 Good morning and welcome to this exciting workshop on open edX. I begin with apologies for not being physically present with you. Unfortunately, I have to travel a delegate meet at National Academy of Engineers in US. My colleague Professor Gayathonde has kindly agreed to conduct this workshop on my behalf. Of course, I am trying to be telepresent along with you and that is the reason why you are listening to this recorded talk. Today I am going to share some of my generic thoughts on technology-enabled learning leading to the assuring of the MOOCs era in India. It has already started on large scale across the globe and India will soon be part of that international movement. First, let me describe the objectives behind the Indian efforts. Primarily, we wish to enhance the reach and quality of education using information and communication technology. We note that whenever such solutions are imported from other developed countries where these are being used extensively, there are always several issues. We therefore need to innovate and develop affordable solutions locally because the nation cannot afford very high cost solutions since we have a large problem of scale as I shall mention shortly. It is for this reason as well that I suggest concentration on open source software tools and content. Not only open source content are universally acknowledged as the best way to reach out to billions of people, but they also create an affordability so that people can access these without any license cost or an IPR cost. Finally, the Indian efforts want to initiate MOOCs and deploy on large scale. To begin with, I would like to spend some time on discussing the problem of quality that we face. Let us look at this slide which contains some statistics peculiar to India. Large number of fifth standard students cannot solve arithmetic problems of second and third standard. They cannot read and understand lessons of third and fourth standard and they cannot write correct sentences in the language of their own study. High school students are very inadequately prepared particularly in science and maths. College students have a very weak background. They cannot articulate thoughts in their own words and many have serious problems in using English. Now, you would agree that you would have seen this situation around you almost on a regular basis. Many of you would be either studying or teaching in engineering colleges, but all of you are familiar with the status of education in high schools and even in primary schools. By and large, this is the situation that prevails across all MOOCs and colleges in the country. This is a serious problem. In engineering colleges, when we teach, we find that the first year students cannot understand lectures delivered in English. They often ask questions in their own native languages. Luckily, the teachers in those colleges also understand and speak that language. Therefore, they can answer those questions and students take a lot of time to become familiar with articulation in English. Now, this is a problem which should have been solved in the high school. So, in the colleges, we are actually struggling because the problem that should have been solved in high school are not solved. In high school, the teachers are struggling because the problem that should have been solved in the primary school are not solved. Please note that in the entire education ladder, a weakness that remains at the lower ladder causes very serious problems subsequent. Of course, we are not here to solve all education problems, but we should understand that at every stage therefore, we will have to take some extra efforts to ensure that this lack of background or lack of inadequate preparation at the lower level does not come in the way of learning at least the basic things of importance in our own subject area. Let us look at the quality of engineering education. We already mentioned the lack of background of the students, but consider the problem of our own colleagues teaching faculty. There is a lack of experienced teachers. Most teachers do not have PhD and many do not even have master's degree. Elsewhere in the developed world, such people would never be appointed as faculty members, but India has no choice. We have to have teachers to run courses to teach courses and therefore, a large number of teachers in engineering colleges today come with a basic degree that is the graduation degree or bachelor's degree and start teaching. Many of them of course are desirous of continuing their education and they would like to study towards their master's and PhD and many of our teacher colleagues are actually doing these things, but given the teaching load that they have, they are not able to find adequate time to devote to furtherance of their own education. Be that as it may, the engineering education suffers from lack of experience and well educated teachers. As in added attraction, we have a straight jacketed system of education which is based on fixed syllabus and is examination oriented. We all believe that students seem to care only for marks. Of course, this has been true always. Whenever we were students, we also cared for marks, but there was also an education that was happening not merely because it was incidentally acquired since everybody was working for marks, but there was also some emphasis on interaction and when we had only 100 engineering colleges, for example, we had really good quality of teachers and an academic ethos prevailing in those institutions. With 5000 engineering colleges, it is extremely difficult to maintain that and we need to therefore train not only our students, but also our teachers. Incidentally, NASCOM considers that less than 25% of our graduating students are employable. That is a very poor rate and we need to do something about enhancing the quality of engineering education as well. Let us now look at some of the problems of scale that only India faces. We all know that there are 1.25 million students who are admitted to engineering every year. We have a very low gross enrolment ratio as compared to other developed countries where 50%, 60% of the students passing out of schools join colleges. Our ratio was a decimal 11%, it has increased to 18% and we wish to increase it to something like 30% as quickly as possible. Today, we have about 2 crore students in higher education. This way, increase to 3 crores when we manage to enhance our gross enrolment ratio. Please understand these numbers are not small numbers. 