for this course and you must have enrolled there are two ways by which you can do this authenticity one either you can introduce us certificate of participation which is actually I don't know whether the motive is second part is there is a huge draw less than 5% who take the exam what can we do to do some improvements because this is a very great botheration in fact if I try to if it in a one class you know one class if people only audit the course we are not actually motivated only if they take the exam we are slightly motivated because you know the entire portal of discussion forum is kept busy for the whole semester and at the end you don't get a person to take an exam so this actually puts a lot of pain to the course coordinator as well as in-patel also I am in-patel for the past few years I have done 10 courses so I have a right at least to ask you as a coordinator what route we are going to follow to improve the examination percentage because this is very pathetic this is actually not giving me an end the fruit is not coming off simply taking a course and not examining it or become not an examining they are not giving me a credit actually because I will only be happy when a person creates my course why is this not happening I will answer the question in 2-3 ways the first thing is about authenticating the person who comes and writes the that is the course we cannot authenticate the person who did the online course just not possible we are not trying to do it we can only authenticate the person who wrote the exam and that we do we have to give an ID, we look at the ID we verify all that and then we give a certificate only to that person and only that person should be allowed to do credit transfer to the authentication part secondly as far as dropouts are concerned I really think this big lack of numbers you should not even look at you should not even notice the number to really look at is the number of people who submitted your first assignment or let us say the first and second weeks assignment that I think is the real number I mean everything else is just just fluff you know I mean people just coming in you do not even count it in fact I would be happy if we do not even report this it just says that people are aware so many people are aware that this is going on ok so that number if you see the drop off is not very significant it is not very significant that is really in your hands and we have seen across courses that number is pretty good the number of people who write exams divided by the number of people who submitted the first assignment is not a very bad number that is one and the other interesting feature we are seeing is if you look at the enrollments and registrations colleges where the college is also involved that number is dramatically higher extremely higher in fact 75% of people who write exams are coming through the local chapters so if you add to that the credit transfer mechanism you make that no people can actually do credit these courses in their colleges combined with all these things I think we will get a much more significant number of people writing our exams that I think will happen it is in the works but you know credit the notion of credit itself is new to our university system I mean we have been in IIT so we know we understand credit a lot you just step out of IIT is a little bit credit is new it is very very new the CBCS in university is absolutely new many universities do not have it they do not understand that so slowly people are beginning to understand that we are trying to push that those are the policy decisions we are trying to influence I think it will happen we should work towards it and if you focus on the numbers the way I said it is much better do not look at this big fluff of people who are clicking in and out yes so that is another way to look at the numbers that you are already reaching as a faculty you are already reaching which is significantly higher than what you would reach in your class in fact for some of us based on the course we are offering in a single run we are offering getting the number of students to finish the course successfully complete the course is what we would otherwise take 10 years to reach inside the campus so therefore the reach is significant and therefore I think that is a that is another way of viewing it it is not insignificant so this is kind of a negative way to look at the numbers I think there are various positive ways of viewing it the point which is not there in our slides is also that out of 30,000 people we had about 4000 faculty members take up the courses yeah I mentioned that so all these things add up so you have to view it carefully but yes I mean it is nice to have a controlled group enrolling in your course it will be nicer to do that but then that is not the philosophy of this you know you just put it out openly there people just go click this information of the college chapter model coordinator to the course coordinators of the internal courses this January we can always try to reach the chapter yeah sure sure we go for gate duty we go for JEDU we will use that path and involve them directly so this can promote more people to register for the exams my point was apparently 5-10% course completion is the standard yeah yeah and in my opinion actually this ability to let them click and join without any other barrier is actually a positive yeah some people view it like that but then I think his point is he is not able to interact with the people who are likely to register for the exam and then give them something more maybe interact with them push them a little bit and then motivate them so that is what he is saying is missing so through local chapters we can arrange for that see what are the colleges which are interested the thing was I think end of the semester there was a video session I wonder for people who are or faculty and local chapters who are more interested you are still to have a middle of the semester yeah yeah for 4 week and 8 week the live session you mean we can try that the live sessions are always overhead with respect to scheduling and yeah yeah that is what when you say middle of the semester imagine 100 courses 100 question papers to the exam partner believe me it is just a nightmare in our office I can't no I mean I am saying there are so many other things that are going on if you add on to this the burden of organizing these sessions it is pretty hard we will try to figure out how to do it if it is smooth enough that we are not involved too much weekend so nobody offers exams other than us so yeah yeah we can only look at completion in whatever way they define it but it is the same percentage I think 2 to 5 yeah so I am moving on okay so in terms of people so this looks a little older to me but anyway number of people who are enrolling a large number is students there is a small fraction which is faculty etcetera number of people who register for exams also are like that we do a lot of things for toppers in the course we give priority we put them up in our portal nptel.ic.in this is also a place where people can verify their certificates etcetera so here is another thing you can do you can reach and connect with certified students so this is possible so in case you are running a project for which you want to hire people maybe you have done some course here you can advertise the project positions on this portal to specified students so you can say people who did well in these courses I would like to offer them an opportunity to get an interview for a project position in case they are interested so this is also something that you can promote with your colleagues saying in case somebody is looking for a project hiring in fact it is quite hard to hire good people into our project so this is a way in which you can reach out to people also so this is I think has been one of the unimaginably big successes for initiative the local chapter colleges the number has crossed 700 now every week we get five requests for adding local chapter but of course even though there are 700 not all of them are going to be very very active the number of active colleges comes to around 400 or so which is still a fairly big number across the country and you can see every state is represented I think the Randaman and Ekoba is actually one it is not three only one college there which is a local chapter and all across the country so many of them and you can see they form a significant fraction of our course enrolments and exam registration so both of them are very very significant and there are mentors from these colleges who participate in the portal so for local chapters we have a lot of visibility in our portals I wish you had come for the Saturday's meeting they were all here all quite excited in fact we now do a rating and ranking of local chapters and all based on their performance