 Hello, everyone, a very warm welcome from my behalf. I'm really happy and honored and privileged to be here in front of all of you to talk about two digital technology interventions in Indian higher education that I've been a part of. I'll describe this to you the best of my ability, but you have to understand I'm an academic, I'm not much of a bureaucrat, so I'm going to use words and terms which maybe are okay, please put up with me. So let me get started by just introducing you to the landscape of higher education in the country. Every year in India, more than eight and a half million students get into undergraduate education. That's a huge number, however, this is at the GER of only 27%, only about one fourth of the children of that age are getting into higher education, into undergraduate higher education. Today we have a grand ambition of increasing this GER to 50%, maybe even 60%, 70%. That means this number could go to 16 million, no 20 million, who knows, that kind of numbers we are looking at in the near future. Now if you look a little closer at things like employability, one is a little bit, we need to be a little bit more careful because about one million out of this eight and a half million, one to one and a half million gets into engineering school. It's quite reasonable for education and employability, but then there's lots of studies that people do these days, which says even out of engineering school, maybe the graduates are not that skilled, maybe we need to focus on that. However, the bulk, a large bulk goes into degrees that we call BA, B-S-C-P, Com. Now you can see that's a huge fraction and people who come out of those degrees, employability is a huge challenge. Out of undergraduate getting jobs after those degrees is not very common and it's one of the big problems that this country faces today, particularly as we increase GER, that's going to stare at us in even bigger fashion. So this is one issue I want to bring your attention to in terms of the landscape, in terms of the large scale at which higher education happens in this country and how employability is something that one needs to focus on. If you look a little bit more close at the type of institutes we have, type of universities we have, type of colleges we have, into which this eight and a half million goes, where do they go every year? The top, the top most institutes in the country, the most premier institutes in the country, the most sought after dream institutions are no doubt the IITs. Every family has ambitions that their kid should be in an IIT. It's a matter of great prestige. These institutes are internationally well-known and for good reason. The teaching, learning practices, the peer group that you see in these institutions and the way in which you get set for life with a degree from these institutions is amazing. So they have a great value, but on the flip side, the competition to enter into these institutes is really, really almost in human level of competition. Kids prepare from class three sometimes to get into these institutions. It's very, very hard and it's also very costly. I'll talk a little bit more about the JEE, which admits students into these institutes. One important thing to notice, these top institutes, what we call as institutes of national importance, about 135 of them, including 23 IITs, account for just 0.5% of total UGA enrollment. So these are data a few years ago, but it's not changed dramatically from that point on. So these are the top institutes. Everybody wants to be here, but very, very few get to go there. Next come public universities and private universities. Quite a slightly larger number, you can see the enrollments. 10 times the enrollments of IITs are in public universities, private universities, hundreds of them across the country. Quite a few of them have solid quality, good brands. It does vary. It's not quite uniform, but then it's pretty good. A lot of people who get in here are quite happy with the education that they get. The brand is also pretty good. The private universities, particularly the deemed ones, end up being large in scale. They admit tens of thousands of people, but then they also end up being expensive because they take care of good campuses. It's quite expensive. The public universities are slightly cheaper. They're more affordable, but then there's competition to get in there as well. It's not very easy to get into the top public universities. I'm not talking about undergraduate education on campuses of public universities and private universities. That is these kind of numbers. The huge vast majority ends up in places that we call colleges. About 83 percent of undergraduate enrollment today is in colleges. These colleges are smaller institutions, affiliated sometimes to a public university, attached to public university. They may be autonomous, but then they're strictly regulated and come under the tight control of public universities. You can see 83 percent. It's huge. A large majority ends up in these colleges. Here, the quality varies very widely. Affordability varies. The government colleges, about 8,000 of them, are some of the cheapest in the country. They are there in the nooks and corners and if you get in, you pay really very little money for your undergraduate education. There are very good private colleges all across the country. There are a lot of religious institutions, some colleges, it's really varied. You should go out there and see some of our colleges. You'll see a wide variety and quality does vary as well. You're not assured of the same type of syllabus, same type of