20 million are already studying in higher education and 30 million shall be soon studying in higher education. Of course, our ambition is to enhance this number to a much larger number later. But look at our problems of numbers in schools. I mentioned 3 crores as an ambitious target to get students in higher education. Well, about 3 crore students study just in 9 standard across the country and there are more than 37 crore Indians who are younger than 15 years. This, my dear friends, is a number which is unsurpassed anywhere in the world. Even the Chinese have less number of students than us because China is now an aging society. We talk of demographic advantage. This is our demographic advantage. But if we do not do something very quickly to solve the riddle of providing quality education at such large scale, then this demographic advantage might become a demographic challenge for us. We thus have an unprecedented problem of scale and quality. I would like you to remember this always. Every effort that we do in trying to get the information and communication technology to work for us in the domain of education must go to address the problem of scale and quality because these are very, very serious problems. These are unique problems to India and we only will have to solve our problems. Nobody else in the world will come to solve it. Of course, in the process we need to use every morsel of wisdom available from any corner of the world in order to deploy ICT as meaningfully as possible in the entire country across the entire spectrum of education. In this context, let me describe the three pillars on which the education stands. One is content, the second is dissemination and third is access. Let us look at the content initiatives in the country. I will of course, be talking about these initiatives only in the context of use of information and communication technology and not a general context. So, if you look at ICT usage, a very major initiative that the nation took was the National Mission on Education through ICT. Under that a very important program, national program on technology enabled learning or NPTEL, it actually started as an independent program and now is part of a mission. They have already created over 1200 courses and they have initiated offering of massive open online courses with certification. Now, the NPTEL courses were created by recording lectures in the conventional way. For example, if I offer a course in IIT Bombay, the local NPTEL coordinator will tell me that could my lectures be recorded and made available freely to people. When I can send, they would record my lectures just as I would give them in a classroom. Typically, the classroom lecture is one hour duration and that is how most of the lectures were so clear. There are two things about this NPTEL that we should understand. First of all, it is one of the most massive efforts coordinated jointly by all IITs in IIT. In fact, leader of the group then Professor Anand and Professor Mangala Sundar, who actually spent almost their entire professional life in last several years in creating this marvelous resource. This resource is now available in open source. I do not know how many of you are aware that all the NPTEL courses have been released under CC BYSA license, the Creative Commons license by attribution and share alike. Anybody and everybody in the world can use this including of course all our engineering college students and all our engineering college teachers. One of the reasons why this resource has not been used as much as it ought to have been used because the quality of these lectures let me tell you is phenomenal. These are the best teachers giving the courses in their best way in premier institutions in the country. But some problem that I have realized after talking to thousands of teachers through our T-10KT program and of course to a large number of students, what the students feel is that the lectures that are delivered are excellent, but they do not directly cover the topics which they feel are relevant for their syllabus and for their exams. This is being corrected now. In fact, for quite some time NPTEL has been working closely to align the courses to the syllabi which are offered elsewhere. I would only mention that the strict syllabus that is outlined by the university is not necessarily the end of all knowledge. In fact, the reason why the premier institutions have a course emphasize several additional points which are not covered under the public syllabus is because that is what is going to be the relevant knowledge in coming years. Unfortunately, the examination system does not currently permit students and teachers in engineering colleges to concentrate on these topics. Curiously, what I have found is that most students who actually access and study the NPTEL lectures are those who are preparing for their great examination and not for their own examination in their university. In any case, NPTEL is an important resource and people should make use of it. It is an important ICT resource. It can be accessed by anybody who has an internet connection. Teachers can download these lectures and encourage students to study these during their own spare time. Anyway, let us go to several other similar important initiatives on use of ICT in education. Spoken tutorials is one such initiative. This initiative was started by my colleague, Professor Kannan Nagalya. Lacks of students have been trained using these spoken tutorials. The concept is very simple. Each spoken tutorial is a simple 10 minute recording of a explanatory tutorial talk. This talk is originally in English. The slides which are prepared are in English. There is no face or a human being and therefore, the combined video audio payload of the 10 minute package is very small and can be easily transmitted on no bandwidth internet or can be easily stored in large numbers on even a simple SD card. These 10 minute tutorials are first created in English. A transcript is written. This transcript is then translated into multiple Indian languages and the same video is dubbed in those languages. Those who are interested might look at the spoken tutorials website. You can easily find it by just typing spoken tutorials in any search engine and you will get the beautiful collection of all spoken tutorials including the statistics of its usage including the method of preparing such spoken tutorials. Incidentally, all of these are available as part of an open source resource. There are virtual labs. The virtual labs could be extremely useful for two objectives. One, to support engineering education where you need a lot of experimental work. Of course, the actual experiments have no substitute but the virtual labs will permit complex experiments requiring very high investment in equipment to be done by students elsewhere by using the virtual remote control facilities. IIT Delhi is spearheading this campaign jointly with several other institutions. IIT Bombay of course is also part of it and there are a large number of virtual labs that have been created and I think in coming years people will find them useful. The other important use of virtual labs is in vocational training. Not much work has yet happened but the conventional vocational training which also depends upon a lot of hands-on experimentation will benefit very much through these virtual labs. Amruta University which is organizing