in our courses they really like it we also partner with industry so in case you have an industry contact who wants to work with us we do a variety of things with them in fact while you are offering this course if there are a group of industry which are interested in interacting with you more you can get into a CCE sort of course with them separately and you can run this course for everybody and you can do something additional for the industry participants and charge them whatever you want directly and they can write our exams as well all of these are possible so please do explore all those possibilities yeah in that context if you have a professional body meeting in your area coming up sometime soon you can let us know at that point and if you can help us get a small slot we will make a short presentation on this on how the industry can actively participate in various ways they can support they can send a staff or a course they can go off the product we will discuss that with them but we like to present it to them yeah that is also the industry bodies have been very positive so this is happening a lot for instance there is a course that an IIT Kharagpur faculty is offering this is an open course softwareed on NPTEL but HCL is interested in partnering with them so what he has done is adding on some components to for that like face to face interaction with the HCL employees and they will do this open online course and on top of that there is a separate CC course for which there is an additional payment from HCL to that faculty member and they heed us some additional content on top of that so you can you can do such things it is possible so please do explore such possibilities I have a question about the local chapters you mentioned free for Delhi would you tell us which are these institutions or colleges in Delhi so I do not remember of the top of my right now but I can have it e-mail to you Barthi will write an e-mail to you with the complete list so we have over the years over the last two years or so we have come up with a set of best practices which I think are good to remind people I think some of you might already have your course content ready but nevertheless it is good to see what we are saying I think first should have a target audience in mind a group of people who you think would be interested in this course so even for preparing course content I think that makes that that is important so you should keep this target audience in mind and you have to as far as possible have the course content self-contained I think that is that is also extremely useful because you do not know what people are people of multiple backgrounds it is good to target to as large audience as possible and the second point I cannot stress more fully you have to be very organized and you have to plan the course completely so for instance the course content has to go out at exactly regular intervals every week on Monday morning the course content has to go out this I think is extremely important when you will see maybe in the first time it might be okay but the second week third week and all you have to really absolutely have the thing working on schedule because like I said the numbers are big and people there will be colleges in will be waiting to download the content that moment it is released they will download it then they will release it in their local networks they will show it to their students they are really banking on that first of all they will have a setup where their faculty first watch it some 2-3 times and then put it out for students and explain so if you delay it everything goes goes wrong there it is absolutely important that you have the content out Monday morning without fail every week it is very very important I cannot stress that now what is the time yeah I think let us say 8 o'clock the role of the teaching assistant is very critical yeah extremely important because faculty will often record the stuff and they think it is already in setup but there is a minor thing that has not been done like you just hit up a pattern saying we will go from private to positive whatever it is and then it just stays sitting there and students start saying so I think teaching assistant particularly should stay on top of making sure that whatever has been made ready has also been released in time and also I have to mention small details like type 4 is that so I think teaching assistant role there is the most critical you are the one who will have the time to cut it carefully because it will be 95% or 99% ready that the 1% will make the difference between being on schedule looking good etc and being not on schedule not available etc that 1% is in your hands yeah so please make sure that this Monday morning if you are teaching assistant for the course personally take it up that Monday morning just check to make sure that it is public that particular content has become public and if there is some small three lines write up about that just be true it must be true there is no error in it and also if the segment has been uploaded make sure it is uploaded and check the answers yeah yeah much much before not on Monday morning sure sure there is a notepad and pen in case yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah questions answered what time lapse all will be answered with all participants I am giving a rating. So, if the rating goes down below the previous week I have to ask me 3 years to make a meeting and say why this happened. I made a review sheet this time so this will be floated every week you will have to feedback directly I am not getting it back they will come to impact the coordinates directly. So, you will know that where or what I am doing on last week. So, if there is a depression in that ranking then I think there should be meeting. So, if this is followed it will be very good. In fact, you can also make it as part of your online course content itself below every video week's lectures you can have some questions posted no. They do that they do that below that you can have questions in the portal itself you can set up those questions. So, they will see the video and then below that they can answer those questions without going into another sheet it is possible. I mean. So, Andrew Andrew do we upload the assignment for the week along with the material or if the assignment updated later. Yes, along with the material everything is released on that Monday morning so we will so the ideal way to do it is to make sure all the content is already there before the course starts. Yes. Jan 15th till Jan 15th and in the portal there is a way to make the content public that is all everything is already uploaded and kept in private mode and on Monday morning you are simply making it public you are not really creating content or anything at that point that is the best way to run the course. It is the least stressful way everything is there you are just making it public perfect way to run. One more thing I would suggest I mean more for TAs from my experience last time it is very useful if you can solve the problem. Oh yeah. And there have been couple of cases where two TAs were able to solve and remaining TAs were not able to solve and what that feedback that gave me was that the number of problems that are off the difficulty level that I expect are higher than what I have promised and that helps us really fix the course problem. I think so. I think so not only that I think being able to solve at least one of the TAs solving the problem and then entering the solution and checking is absolutely important otherwise you know things can go wrong you would have maybe done it correctly something some setting somewhere would be wrong once something goes strong it is impossible to correct it. So ideally the way you should run it is you know before the thing goes public before the assignment goes public you have to make sure that the answers are checked correctly or I mean there is a way for TAs to log in and then put in the answers and check whether all the answers are correct or not. I think that has to be done definitely done and then when you release it for public you can stop it you know I mean you do not have to have the check answers option enabled. So there is something called the check answers option for every assignment you can keep it enabled check it and then disable it and then make it public. So that students are not able to do it but at the same time they do it so this is very important. For example Monday how many hours of course should be up to for example let us say 36 hours I have a 50 hours class. Okay. It is much more than 36 because I am not able to cover it in 36 hours. Okay. So should I divide the n by n number of weeks and upload them all in up to end. Yes whatever. Or should I grow gradually let us say 5 in the first week then 6 in the second week gradually. How