career opportunities coming out of colleges, and clearly colleges form the huge bulk of the numbers. There are also open universities, but I don't want to talk too much about that, because it's not still totally accepted in mainstream like in the other places. Now, let's talk about how students get into these institutions. This big hierarchy of institutions is spoke about most sought after, most aspirational, and then the colleges where everybody gets in. How do students get into it? How do you get admitted into it? That brings us into this huge problem of admission that we have in this country. Every year, you should just talk to parents and kids who are passing out of class 12. It's stressful situation in the family, everybody gets worked up, lots of things happen. Why is it that does, why does it happen? Why is it that this is a big problem? The first thing is, if you look a little bit closer at our school education, there's a lot of variety there. CBSE is a pretty popular board. It's a great board, it's got good reputation, but only a very small fraction of graduates out of class 12 come from this board. It's got very good reputation. CBSE schools, you can hardly go wrong with the kind of graduates come out of CBSE school. But then a huge majority of our school graduates come out of state schools, various different states, and the variety there again is very, very different. So different schools have different states, have different type of school systems, different syllabi, different emphasis, different exams. It's very, very hard to normalize across them, compare across them. And so what ends up happening is, pretty much any competitive public university, IIT, has to rely on entrance exam. Otherwise it's not legally okay to compare students and admit them using any other means. So we end up using entrance exams as our means. So is that the great thing? It turns out today, entrance exams are a celebrated part of our culture. JEE in particular, which admits students into IITs, is considered one of the most difficult exams in the world. About 1.2 million or so get into the JEE exam every year, less than 20,000 get into the IITs. So it's one of the most selective exams. You should see some of the questions that are asked in the JEE advanced exam. It's a very tough math and science problems at the level of 12 standard. So one can ask a lot of interesting questions. Are these students who are doing tough math and science problems the only type we're going to do well in life? These are all important questions to ask as well. Once the JEE culture has said, this has set the trend for every other entrance exam in the country. We rely on entrance exams so much more and this causes tremendous stress in the families. Now students prepare, they go to some towns, reside there away from their families and prepare for these entrance exams. There are documentaries made on this topic. You should go and watch some of these things. It's really, really hard to watch some of them. And just imagine, if you're not, if you're not in the top 20,000 out of 1.3 million, are you really a failure? I mean, if you end up being 50,000 out of the top 1.2 million, I think you're doing great. You should be celebrated as a great performer but then you declared a failure today in this country and then you go through disappointment cycles which are really, really tough to see. I do see some of these kids, they're really good students, very motivated, very capable, very skilled but then they end up starting their lives and career with the failure based on their foreheads. It's not really very nice. So what ends up happening is the last two points that I put up there. A lot of motivated, capable students, a lot of motivated, capable, good, solid, great students. If you're in the top 1,000,000 out of 1.5 million, you're a great student in my opinion but they end up in places where they're not happy either or there is no good fit. They feel like they've lost out on getting into IIT or they get into a college and they're not doing that great. So what is the solution? In a situation like this where maybe we cannot spend so much more of our GDP into education, we have our own limitations and expenditure, what do we do? How do we solve this problem? What is it that we can do positively to impact the lives of these students who end up in these various institutes and colleges maybe lower than their capability? They're more capable, they're not getting what they want. One solution is to provide access. Now, if you just think of higher education in general, just from a high level, if you want to describe what is the most desirable aspect of higher education, I would put it down to three things. The first is universal access. Anyone who wants higher education desperately should get it, particularly the aspirational folks in the country who really need higher education to get better in life, to get their families out of poverty. Universal access is absolutely important. Happy learners, while they are in college, they should enjoy learning. Learning is something that should be enjoyed and this is something that sits you for life. Once you start enjoying learning, that's a fantastic thing about education. The third thing is skilled graduates. They should get out and get jobs. No point in getting a degree for the sake of having two letters at the end of your name. It should give you skills, it should give you jobs. You should be able to go out into the economy and contribute after that. So if you can do those things, you're doing fantastically well in higher education and today for a large