this event itself has been participating in haptic devices but there is a long way that we need to traverse in order to develop and deploy these virtual labs for each and every activity of both vocational education, engineering education and science education wherever experiments are required. This was about the content. Let us look at the dissemination. National knowledge network which provides connectivity to hundreds of universities and thousands of colleges is also busy constructing fiber connectivity to over 1 lakh panchayats or 1 lakh block level teams. We have suggested that at every panchayat at least one school and one hospital be connected so that the schools come on the ICT roadmap. Internet availability is increasing rapidly yet the bandwidth availability, the bandwidth affordability and the easy access in large stacks of the rural India is still a problem. However the dissemination of any ICT based education initiative cannot happen unless the dissemination infrastructure is ready. National knowledge network will complete the 1 lakh panchayat connectivity in less than two years. All universities and all colleges should be connected on the internet. That is a minimal requirement. That should also happen very shortly. Let us see how we can solve the dissemination problem because that is going to be the key on using ICT at a very large scale for all aspects of education. Last but not the least the access to these content most institutions of higher learning have lab facilities. You are for example working on several PCs connected on a local area network and the network is connected to internet. There have been successful pilots with affordable access devices. I will show you some glimpses of android tablets. We participated in Akash project for example you would like to see that. There are netbooks which are capable of running Linux. We will see an example. There are affordable Wi-Fi solutions which are being worked out so that they could be housed in schools where a high end server etcetera would be very difficult to put in. Finally there are large clouds or server farms which are being built. These hopefully should solve the access problem but here again we have miles to go. Consider institutions of higher learning. Even engineering colleges which as I said have well equipped local area networks and labs. They do not have enough devices so that all students of a college simultaneously can access the content. Remember I am saying all schools even IITs for example IIT Bombay has 8000 students on the campus. Of course a large number of them have their own laptops and we have provided Wi-Fi connectivity in their hostels. Yet if we want to conduct a single online exam for all 8000 students we cannot do so in one go. This is a major area of concern and that is the reason why we would require affordable devices completely connected and available and accessible to every student. We also mentioned the servers. Please note that let us say take a higher education institution like a science college with 3000 students or engineering college with 3000 students. If all 3000 students are provided with either their own laptops or PCs and even network connection so that on the LAN they can work very well. Yet we will not be able to provide adequate internet bandwidth so that all of them can access internet with equal ease and with the availability of bandwidth. What it means is that we will need local servers in these institutions of higher learning which will have to create replicated content from a central cloud so that the students locally can access these on a local area network bandwidth rather than sharing a very limited internet bandwidth that would be available. These are going to be some of the challenges that we shall have in ensuring access to all students who are studying. Please note I have spoken only about the higher education institution. In schools we have more challenges. We have done one of the pilots in four schools in Ponderpur where we do not have a server located in any one of the schools. Instead a neighbouring engineering college in Ponderpur actually maintains a local server with replicated school content. These are delivered to the school students of nine standard schools who have been given a class tablets and the schools have a very strong Wi-Fi connectivity to the main server. This experiment has been successful and we hope that such experiments will be replicated in large number of schools across the country. Before going further I would like to mention an important thing. I have indicated in the last three slides that content, dissemination and access are three pillars on which the use of ICT in education stands. That is true but not completely true. There is a fourth dimension and the fourth dimension is the actual delivery of a course taken by the students where they study a particular defined portion, learn new skills. Currently that is the part of what we call the education system in schools and colleges. Use of ICT will not succeed unless the actual delivery of the course and the actual learning by the students is also affected by ICT. So while content, dissemination and access are three important components which facilitate learning. They do not guarantee learning. If I am a student I will learn when you as a teacher teach me a course in my college when I ask questions not only to you but to my fellow students. When I look at examination problems and try to prepare for that examination I study more. So the actual study involves my spending quality time as a student in learning a subject. Availability of knowledge does not guarantee that I become a knowledgeable person. The knowledge will come into my mind only when I spend quality time and the job of a teacher in an educational institution is to ensure that every student is enabled and empowered to spend this quality time. That is the reason why we have to make the best content available, accessible through dissemination mechanisms. But there has to be one more step and that is the actual conduct of courses. This is currently done by teachers, by the college system, by the university system. This is where education happens and that is the reason why involvement of teachers, involvement of educational institutions is extremely critical for guaranteeing both the quality of education and the scale of education. I say this very specifically because many seem to believe that the massive open online courses will mean no teachers are required. That is nonsense. That is the biggest humbug. Most important thing is that education happens through human interaction as much as it happens through students studying a book on his or her own in the pressings of the hostel or the classroom or lab. The collective group interaction is an important component that helps me to learn new things when I am a student and that ethos can only be provided by an educational institution as of now. There are of course discussion