do you do? Because the question is if the more you upload the less you will see the registration for the exam. Yeah that is also true. The other model that we had in some courses was if it is possible in your course is you have maybe 40 hours or 35 hours which is applicable for the exam if you can split it that way. And say this is additional content for this course which we are not going to use but those are interested and this information will be really useful if the course can be split bigger that way. So you can reduce the content which is for the exam. That has been very important but everything is there. So people interested students will see it but for the exam you focus on these things. Some additional topics you have to split it like that. If you can do that then that also helps. So students know that it is about 2 or 3 hours of content every week which they have to really focus on. The other things they can do in a more relaxed way without the stress of preparing for the exam. Another final thing which I had in my discussion forum is we are given about 60 to 70 references. X books etc. They do not have. Practically they are not accessible to people outside IIT or any IIT system. Do they have to can we really create an hyperlink to this through our Intranet library? Yeah there are a few public resources that are in India being created. Now one is the digital library project of IIT Kharagpur. It is probably we can link to that if they have it available. Other is Inflibnet. Inflibnet also has a huge amount of content which is all free for people in India. There are a few efforts like that but which college would know it you know I mean even in IIT many people do not know it because we anyway have access but outside we can work with you on that but it is really good to have resources that are open which for which they do not have to pay for. Now what I mean to specifically ask is let us say IIT Manta's library has got certain textbooks. Oh you make it available to them at that time. Yeah I said they are IIT students. Okay. Is it possible? Is it allowed? Right now we have not we have not explored that no? Not for books. For example all books of IIT Manta's library are easily accessible to the IIT Manta's library. Yeah yeah. It is actually a good idea because I would want my research scholars to be a priority over. I mean how do you make it available? First of all they have to come here and see. No no soft copy is there all are e-books. Okay e-books. All are e-books these days. Okay. Most of the contents are e-books. We will work with we will work with InflipNet first. I think InflipNet also has a huge cash of e-books. Because the search papers journals are difficult because they are all priced publication. But e-book contents in the present domain it is more on a liquidized mode. We can try that. We can try that. Thank you. Can I? I have a very slightly different problem because the course which I offer are course I offer such courses and I find hardly any takers and you know this stuff to it. So I have to find my students. Yeah sure. I have to go to them. So my idea is that last time I did it in a small way through social media and all. But you said you know advertising is not. No we can. I mean social media and all is fine. I do not think the ministry even understands that. What are you doing? But this time yeah in fact yesterday you wrote the. Yeah we do have all those avenues. We have a Facebook account which in which you can build marketing. What I am planning to do is I possible to prepare a brochure of two or three courses which similar disciplines offer and send it to some colleges. Definitely. Which are basically arts colleges. Yeah. And course universities as well. So that is the way you can I mean I want to reach them because. Yeah. The kind of feedback which I get now is when you have your lectures in the YouTube you download it and below you can see the comments. Yeah. That itself is a great satisfaction. Yeah. Yeah. So basically do it for that but at the same time when there is a possibility that students can enroll and get a certificate that might be an additional. Sure. You know encouragement. Sure we are happy to do that no problem. That is the reason why I said you know I need a little more time to prepare and. Yeah. Okay. So in terms of recording if at all possible I would say I mean I think right now most of you are probably already finished recording. It is not a not something we can revisit too much but in case you are doing some recording it comes out much better on video. The resolution is high if you write say on a tablet as opposed to writing on the board everything changes a lot when you write on a tablet you can use slides you can mark those slides if you like. All of that you can do. Another very interesting thing a lot of students appreciate is if you do videos which are not just lectures. Yeah. So this is a slide on improving the course videos. A lot of feedback we get from people outside is they do not really have access to good labs good lab facilities in the area that you are talking about can we have videos of how good lab looks like what are some good experiments you can run some good demos that you can show them. Just to know one way it breaks the monotony of lectures coming in and another way it just exposes them to how to even set up labs. In fact apparently a commonly said thing is a lot of kids they buy and they most cases they do not know to use and then all this ends up being a big problem. So you can if you can show even we are studios very much available to you are people available to you can take them to your labs and show them around how do you how you set up things some interesting experiments maybe some demonstrations or even outside if you think there is some industry or something which is actually doing one of the things that you are teaching you want to show them some actual footage of how that works we are very happy to help out all those things have a great impact on how everything works. And the other thing people pointed out are you know the intro videos introduction videos they when people are saying it is good to have it done in a better way we are trying to put some things in place but I do not know how much we can improve that but there are some nice introduction videos that we have seen we can point you to it you can write to us we can show you some of these very nice videos that were done for a few other IITs have done it none of are nothing here has been so good. So I mean in case you have a nice idea for an introductory video which you think will really capture the essence of your course we are happy to work with you and do that. Another idea that I would suggest to make your course a bit more broad based is many of us go to industry and maybe other colleges and give popular lectures these are not very rigorous deep lectures like we do inside our IITs for courses bit of a lighter introduction high level covering a lot of ideas in some time I am sure you have slides like that so you can present that maybe midway through the course or in the beginning of the course maybe every two weeks or so just to bring up a high level introduction to what is going on and then in depth view so those are all ideas that we are suggesting so some colleges so those are how to make the course videos more lively etc if you think your videos are already lively then there is nothing more to do great but then one issue a lot of colleges point out particularly this board of studies meetings when they want to do credit transfer they really want to know how many hours of engagement the student had every week and here the number of hours of course video plays a big role so I mean you know how the board of studies are so many different colleges and different types of people who are there so if you do say a 20 hour course when the number of course video is actually 15 hours then that becomes a problem for them because the board of studies has approved a 20 hour course and finally when they want to credit it it is a 15 hour course it does not work for them it might seem like a very silly thing but that is how unfortunately these things work the letter of the law work so if you do a 8 week course try to make sure your content of video is greater than or equal to 20 hours it just helps I do not know why it is a little bit administrative at some level but that is how that is how things are set up here it works that way I do not know what that can be sometimes you want people out to do that so that is great if I go to a video it is outside yeah sure sure sure so that is all they want I mean at some point you should be able to say this is the amount of hours of engagement the student had based on all the content I had so we are able to produce a document like that they are happy to have it yeah every week yeah if we can yeah so we will