majority of the people that we see, what we need to provide is access in this country at least to the top institutes. Access to top institutes for anyone who's motivated and willing to work hard is a fantastic way of approaching this problem. And both the interventions that I've been part of, the digital technology, online interventions, I want to say online with the personal connect. I'll talk about what that means. Two big projects that I've been part of. The first one is called NPTEL, the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning. The URL is out there for you. The second one is a much more recent one, less than three years old. It's IIT Madras BS degree. Today IIT Madras has opened its doors and it offers a BS degree to those who are motivated and who are willing to work hard. So these two programs, these two projects, provide access to IITs for individual course certificates, access to IITM for an entire degree that you can get today from IITM. And both of these are one awards recently, the QSRI Imagine Education Awards, the Gold for Lifelong Learning, and Silver for Best Online Program. Even before we graduated a single student, we've become a best online program. So that's the awards, the one, I'm really happy to describe both of these programs to you very briefly in the rest of this talk. A couple of things I want to point out, IITM today gives degrees without JEE, you get in, you show, you can perform well, you get a degree. In such a situation when you provide open access, how do you ensure rigor? How do you make sure that the brand is protected? How do you make sure that good skilled graduates come out and go out and get jobs? Those are difficult problems, isn't it? So this is what I'm going to try and focus on in the rest of this talk. So NPTEL is actually a very old project, more than two decades old. It started all the way back in 2003. It's funded completely by the Ministry of Education. I should thank the Ministry of Education for their support over the past two decades. It's a joint project of seven IITs and IASC. So at that time, when this project started, there were only seven IITs, there are 23 IITs today. Seven IITs and IASC, Bangalore participated in this project. For a long time, NPTEL was recording course content that happens in IITs and it put it up on the portal and people were watching. Around 2010, when MOOCs became a big buzzword, NPTEL started doing MOOCs in the Indian context. So in 2014, we started a certification effort and it still carries on. And if you look around the globe, there are various portals out there. NPTEL probably is not the most well known globally. We don't market our name that well. But then if in terms of content, we are really, really, really rich. There's more than 2,500 courses, 60,000 hours of video in engineering, technological, college course, curriculum based content, I can easily say, this is one of the leading portals in the world. You go to any grad school, you see serious graduate learners, they will be looking at NPTEL videos. And this includes countries like the US and Germany and France across the world. High quality learning happens on NPTEL. So let me describe what is this NPTEL's unique way of doing certification with MOOC courses. Like I said, NPTEL opens the doors and provides access to IITs for anyone who's motivated and wants to learn. Open access provided, if you are motivated, if you want to learn, how do we do it? We have a portal, swyam.gov.in, the National MOOCs portal of India, which is again supported by the ministry. So every semester we put up courses there. Anyone across the globe, not just in India, across the globe can simply log in, click on join, you are in the course. Any course you want to learn. In January 23, we have 665 courses upon this portal. Right now, you can go and log in and join any course that you want. Now this runs like a MOOC. There's weekly assignments, forum, live sessions, exciting content, 10 weeks, 12 weeks. It goes on even for a longer time. This runs like a MOOC. But then we don't stop there. After that, you can register for an exam. So there's a small fee for it. Up until now, everything is free. But then after that, you have to pay a small fee. It's just 1000 rupees, about $12, if you want me to convert. So you pay a small fee and then you can show up and write an exam. Now this exam is in centers across the country. Physical centers with proctoring, that's sort of a picture where the exam happens. And if you write that exam in a center and if you pass, you get a certificate. And this certificate comes with the stamp and seal of the IITs and IAC and the top institutes that are running this course. This over the past eight years has become hugely successful and become part of mainstream higher education in the country through important policy measures and a very, very important personal connect program that we have launched. This is an important part. We have been able over the past eight years to mainstream MOOCs in this country. I think very few countries have done this and India has done this successfully through two important measures. The first one is local chapters. Local chapters play a huge role. The colleges I spoke about have a representative who represents NPTEL in those colleges and becomes an ambassador for NPTEL in those colleges, provides that vital last minute personal touch and connect to the students. So local chapters play a huge role in the success of NPTEL and SWIME today. About 90% of exam registrations comes from local chapters. Okay, so that's one connect. It's very important. The next important piece