forums and so on and they are increasingly becoming very effective. But I still believe that these all should act as supplement to a stronger conventional education system and not necessarily as a replacement. Let us now quickly look at some of the glimpses of activities that have happened so far in the use of ICT. Here is an android tablet which runs Sylab. You might be aware that Sylab is an open source functional equivalent of the commercial product called MATLAB extensively used by scientists and engineers for solving all kinds of complex computational problems. Here is an example of Sylab running a complex code and plotting useful two dimensional and three dimensional graphs with appropriate computational values prescribed. Those of you who have used MATLAB would know that MATLAB licenses are very costly. Sadly many people do not have proper license software which is bad but there is an open source equivalent happening. Again a lot of work is happening in most of the major institutions. Spirited again by IIT Bombay there is a huge effort on putting Sylab on android tablets. We have succeeded in doing it on Akash where it can run on any other android as well. More importantly the Akash tablet can also be used for further experiment. So, look at this particular gadget. This is called Anudino. You might have heard of Anudino which is an experimental electronic kit which is used by people to develop a whole lot of experiment. This is called an Anudino because Anu is an atom. So, it is a very small board here. It has a small sensor a temperature sensor connected by a USB cable to the Akash tablet. The Akash tablet itself is an affordable device. But what Professor Kannanth Madhgalya's team has created this particular experiment costs only 90 rupees. And look at the simple open source software running on the Akash tablet which can run on any android tablet by the way or any Linux tablet for example is a temperature versus time curve which is being plotted online. Imagine how many experiments can be created using affordable tablets and such simple additional hardware gadgets. Sensors, data collection, data acquisition, data analysis, reporting more and more such sensors could be connected to affordable tablets making engineering experimentation a lot different, a lot better and a lot cheaper. Here is the latest experiment by Professor Kannanth my colleague in developing affordable solutions. This is a net book. It has a regular keyboard. It has a normal screen. It is not a touch sensitive screen. It is a normal screen. However, this net book has two important properties. One it can it of course runs android but it also can run Linux. You are seeing a Linux operating system running on. Second it is an affordable device. Normally, net books are available for anywhere between 12000 to 20000 rupees. This net book we have managed to procure for 5000 rupees plus taxis. It is an extremely low cost device and you can say it is an elder brother of the Aakash tablet. The next part we believe if you look at this net book we believe that a large number of students would like to have a conventional keyboard so you can interact with this device. Since the net book device is not just an excess device it is actually a computing device because it runs Linux and therefore, people would be able to use this instead of a costlier laptop for most of their work. It has Wi-Fi connectivity. It has USB port. You can even connect an external one terabyte hard disk. We have experimented successfully using that. Let me now describe another important initiative using ICT for education. This is called the T10KT project or 10,000 teachers at a time project. We have been running this for almost one and half years close to two years. Now, we have established over 300 remote centers. We conduct teachers training workshop where up to 10,000 teachers are trained simultaneously in a subject. We provide interactive live lectures in these workshops from the hub institutions. Today, we have two hubs, IIT Bombay and IIT Kharagpur, but there can be more such hubs. The labs and tutorials are conducted at remote centers. Over 85,000 teachers have been trained so far and our ambition is to train 150,000 teachers within three years. Not only our ambition is our mandate under this project funded by the national nation. So, let me those of you are not familiar with this T10KT. Let me very briefly tell you the methodology. We started this training program for teachers almost eight years ago when I initiated the distance education in IIT using visas. We set up remote centers. We soon converted these interactive lecture sessions into workshops for teachers. We started training some 300, 400 teachers at a time at four or five remote centers through a project funded by FAC. At that time we were using visas. Thankfully, Amruta University at that time was involved in development of the AVU software and when we found that it could work on internet, we migrated to use of AVU. This AVU software permits us to create a virtual classroom across the country at multiple places which are called remote centers. I was telling you about the T10KT program and methodology. It is based on the ordinary workshop methodology which is used for training teachers such as a quality improvement or QIP program or an AICT or IST workshop where 35 to 40 teachers would assemble in a college and they would be trained on a subject by a team of experts. What used to happen is this method worked when we had as I said only 100 engineering colleges at one time. Number of teachers that we need to train training 35 to 40 teachers at a time was not going to be the solution. Second thing I realized that that training was very costly because the first of all these 35 to 40 people came from all across the country. A lot of money had to be spent on their travel and stay and accommodation and other things. Second, the cost of 3 or 4 top class experts who would develop that course and deliver that course will have to be amortized only over 35 to 40 teachers. We said can we expand this to say 1000 teachers training program where the methodology is that we will establish remote centers. The interactive lectures in the morning sessions will be delivered by experts who assemble at IIT Bombay same 3 or 4 experts but instead of talking to 40 teachers now they will talk to 1000 teachers spread across 30-40 remote centers. The lectures are interactive thanks to the AVU software. In the afternoon these teachers will be busy conducting tutorial sessions lab sessions and discussion sessions in each remote center. So at every remote center there will be 35, 40, 50 teachers participate and these activities at the remote center they will do under the coordination of a workshop coordinator who would be a local expert in that subject. Now one question which AICT asked me or IST asked me how do I ensure that the labs and tutorials at each remote center are conducted with the same rigor with