get back to you on that if you can give us some numbers on what you think is there every week yeah so all of those board of studies meetings makes a difference that NPTEL said it as opposed to the faculty themselves saying it so we have to it is good for us how do they calculate the credit it is just like a viewing hours or the students need to put effort to understand that for the books read it changes depending on who the board of studies is and then I think in many places I know a place where they take our 8 week course for 3 credits and there are also places where the 8 week course is only 2 credits and that is up to the university and the board of studies we cannot really influence that we can simply say this is the number of hours or week of engagement I expect from a student this is what would have happened in this course that is something we say and then let them decide how to convert that into credit because some colleges feel this content while you might say is only 2 hours 2 hours of video took 4 hours for an average student in our university so this is big enough so we are willing to give 3 credits that is the kind of input they have how they interpret okay so yeah like I said yes we should include the time for assignments as well definitely we should yeah so okay so like I said most important part is release content regularly and being active on the forum is also very important answering questions on the forum and the question paper has become a big deal now because lot of people are writing it it's become very visible and the scale is increasing question papers become a big deal it needs to be more standardized we cannot make question papers like we do for our on campus courses it cannot happen just like that because you have to think about it you have to I mean I've never been a big fan of this term but you have to go to Bloom's taxonomy and you have to have certain fraction of questions which are of different type and you have to have that because this has become more or less some sort of standardized exam for a lot of people to take across the country and you cannot target really one set of students not possible we can't write it like that so we have guidelines for it we have detailed guidelines on what fraction of question should be recall what fraction of question should be repetitions from the assignments what fraction of question should be new as in which involves slightly more thinking than what was done in class all three are important so in fact there was a question question paper where it was mostly recall and students came back to it after it with a big complaint said this is not an IIT course we expected questions like this you can't let us go in half an hour you know you have to engage us for the full time of the full time of the exam so it needs to be challenging but we've also had the other extreme where faculty members have simply repeated the IIT Madras question paper and then that reflects very very badly nobody really passes the course that's also not what we want so we have given detailed guidelines on how many questions of how many marks what fraction should be basically recall the lectures what fraction should be repetitions from the assignment so you might say why are we repeating from the assignment it's not that bad but in this context it's very important because we don't know who did the assignment if you repeat from the assignment and they do well in those questions we know that they are they know how to do the assignment for sure whether this is in a proctored condition that's very important so it's perfectly fine to repeat and it's important that you repeat questions too much of course and you should also have one component which is different maybe similar to the assignment question but different enough that it'll test whether the concepts are sunken or not so all these three are important we have detailed guidelines we'll give you those guidelines once again and the other important thing is we want the question paper tomorrow I'm just kidding as very early so 15th January is our date so a lot of people ask how can I give you a question paper without even seeing the start of the course so I know it sounds like very unreasonable request but you have to imagine there are 130 courses that are going to come and all the question papers from 130 faculty two question papers each have to be processed at one office here needs to be converted into a format which goes into the TCS system now that's not a easy task for those of you are familiar with the gate process you know how complicated it is okay and gate can afford to do it because they run only one exam a year we run four exams four exam days two exams on each day every year so it's a huge task and the gate does not have 130 question papers it's all much much lesser and they work slowly carefully over a long period let me take we will give you detail guidelines and you can follow those guidelines it can both are possible both are possible you can have objective type as well as subjective type which are paper pen written and you evaluate them both are possible we will give you detail guidelines on how that works so now the Jan 15 question paper is not set in stone I mean I mean we expect a large part of those question paper to remain the same but after you run the course if you feel like there are you know really you want to go change it it's okay to change but having the first question paper out I think is extremely important please do work on it very early and give us the papers Jan 15 because we have a long process after that and help us tremendous way for example January 15 the course is open one week leave let us first play one assignment get the feeling of the student first stand touch then we give the paper maybe 20 seconds so you have to give us one week at least the course starts on 23rd then you have to give you 30 seconds one assignment should be born the question paper actually consists of 3 sections we have given given the breakup of the sections the way we want the format so there is a section 1, 2, 3 ideally so we have the first part it is called report from the course so you know already what contents you have done second is online assignments which we are either duplicating or very similar lines so at least if those two are ready which is like 50% marks of the total then it is fine the third part is where we say that you can play around with what extra you want to ask them or something so that also if you have an idea it is fine that can be quick but in the first two can be kind of finalized then for us working with it is much easier so that is something that we can do these problems become more complicated when the question papers are MC2 type I mean am I right yes if it is a subject it is a pen writing more I think this is not a big problem it is not very serious if the numbers go up then you have to go back to the objective type if the numbers go up then you have to go back to the objective type and the course you are processing for the faculty the numbers are huge is also different the correctives we can do it is commitment from this side if you agree to do an MCQ then it is fine if you agree to do a paper pen more what we have specified is for the online and offline exam the structure is going to be the same if we are saying by Jan 15 you can give us a paper so let me step back a little bit if there were only 5 faculty we are working with we are happy to relax the deadlines now that the number has gone to 130 across institutes so many different people we have to first put down some deadlines which are very serious and of course you know depending on people who have a lot of experience in this we will work with you I am not saying we won't work with you it is fine but still please try to think of the question paper basically it means you have to start thinking right now about what you are going to ask what would make sense etc so that is what is very important sometimes we have to get back to the technique because something they have overrope maybe something but you have people send us multiple choice questions because the answer is already wrong something like that they have had some other idea we will deselect the answer some maybe that was their idea or some specific errors are there which we need some time to run through it and check if it is not having those errors and then move it or you expect some type of answers that the student would key in but the software will not accept that so then we check it and we get back to saying this is not possible in this system there are some questions where there are huge things which we want you to break up so we don't advise 10 mark questions maximum marks that any question can have it says 3 or 4 because we don't want the student to lose out too many marks and he is going in for an all thing so then if the faculty