which they would have been conducted in IIT Bombay. So our answer to that was that much before this large workshop is held we collect all the workshop coordinators and conduct a coordinators workshop at IIT for one week. During that one week all the participating coordinators are rigorously trained in conducting the same lab assignments and the same tutorials which they will have to later supervise in the main workshop tasks. We found that this method works and the beneficiaries are much larger number of teachers at a single time. With the success of this 1000 teacher training program over 3 years the mission asked us to scale it up and we have currently scaled it to train 10,000 teachers at a time. Of course when we say 10,000 teachers it is only a notional number we never have actual 10,000 teachers participating. Sometimes there are 9,000, 8,000, sometimes even 5,000, sometimes 11,000 but the fact remains that this is probably a unique program in the world where so many teachers are being trained simultaneously in a very tedious 2 week workshop. We have trained more than 85,000 teachers so far and our mandate is to train 150,000 teachers in 15 specific subjects over the 3 year period of which almost one and half years are over. Let us now look at some of the glimpses of the participants activities during these workshops. Here is a brief of the remote center map you can see that there are large stacks of the country in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in Odisha where we still do not have a presence. We have appealed to engineering college teachers to come forward to become a remote center. We expect people to be able to do that soon so that we can enlarge the number of remote centers. Here is it still from co-ordinators workshop. You can have 270 co-ordinators sitting here and interacting in here again we have morning sessions which interactive lecture sessions and in the afternoon all the co-ordinators go through the drill of the same kind of tutorials and practical sessions that I spoke of. Here is a set of teachers at a remote center. I particularly like this slide because it shows a large number of lady teachers participating in the workshop. I must tell you that this is an important by-product of our efforts which we actually did not see as an important contribution. Many of the lady teachers participating in our workshops have written to us that they are thankful that the workshop was conducted at a place where they live because had it been in IIT Bombay they would have never been able to leave aside their families and their children for two weeks to be absent to attend this workshop. Because the workshop was conducted at the place of their own work they were able to attend this without jeopardizing their family commitments. As my colleague Professor Cundin says this process has helped us to empower 50% of the national population. So I am thankful to all the lady teachers who participate very vigorously in all our efforts their contributions will be very significant in scaling up quality education in coming years. Let me now come to the main crux, the online approaches of which we have started trying some online in activity in the TTNKT. Some of these workshops we conducted mixed mode where a portion for one week of workshop is done online. This one week effort is spread over five to six weeks so that participating teachers have to spend one day a week in doing the workshop related activities which they can easily find during that week. Over five to six weeks they do five to six days worth of work. It is a very serious work they have to do online submissions and now we will be conducting online quizzes as well after which they come for the other week which is face to face at the remote centers. We have found that effectiveness is enhanced for the serious participants. Currently we use Moodle which does not unfortunately scale beyond 2000 or 2500 concurrent users. That has been one bottleneck for which we are looking at alternatives and the MOOC platform turned out to be the best alternative as I shall briefly explain. Before going ahead I would like to appraise you of 14 grand challenges in engineering. This list was prepared by National Academy of Engineers in United States and in fact Indian National Academy of Engineers is going to have a serious dialogue with the National Academy of Engineers over the next three four days to consider which of these grand challenges the two countries can together work in. I will not bore you with this list. The seven challenges are listed here including solar energy, energy from fusion, access to clean water etc etc engineering better medicines. What is very relevant for our discussion today is advanced personalized learning. Many of you would have heard of intelligent tutoring system. Advanced personalized learning is considered a grand challenge where every individual learner on the globe can receive instructions which are specific to that particular individual. This is taking the intelligent tutoring systems to its extreme usage. That is a grand engineering challenge. I shall see very shortly how the MOOCs effort could lead towards that. First the theme of the workshop today the massive open online courses. Well India has already started offering MOOCs to global learners. There are several teachers from our institutions which have been giving on the popular platforms such as Coursera and Udacity and so on. But specifically we have got into an MOU with EDX and we have also started using open EDX to develop our own Indian platform which is called Swayam. Swayam stands for study waves of active learning for young aspiring minds. This is an Indian open source platform based on EDX. It is built using Python and Django framework. We propose that this will cater to the native languages as well. We propose that it will permit offering of blended MOOCs. I will mention what blended MOOCs is a short while and we propose that this will also be available for school education and vocational training. We believe that a large scale national rollout will unfold very short. This then is the background of the massive open online courses with which the nation is on the threshold of ushering in a completely new era of education. Here are some samples of the Swayam site. This is not yet been released. In fact the experiment that you will be conducting in the afternoon and the demonstration that you will be doing is exactly on the same platform except that it is not called Swayam for reasons of proprietary. It is called IIT Bombay test server or IIT Bombay test server or something. The Swayam which we have built on open EDX works in Hindi and English currently. You can choose a language of your choice which will later mean that students starting to wanting to study some subject in Tamil or Telugu or something and if that course is available in those languages they can choose that language. Starting with the introduction in fact with the