comes back and we send it back and say now break it down either into steps or give us more questions so we need time for us to go a few times back and forth and kind of migrate sometimes they will say you have to use some data from some data sheet and because it is in campus we will be naturally providing it in the hall but here we have to get the data sheet from the so we need the time to run through that so many various different subjects and it just takes much much longer than you can imagine so the process really like to okay so I think so you will get feedback at the end of the course and it's important to incorporate the feedback and we also collect video feedback from the people who write the exam so I think that's also a good when you we will share it with them also okay so I think those are the slides now I think I would like to look at the I think this documents have been given to you so Barthi is going to go through some of the document in some detail and walk you through what to pay attention to I think the main thing I want to emphasize once again is the visibility level has gone up significantly and people get upset when something is not done properly so I think I would really urge you to be more diligent and Monday morning I will definitely urge all the faculty to check the content that is out there check for typos because these typos are I mean it's so silly to you but it really reflects badly on everybody if it's not there and definitely faculty are you are responsible that let me make that part also very clear even though we have teaching assistants just like IITM policy you are definitely responsible for every content every question being correct every everything being ultimate responsibility definitely stops with you so I would request you to be more diligent and look at the one more self-criticism I thought there was an error for example in one of the questions that I had and literally within an hour of releasing the solution 100 e-mails so you really get swamped so it's very useful to do this in Purnand rather than it's very very important we get two kinds of e-mails and there is a mistake they say how can IIT do such a thing and when something can't be done they start saying IIT can do anything how can you say no to this you have brought me in this so people out there the perception is that there is a certain perception of IIT you know what it is and so we have to live up to that I think whether you like it or not we have to live up to it and any mistake is highly amplified believe me e-mails go out to the prime minister with a copy to us saying this is what's going on so it just happens so and again perception matters a lot I think we had a meeting with Bhaskar where also he said apparently perception is reality today so really matters a lot so let's let's work doubly hard to make sure there are no errors we don't get embraced in public just a query is it the case that the image that you have taken all the recorded video and airing some of the channels yes there is a channel called Swayamprabha which is a DTH channel if you have the Durudarshan set up box you can set it up in your house also and then show we have set it up here you can see the DTH channel channel that's coming out oh that's on Swayamp ok on Swayamp so Swayamp I'll give updates later on right now you can wait for me yeah yeah yes you can ignore it for now we will get back to you with more details well you are registered but yeah through our office and we are working in some way carefully to handle it there is no major hurry right now but hopefully sometime in January I will get back to you with more details so ICSR is going through a modernization process it's been going through that for the past 6-7 years hopefully they will complete it within a year or so and believe me I mean if you think that's the pain we deal with them every day so I can tell you horror stories so please bear with us ok we've given you four documents I'll send the soft copies also to the TAs as well as the faculty on this first thing we'll be creating a Google groups of the faculty members so that we can send out common announcements to all of you TAs also we'll be creating a Google groups on which all of you will be there for which we have collected the email IDs if there's anything missing please add it up there so you should start seeing emails from us like within this week I guess so the first sheet that I'm having is the pre-course sheet which is called NOC process and course builder workshop that one we have the timelines there so we have three sets of courses starting on 23rd January I think most of the courses are going in there except for probably one or two the exam dates are on 26th March for that so the first two set and then we have another set of courses starting in February so which will be the four week, eight week again a new set that we are starting and there'll be another exam date in April for which that set will go for exams course contents yes we have just specified this is the general run through I'm giving a minimum of 2.5 hours you can exceed it but again we recommend don't exceed too much because most of the people doing the course are either professional students and colleges and they're doing it as an extra add-on so I mean overloading them too much we don't recommend but yes you can see how much content you want to push out every week then for each video we require a summary of the video with three or four points below the video this is really useful because then it says what the video is about what are the salient points being dealt with in that particular video so please this is kind of mandatory now just see that you have three or four points below the video saying what it is about and provide notes or slides wherever possible so if you've taught using slides or you have taught using say a tablet make it available so that it becomes like course notes for him also for courses that is handwritten notes it helps if you have a neat hand the tab format which is in journal that can be shared PDF file yes that can be shared so when you send it out kindly write protected because people use it for textbook publication later so write protected so that at least copy copy protection is there people do that I have seen that so so yeah video we have already made the video no no not in the video below the video on the online courses portal we have a place where you can put in a few points about the video yeah make a summary make notes available wherever it is there for courses that have been offered previously we are getting them transcribed now through our transcription partner we will make these notes available to you it should be available say by next month at least if the TAS can verify it will have mistakes we only have get a 70 percent 80 percent accuracy in that and if you can verify the transcripts as it comes in and also put it out as course notes it's really helpful to the students we get lot of feedback saying that's a nice part because when they want to revise for the exams it's easier for them to go through the notes rather than videos so we'll share the transcripts with you the faculty can either directly verify the transcripts or have any of the students do it and there's a separate hondarium for that too so that can go in as part of the notes one tutorial yes the transcripts from the video like say transcripts of your video yeah whatever you have spoken on the board yes so the math part will come as whatever you spoke whatever you spoke there'll be snapshots of your board work in the transcript given and whatever you have spoken will be out in letter format so we just need a math conversion for that into formulae kinds so that is there then assignment we require solutions to all the assignments in many courses we have to chase up for the solutions this time we're making in vanity solutions are there on the portal along with the assignments of course not made public till the assignment closes on the day that the assignment closes please make public these solutions to the assignments so if you're giving out problems please see that there's a completely worked out format of the problems rather than just giving answers or values because they might not know how to solve it or a video can be done some of the TAs or the faculty have even done videos showing how you solve the assignment so one of these two is a mandatory requirement now post yes yes you can have sir but then you'll just have to check on numbers and how to evaluate yes this is a good method first week or so you do only obstetric and see how many people are responding once the number becomes reasonable that you're monitoring you can handle then you can do something to protect because the difficulty is added in subjects like ours I know I know it's very hard but then first week is just assessing who all are there in the portal so you can ask some simple you know sometimes they themselves are comfortable more than comfortable you know but first week you go with subjective and supposing you have 2,000 sometimes then no no but I'm not in any way expecting but I'm so confident about that but I would really suggest that you have the first week all our Metras courses should be open for enrolments today we've already opened about 15 or 20 yesterday totally in Metras IIT we have about 30 courses I think yes no even for your course it's opening we'll say that it starts on February and the enrolment will be open till February so we have opened all the IIT Metras courses the males are going out to the faculty giving the user admin ID and the passwords we still haven't reached out to the TAs using the admin ID and passwords please contact your faculty members to get the admin ID and passwords the next step is we have put out information on the course introductory page based on the syllabus submitted it has been done humanly we are opening 30 courses at a time checking other institute prone to errors there is going to be some of it so please go to your individual courses check that the data put out on that page is all correct so we have above the course intended audience prerequisites any industries that recognize it above the course instructor in photograph of the instructor below that is the course layout and then we have any suggested readings that you might have then we have certification data data also available so kindly check that the dates that we have put in there are correct the exam dates are correct if you have the 8 week course we have put in March if it is a 12 week we have put in April and so on and all the other information this is completely editable by you so once you have shared the admin ID and the password you get access to the dashboard dashboard is the back end of the course that we call it from where you can control all this you can go and change in whatever you require okay it is we will show you we will share some videos with you the dashboard has changed for people have used the previous dashboard the dashboard has now changed we have a version of grade now not significantly different but yes certain things have been moved around you just need to search for maybe a few minutes and you will get there so that can be done and you can change it correspondingly the other thing that you can customize we have done two more things one is in the announcement section we have already put out an announcement so that people coming there will see something there forum we have put out a post called introduce yourself just to get the forum started and many people do enthuly introduce themselves saying who they are why they did the course and so on we have already put saying that you will be supporting the course and so on your T s can also we would recommend and it is nice when we have some tf photos in the course for instance one of the courses I think we already have a tf photo who is going to be supporting it you all can check with your coordinators put out your photos and say you will be the tf of this course handling it it is nice to get a face there for you know they will be getting a lot of replies from you that is another thing and there is a welcome email so every student who registers gets a welcome email again you can change it customize it make it more friendly or in whatever style you want feel free to change it just keep the data intact you can change any other things there yeah so the check task that I have given please go through that and see that you check all this information on the portal and it is correct because people will come back and say that day you had put out this information they will have photographs on their mobile phones they will send it to us it was there like this on the portal now you have changed up so okay that is done then we have during the course run I am just going to go quickly over that mostly it is there uploading videos on YouTube so every admin ID that we give is a Gmail ID it has a corresponding YouTube channel associated with it where in the course videos are going for courses that are getting rerun we are just using IDs from the previous run we are not doing new uploads unless there is new content to be uploaded so for the rerun courses already every link is available you just need to reorganize it and change it whatever you want delete stuff that you don't want and so on for the new courses we need to upload content so get in touch with our studio team with our office to get the uploads done of the new videos and we can start creating content unit wise week wise and so on so some recommendations we have given here this is more for the tears it will be nice if you can go through it for instance we want something like week wise organization of contents is really ready so do week one with a unit name what it deals with then lesson names and please do not use lesson 1 lesson 2 lesson 3 it makes no sense so give some name to what the concept is about maybe call it lesson 1 hyphen something put something in there so that he knows you know what that particular link is about so that is something assignments this is again another thing that there is too much variation we are kind of standardizing it now have a module called assignments probably okay and publish your assignments in there and solutions also come out in seen solutions come out in the announcement solutions come out in the forum solutions put out in somewhere some other link and we are not able to find it I hope the students find it so kind of standard as a whole thing you will have the course outline you will have a module called assignments within assignments release a solution as they come out it is easy for everybody to find it so that we know what is happening and assignments we would like to put in one more thing here assignments are normally archived along with the solutions on the NPTEL website for to the course in the future so even once the course is over the all the contents archived on the NPTEL website please have a copy of the assignments you are creating so that you can hand it over to us at the end of the course many times we have from the TSI directly created on the portal it was in my notebook we do not get a copy at all for archiving please have a copy in some PDF format that you can share with us later on that we can archive okay and yeah configuring the marks I have given some details there please get back to us if you have any doubts and configuration and everything checking of the assignments is most important we get a lot of issues there when it is wrongly configured marks go on to 200 300 and so on when you know weightages and things are changed like that minus 200 if you do negative marking we recommend don't do negative marking in assignments it is only for them to learn something and do something the exam weightage is only 25% currently for the assignment so if possible if preferable and if you can convince the course instructors already here if it's okay do not give a negative markings with assignments we just go with positive so check the assignment when you put an answer see that you get 100% for all correct 0% for all incorrect answers partial marks according to what we have done these are the checks that you will do when it is configured we have given more details there please go through that on how to do it we have given also the type of assignments that can be done so basically we support MCQ multiple choice questions multiple select questions where you can have more you can have short answers that means in that you can have numerical and alphanumerical numerical he can enter a number and that can be checked against alphanumeric any words they can enter and that can be checked against and the other type is the assignment subjective assignment type so these four that I've listed are auto graded you said the answer the back end it grades it automatically it goes out as marks for the subjective alone we will require some configurations extra for people who will be correcting for it to be allocated to them and so on that have to be before the assignment is made public not after we cannot do it after that so before the assignment is being made public the subjective we need to say who is going to correct the assignment so that it gets allocated to them and then we get access to the assignments for grading another thing that we have seen in the past is when subjective assignments are going out the grading does not happen on time so people if you are using subjective assignments we like to see that the assignments are graded within that one week same time and the marks are also published on the portal let's see that it gets done many times till the end of the course we don't get the solutions out and that becomes a problem for us okay the grading of