portal in their own language of choice later. Currently the Swayam platform will release only in English and Hindi. This is an example of an Hindi registration page. There are several policy issues that need to be addressed when you run massive open online courses. The most important is that the credits or marks earned through MOOCs should be recognized for which we need supervised online examinations and for which we will need local assignments and assessments done by local teachers. This is the crux of the blended model of MOOCs which I had suggested. There is a paper that I had written. I do not think I have shared that with you. Let me see I will mail it to you and I will request the organizers to circulate the soft copy or even hard copy on blended MOOCs for engineering education. What this means is that the students let us say I am doing a course in thermodynamics in Coimbatore which is part of my university syllabus. So far the university teacher who, a college teacher who teaches me used to use a reference book or a textbook written by someone else and said this is the reference book that you should do. Let us say that professor Gayathondi of IIT Bombay is offering a MOOC on thermodynamics which he does actually. Now suppose my teacher in Coimbatore says thermodynamics as a student here. I advise you to register for the MOOCs that is being offered by professor Gayathondi. Since all his lectures example problems, sample quizzes and the actual online exams are available you give all of them. I will of course engage you in the normal classroom but I will not waste my time in delivering the lectures because you have the lectures from professor Gayathondi instead I will concentrate on discussing conceptual problems discussing hard problems how to solve them. So we will use the entire classroom interaction just for solving problems and discussion. This is actually called a flipped classroom where the lectures are online and the classroom is used for discussion session. This model is very effective by the way. Professor Kannan has been doing a flipped classroom for five years. My own colleague professor Kamishwari Chevron who ran blended with the flipped classroom model for two years in succession. I have personally ran this course with my colleague professor Supratik Chakravarti the CS 101 course with 540 students in the blended model. Now if this model becomes acceptable then what would happen is that the Coimtore University where the teacher currently spent 80-85 percent of their time in preparing for lectures and delivering instead they will be able to spend that time in quality interaction with students. Imagine how much more than knowledge that students would gain. On one hand they get the best course delivered by one professor Gayathondi of IIT Bombay. On the other hand they have a constant interaction with their teachers throughout the semester. This blended model I have advocated this also helps in the local college and university to adopt the books great. The online examinations will now be supervised by the local teachers because their students are registered for that course. Additionally the teachers will give local assignments including course projects. Please note that the online courses mostly use multiple choice questions as the quizzing or examination method whereas we would like our students to be trained in giving long answers in articulating let us say, problem reports or project reports and so on. Now these kind of assignments can be given by local teachers in a blended model learning. These will be evaluated by local teachers. When the arrangement that I have suggested is that the final grade which the university accept will be given on the basis of say 75 or 80 percent marks obtained through online examinations which Gayathondi conducts for thermodynamics for me. These online examinations are supervised by my local teachers so there is a sanctity for those exams. 15 to 20 percent of the weightage to my final score will come from the evaluation and assessment that the local teacher does who can give me long assignments course project and assess my ability to articulate properly larger answers which cannot be currently automatically assessed on the online platform. I personally believe that this blended model will work very effectively. A committee of university grants commission are already recommended the recognition of such a system and suggested that to begin with at least 15 to 20 percent of the subjects which form the total credits of a B degree in a university can be obtained by the students using the MOOCs course. The credit recognition by my own university in Coimbatore is one issue but there is a larger issue of credit recognition through transfer of credits across university. As also recognition of credits earned by learners who are not in the conventional education system. Suppose a student is studying some subjects on MOOCs on his or her own somewhere not part of a university or college system and then comes to a college system saying look I have studied these four subjects online please give me credits for this I will study the remaining subjects in your college or university. All of these issues are actually tough issues. Thankfully MHRD has appointed an implementation committee to look at all of these and to ensure that a credit recognition happens as quickly as possible in India. It is in this context that we started our collaboration on the MOOCs effort. As I mentioned IIT Bombay and EDX have built upon the MOU which we signed in 2013. EDX has provided technical support for building the SWIM platform and IIT Bombay is already offering courses to global learners using the global EDX consortium. The open EDX version now has just been released it was announced in the last conference on open EDX held in Boston just 15 days ago. This release is called ASPEN and we have already started work on porting SWIM to this ASPEN release. This will be available very shortly. It has a consistent multilingual framework but to put it for actual use for 20 different languages in India is going to be a challenge which we expect to solve very shortly. The version that you have is also an open source version as I said it is not called SWIM for proprietary reasons. But once the SWIM is launched the SWIM platform version which will also be incidentally available as an open source release on Github can be used by anyone any institution. These are the features of open EDX first there is a course management system or CMS which has a studio for creating courses. You are all going to spend a lot of time under the co-ordinatorship my colleague Prasad Gaitonde and my colleagues Brinda and Urmila and others on going through the studio in this workshop. There is a learning management system or LMS which provides individual students access to any course. It offers online assessment and it has instant feedback mechanism for multiple choice short-term circuits. There is also an