subjective assignments will also be for 100 marks descriptive descriptive yes so a grading for subjective assignments is also 100 marks objective anything the course builder automatically does it out of 100 okay during the course run yes the content will be done whatever Monday you do the other important thing is when the content is being released every Sunday Monday whenever you are doing it please send out an announcement to the students saying that this week's content has been released because many of them somehow wait for the content they think content will come into their inbox content will come somewhere it will be delivered to the house I don't know they'll write to us where do I go find my content means I go to the portal login you'll see your content there so send them an email on how to access it also and in the subject mention the course name there are many people who are then 5 or 10 courses are we talking about what is the content release so in the subject name always mention your course name and then go with whatever you have to say to the student yeah the other thing that we do is normally we archive all the contents as the course run goes on the NPTEL website this is for the benefit of the people who cannot access youtube many colleges have blocked youtube access and the online courses portal we use actually sources the videos from the youtube so this has been a request so what we do is every Monday when your course is live on the portal we also make it live on NPTEL website so week 3 content is live on the portal week 3 content will be live on NPTEL website for download it is available for download in 4 formats mp4 flb 3gp and mp3 that is the audio rift we'll also give them just for the sake of listening if they want to do it one check that we like the TS to do is go to our NPTEL website there is a course created for every equivalent course please check that the contents are correct if the video may be replicated or it's all done humanly ok there is not much automation being done we are on the way to it but just check that the videos are correct if there are 5 videos in your portal we also have 5 here or we have not missed anything just do that one check and get back to us if there are any errors in it ok so that's something that you can check and yeah check the forum every day so that's something maybe once or twice depending on the traffic you have in your forum keep replying to them one thing we'd like to tell you is just be polite on the forum these are people who have never probably been on online course first time they're getting into an online course they are already hesitant to write because it's IITs they are addressing they don't know English they have a hesitancy in using the language so sometimes I mean we are very used to that kind of thing right ok already done already answered it seems ok for us when we read it but for a student from outside when you see such a reply it's not very nice you know it may not kind of encourage him to post that you know what am I posting so kind of be more encouraging if your forum is kind of slackening see what you can do to activate it see how you can get the people to respond maybe you can recognize some people who are doing responses on your favorite like actually and many times the people think that the forum is for students to interact with the faculty they do not understand that they can also talk amongst themselves they can also answer some questions so maybe you can bring it about saying that anybody can answer anybody's questions you know it's not like it's with the faculty that's the main thing but also to encourage discussion so something like that you can try for the forum on the forum we also have certain features which are deleting junk post you can ban a user in case he starts publishing solutions or he is viewing being abusive or anything in that sense you can mark duplicates that is many people asking the same question you can mark it as already answered you can say it's a duplicate question that he can refer to some of the question you can tag the best answers so all these options are available on the forum just explore it and yeah there's an email ID the admin ID they will also be writing to so please make it a point to check that admin email ID every day for any emails that have come there that you'll be responding to any admin related questions regarding the exams regarding certificates regarding thing we will send you updates so for the offices to handle the admin related across 130 courses is a little hard we do try to keep be on top of it so we'll send you whatever admin answers you might be requiring use it in spite of that if you have any questions you don't know how to answer please pass it on to us we'll do it for you okay yeah for the faculty we'd recommend that there's something called a daily digest from the forum that you can subscribe so you can the forum what happens is you're not directly subscribed to the forum by email it's not an auto subscription yeah keep it it's not an auto subscription it only happens if you subscribe to it willingly so faculty what we recommend is there is something called a daily digest you don't have to get every post as it comes in once a day or something you can do a digest to see how many posts have come how many people have responded and so on and you can also respond through email so if you just have an email on your mobile or something you don't have to log in to the portal so I think Prathap and all used to use it extensively he just gets on to his email and he keeps responding to it and it'll get posted in the forum as well as go as an email to the student which is very convenient you know when you're doing it so you can subscribe to the forum with your email lady which way you think need not be loaded or whichever you use so that is something that you can do the enrollment data we will share with you weekly but it's also available on the dashboard is analytics so you can also track what is enrollment happening few things we encourage the TAs also please share that these courses are happening on your Facebook pages any other groups that you have any other department pages that you have that you can access to saying that you know tell your friends that these courses are happening they can enroll so that they see it right so this is the during run of the course that you'll be doing making the content live putting out the assignments checking on that any other things that you require our office is open so you can do that the third part that definitely we'd like to talk about is the question papers so this is a little detail here you can go through it so as a server is asking there are two modes of examinations that we run one is an online mode of examination we call it and a offline mode of examination so online mode both of these are proctored both of these the students have to come to an exam center online doesn't mean that from home he can take it both of these he has to come to the center he has to register first in the form pay the fee get his hall ticket and appear the only differences in the online mode it's very similar to our online assignments so like you can use only mcq msq short answer type max you can get an essay type which they provide that is you some answers can be written essay format that you can evaluate later on but that is all it allows programming courses of course they have programming platform you can use cc plus plus so on if your course requires it but that is the capability of the online exam in case you want derivations you want some graphs to be used you want some other charts to be used you want detailed answers to be written you have to go in for the offline method of examination so both of these are available with us but the format of the question paper is by and large the same as we have outlined in the second thing which soft copies I'll be sending you to so that will be again three sections one is going to be recall the assignment based one is going to be what you want to test the person extra on based on the course so this is it so what happens once I'll send the question paper in is we just do a rain check on the total of the paper the type of questions the number of questions any other typos that we cast there and so on get back to you with suggestions on what can be improved and we'll get back the final paper from you once we create the final paper on the tcs platform that we will do from our office here and you we need the faculty member and or the TA to come and sign off on the paper because again here that's a manual process so we might have made errors in translating your actual paper into the software so please see that these checks are done and they all are correct few minutes I'd like to take on here is for some things where we've had mathematical papers the there were about a few questions that