open response which can permit longer essay type answers to be assessed. There are efforts of assessing these either through a peer review mechanism and there are also efforts to put some machine learning algorithms to automatically grade these. Suffice it to say that these are not yet perfect replacements for the individual personal human grading that is currently done by people. But there would be a great move forward in terms of R&D efforts in this and we can see some very useful results in coming years. More importantly, the engine which runs these courses can connect to external auto grader. There are some courses in which the submissions, long submissions can be automatically graded. One common example which all of you would be familiar with is programming assignment. If a student submits a program to a student or a teacher correcting that assignment, mind you I am not talking about only a program which runs properly that a compiler can test. But whether that program has been written to take care of all possible specifications of processing input data correctly validating what about the quality of that program all of these issues. I would like to put an auto grader we have created such an auto grader CS 101 course after polishing it we shall be releasing that also in open source. There are open source auto graders for python etcetera that have been created by MIT in Sanford and there are many such efforts. Now these will permit longer answers of a specific type. Namely actual programs constructed by students to be automatically graded. Not merely for basic correctness but even for quality of programming kind of different test cases these programs can handle etcetera. Last but the most important thing of the features is like all MOOCs platform it tracks all interaction events. It means that a participating student suppose I am a student in Coimbatore and I register for Professor Gayathorn's course on thermodynamics the moment I login an event is locked the moment I open his first video lecture and lock time and date and time. How long I see the video is therefore recorded when I skip the video and go to an example problem again that is locked. How long I spend in looking at the example problem is locked if I go to a quiz it logs how long do I spend on each question of the quiz and whether my answers are correct or not. Please note that for every course which is whatever we substantial content portion in terms of megabytes and gigabytes interaction event logs constitute an immense amount of useful information about the behavior of each individual student as to how that student attempts a particular course. How that student studies the course the complete chain of events is actually captured and recorded these event logs constitute the most important clue to the students learning behavior which so far was not possible to be obtained by any human means and this is what I will connect to the grand challenge of engineering very short. First let me describe some other remaining components of the open edx platform I mentioned Django which is a very high level python wave framework which makes programming very easy first of all it has an object relational mapper it uses jessons and not xml which is actually a very high payload kind of mechanism for exchanging information json has emerged as the most popular short representation for associative key value pairs etcetera etcetera which is used extensively here it has an automatic admin interface it has a very elegant URL design it has a template system by which you can build interactive web applications it has a very good cache including a memcache and it has features for internationalization this Django framework therefore becomes the main glue that actually gives the back end framework on which the entire open edx platform resides on one hand it connects to mongo db and mysql db and other thing on the other hand it connects to the front end web system that you have so this Django framework is the crux of the massive code that is built around open edx let me spend a few minutes telling you about the intelligent tutoring systems and the work that is now seriously happening across the globe current intelligent tutoring systems or personalized tutoring systems classify students based on their state of understanding now this judgment is based only on the exams course so suppose let us say there are 100 students who get only 40 marks whereas all others are getting 60 80 marks etc now to these 100 students some additional material has to be automatically delivered for study so that my low score of 40 marks can become better this is called personalized tutoring but what happens is because the judgment is based only on my score and that is say 40 percent for all 100 people exactly the same advice is given to all these 100 people now look at these 100 people I might for example one of those 100 might be more comfortable studying methodically unit by unit step by step there may be another student who actually looks at all all the examples first and that is how he or she studies based there may be a third student who straight away jumps to quizzes and he or she learns by actually solving problems if your system does not know these different trades you will treat all three of us the same category and give us the same material what is desirable if I have a systematic person I should be given additional material for each unit and subunit saying my dear Fatak please visit this sequence once again so that you understand it better somebody who is known to study through solved examples or a sample example should be given additional example this appears to be your style so look at these additional examples for clarity a third person who actually jumps to quizzes should be given more quizzes simple, medium, complex because that is the way that person learns do not you agree that this way you will maximize the learning of each individual because you are factoring in the behavioral pattern of each individual on how each individual this behavioral pattern could not have been accommodated in intelligent tutoring system because you have no clue to capture the information about this behavior of individual students for you sub gode bara takke everybody is exactly same because they all have a score of 40 percent but now for the first time for the first time you now have additional information about students we already have a big data analytics that is happening on this large event logs extra work to design appropriate alternate material will now be required but I can tell you that the potential is phenomenal for example a conclusion that has been found by a global analysis of the students behavior is that students average watching time of a lecture video is maximum 8 minutes and more importantly the longer the video lecture the shorter time they watch it for this statistically observed across millions of learners across the world on online education so while I