were only worked out and the answer options were incorrect so they had gone in for an online exam but the options given were totally wrong because working out was wrong by whoever had done it it had not been cross check so if you're looking like that please cross check all the answers that are being given there because post exam we can't do anything except you know moderate or something which is not advisable so kind of check all the answers given in another question paper we had 50 mcq questions all options are C 1 to 50 the answer correct answer is C we couldn't change it too much we had to go with it so these are things we might want to avoid when we are designing the paper and we are looking at it we see options being repeated in a question we see questions being repeated in the question paper questions being repeated the other thing we'd like to emphasize here is the two question papers that you give us should be identical in format no extra questions no lesser questions no difference in the marks in the two question papers they can only be different in questions people ask us can we repeat questions from question paper one to two because you know the content is so much and so on this time we are having only one exam date so morning exam and afternoon which is better than last time which we had which had a question paper so it is okay in a sense but the thing is after one and a half hours we start allowing students to go out if they finish the exam so if they start doing that there is a chance that your paper would be out in some social media forum somewhere so the second group should not get an unfair advantage in the way the question papers been designed assuming that the first paper is totally out so that is the way in which the questions can be repeated so not many of them being repeated but assuming this please design your two questions the other thing for again people from the past to now the change that we have done is we have standardised the grading mechanism there is we are kind of tightening on we are not giving the faculty leeway to decide on what is the mix of assignments to exams course this was done due to various reasons one is initially it was much more flexible than we are now firstly we have 130 courses so if we have 130 different types of logic in which we are going to apply to every course the colleges one we say best 3 best 5 best 8 this will not have assignments that will have something else 50 marks you have 70 marks there so we kind of said let's standardise it what we have currently done is 25% of the total final score will come from the assignments 75% will come from the certification exam and how the 25% is going to be calculated is for a 4 week course it is best 3 out of 4 weeks the average will be best 3 will be taken average and 25% from the certification exam for an 8 week course it is best 6 out of 8 for a 12 week course it is best 8 out of 12 so this is what we are standardise we are publishing on the portal so we are not going to be changing this what this again in turn means is we need to have definitely 4 assignments 8 assignments and 12 assignments there is no going back on that right we are committing to them we are taking this so we are not going to say at some point no I could do only 5 I could get out an assignment every week based on whatever content is there the difficulty level the way you put the questions may be there and that assignment also helps us track how many students are active in the course in one sense because we get the number of submissions as well as the average score so we know how many people are actually active and it also forces them to watch the videos that is another way of enforcing that you know they finish complete that weeks content that week because they have to answer the assignment so this is something certification exam guidelines are for the 4 week courses the exam time is going to be only one and a half hours so the paper needs to engage the student for one and a half hours for the 8 week and 12 week courses we are saying that the paper needs to engage them for 3 hours okay the 4 week exam the paper can be for 50 marks 8 week and 12 week can be 100 of course 50 means you can have it as 102 we have given guidelines on the marks so the section 1 is going to have one mark questions section 2 mark questions but if you say I want to have 100 one mark questions well and good that is fine but then you have to tell us how much of it is recall how much of it is from the assignments we want to know that we keep that fraction a constant okay the format that we are given is the minimal format you can cross it you can exceed it but not go below it you cannot say I will give 5 questions of only so much and that is it you know unless it is a subject to paper where we can give marks for him for that not in an online object to paper definitely questions must be exactly identical and this we have done NPTEL office will do all this minimum requirements numerical yes this time the other change that we are doing for people who have been with us before for any question paper being submitted to us we want a completely worked out solutions of that paper submitted to us again this is just for us to check that you know somebody has worked it all out and the answers are correct there so that we know it we just want the complete solutions and then later date also something we need to have the solutions with us so we are asking for a completely worked out solutions to the question papers that you want to submit to us yeah certificate format and publishing less than 40% nobody less than 40% final score nobody gets a certificate then we have three categories of certificates plus we are publishing the toppers also so all those details are given here you can just check there is more so for the TS because you will get a lot of questions on will I get so much how many do I have to do what you know that certificate if I do not register what can I do the other common question you all may get is if students are there registering into your course from abroad what do they do they can participate end role complete the course but currently we do not conduct proctored exams outside of India hence unless they come to India that to write an exam they will not be getting a certificate okay so you can tell them clearly you can be in the course you can do it but we will not be able to give you a certificate at present we do not have the process in place so I think that is it yes sir so for example in my course I do not expect a large number of registration so if at all you are conducting an examination at the end yes I do not expect that it will split into two like say morning and afternoon because you know the number will be like say small I do not have no idea of guessing but I would expect I do not expect it to be a large number but you have to split it into okay even then do you want two question papers or I can give one paper in the beginning and most people will write two subjects on the same day oh this is harder to manage let us go to okay noise is there noise is there noise please during the break okay yeah the only point that we have in suggestions at best practice is not covered is that if the first weeks content is available on the portal you can open it right away so we recommend that because students will give them a heads up in just going through even introductory video gives them an idea but that is very generic right they are just listening to 3 mins or 4 mins of what you talking put out the first weeks content that will help them decide what is how the course is going to be what is the difficulty level it gives them really withdraw and enroll in some other courses it is quite fine. So we would say if your first week is available make it public now and let them all handle it and TAS can start handling forum you will start seeing activity in the forum right away not too heavy not too technical but yes you can say that you are there at least once a week just check and maybe give some replies to whatever they are doing. I think we are done with this so we will send you all the emails out please be responsive to us. We work in a three month time frame and you know we are desperately trying to call you all or mail you all sometimes expecting replies waiting for you all to just you know getting some feedback and so on please do respond to our emails please we will send you messages don't get bugged yes we will bug you a lot we will keep bombarding you with data and stuff. So kindly respond to our emails kindly adhere to the timelines that we are giving so that it is easy for us to work and TAS definitely do respond to us many times we write on the group and we don't even know if you have read it not read it what is happening so be responsive to us as we you know write to you all saying this is happening. Thank you. Thank you.