as a student might sit for one hour for your lecture in Coimbatore while studying thermodynamics but at home I will not be willing to watch a one hour lecture by even professor after 8 or 10 minutes or 7 minutes I will say give up this is nothing new by the way the commercial television has understood this ages ago that is why you see a commercial break after every 7 and a half but now statistically it has been proven that this is the behavior of all learners majority of learners and there will of course be accepted if there is a fin man's lecture large number of people would watch it for one and a half hours there is a unique lecture on some subject people would watch it but generally this observation has led to restructuring our notion how to design courses and that is why MOOC courses would not have generally more than 8 to 10 minutes longer duration video lecture because that is what students will actually want now this is generic what I am talking about goes one step forward when I notice that some students are performing less because they are not while they are watching videos completely but they are not understanding it I might actually add more video recorded lectures offering more explanation on an online course while the course is running in short there is a huge possibility of technology solutions coming out to help not just the masses but every individual in those masses because that is really really a hard problem it requires strong research it requires systems to be built and it requires operations of those systems feedback whether the students are actually learning by these intelligent tutoring systems better or not etc etc but that is where the future lies in short the way people learn is important current system captures only the systems or exam scores online platforms capture entire sequence of actions including events log which permit greater insight in learning behavior and as I mentioned big data analytics for these logs is an area of immediate attention we need to create what I call systems like active data warehouses you know the data warehouses which are used in banks to find out whether there is any fraud transaction or something like that they analyze the data after the transaction happens but an active data warehouse actually uses this analysis to find out these are the possible frauds that may happen and gives a feedback and actually creates an alert in the transactional system if a possible bad transaction may happen personalized tutoring system to my mind is something like this you have the actual learning that is happening on online courses then you have this huge analytics on the event log and then the feedback mechanism says that look if the student shows this kind of behavior of learning this is the additional tutoring that can be given to that student all of that needs to be done automatically there are two challenges to build such automatic system which as I said will require lot of research and lot of system building but more importantly for teachers who create these courses will now require to anticipate the different additional needs of the organization and they will have to create a large amount of additional learning material to be appropriately used for every individual student based on the needs of that student MOOCs by their friends is finally headed towards that although to begin with our ambition is to actually take the normal massive open online courses to hundreds of millions of Indians who are permanently waiting for these courses there is one more area which I must mention on an effective use of ICT in education and that is educational animation it is an area of great importance and relevance you see in conventional paper based MOOCs we could never talk of animation animation was not possible but with the multimedia facilities available the e- MOOCs actually can contain very useful animation is a field by the way which has received lot of attention but most of the people who are receiving training in building animations and most of the industry working on animation is working for entertainment educational animations are less in one of the MOOCs courses that is being designed by Tata Institute of Social Sciences test where my colleague they are offering a course on a blender based educational animation which is a vocational course which will be offered on MOOCs there are not many people working in this field as I said blender which is an open source platform as a robust Python API so Python programmers can rejoice working with blender you may want to visit a distillation column animated using blender this is a YouTube this thing those of you who understand engineering and understand the distillation column work will enjoy and will actually convince us that this is probably one of the easiest way of explaining how a distillation column work there is a physics gaming engine with the blender which can provide interactive animations if the educational animation slides appears as a sort of misfit I would like to ensure that you appreciate that creation of massive open online courses in future will not use only the conventional PDF files video lectures quizzes etc but will very effectively use such educational animation as well creating courses and helping students to learn the way they learn are going to be the future of education which initially will act as a supplement to our conventional education but who knows there might be now larger number of eclavias in the country who can learn directly from the best teachers online I will conclude with an appeal all participants who are interested in online education please contribute wholeheartedly to any one or more of these activities one by creating and running courses if you are teachers two by participating in blended MOOCs offering whosoever may be the MOOC offering teacher you participate in the blended MOOC offering run a flip classroom you will find that the students participation increase as significant in this work in the conference itself I believe there are papers by my colleague Professor Sahana Murthy and Professor Sridhar Iyer and their PhD students which have conclusively proven that in a flip classroom with the think-pair-share methodology the engagement of student which is orderly 40 to 50 percent as high as 80 percent so if you can use blended MOOCs to run a flip classroom imagine the effectiveness that will occur in your own training your students and effectiveness that will occur in the learning by students last but not the least those of you or your colleagues and your students in your respective colleges who are interested in contributing to the open source code base please ask them to connect together with us I would like to build a very massive group of volunteers across the country who will continue to make the swam the best portal in open source for a varied type of education in this country thank you so much and once again apologies for not being personally present