is credit transfer. Today, more than 60, 70% of the learners do our MOOC courses on NPTEL, write the exam, get the certificate, and guess what? Credit gets into their on-campus program. So they don't have to do that course in the campus. They do it online. They get credit for it. So this credit transfer policy along with the local chapter program has been a boon and we've been able to mainstream MOOCs because of this kind of effort. Now a couple of things I want to point out here. The last point is very important. A lot of people talk about effectiveness of MOOCs, how the completion rates are not that high. Look at our completion rates. If you just divide plainly by enrollments, we are at 20%. But enrollment is really a very bad figure to divide by in the denominator because anybody can go click and join. If you just divide by a number of people who submit the first week's assignment, we are at 50% completion rate. So correct policy along with correct implementation with the personal connect can lead to really very impressive completion rates. Now all these numbers are one thing. Let me just show you a few more numbers just to show you the scale at which NPTEL operates. Just July 22, if you look at the disciplines and the number of people who enrolled and the number of people who wrote the exams and the number of people who got certified, it's really mind boggling. Across engineering, humanity, social sciences, management, we have tens of thousands of people, 100,000 people getting certificates every semester. This is the scale at which we're able to operate across the country today. And I have pictures of so many people from different backgrounds, from companies, from small colleges, from IITs, from University of Oklahoma. So people across the world are using this mechanism to better themselves in education. Let me just introduce you to a couple of learners. Two stories, there are so many hundreds of stories. I just had to pick two. The first is Pamir Roy, he's from Arunachal Pradesh, way out there in the northeast. He did a UG in mechanical engineering. During his undergraduate days, he did 15 NPTEL certifications in the domain of AI and data science. And then after that, he did an internship at IITM with a computer science professor. Today, he runs a startup in Bangalore. Look at that story. It's just amazing for someone to be able to do that. And below that is another story of Akhila, who's from a small college in Hyderabad. She did just two NPTEL courses, stopped both of them, got into an internship in IIT Kharagpur. Today, she's a PhD student at IIC Bangalore in computer science. Once again, a wonderful story. There's so many such uplifting stories. I can go on and on and on talking about people who have enjoyed NPTEL. There is an 83-year-old Sanskrit professor in IITM. She comes every semester to write exams and she's learning German now. So there are people who enjoy this program in so many different ways, whether or not it helps in their career or not. So that's NPTEL for you. Let me move on to the second intervention that I wanted to talk about. This is now IIT Madras. IIT Madras today, like I said, offers an undergraduate degree program in data science and applications. It's a large-scale open admissions, but then, of course, we funnel our output in. I'll show you how we do that. And given our experience, rich experience in NPTEL, we've been able to leverage that and go out and offer a degree program today. And really, this is early days. We're just three years into this program. We have not graduated a single person, but then the bus that this program has created is enormous. I just want to talk a little bit more about how that works. So let me just walk you through the program real quick. It's a bit of a dense slide, but it's important to understand. Out of 12th, we have two different pathways for admission. One is through JEE, of course, we'll never give up JEE, but then there's also an inbuilt qualifier exam. You don't have to go to coaching, you don't have to do anything. You can come in, study with us, show that you are motivated, show that you're willing to work hard, show that you can really do well, you can get in, you can qualify within the program. That's very important. And then we break up the program into three different levels. We just don't throw everything at them in the beginning. We have a foundation level which brings up the basics for everybody. Like I said, it's open admissions, but then we want to funnel slowly down so that only the really skilled graduates are going to go out with a degree program. You do foundations first. If you're happy with foundations, that's good enough for you. You can exit with a certificate. Nobody's going to stop you. There is an intermediate exit that's available. On the other hand, if you feel strong enough at the end of the foundation level, you can continue on to diploma. And diploma is where you really, really pick up the skills that are needed. So you can see how the education varies here. It's not like a typical undergraduate degree where you do your basics in the first and second year and then you start building up your skills later on. We give you the skills early. And data science is an area where you can do skills early. And then what this gives people is, if you are in financial need, you have to pick up the skills and quickly get a job, you can do that. Right after your diploma and programming, there are so many IT jobs that are available to you. Your diploma and data science, so many data science jobs that are available to you. So you build up the degree in a slightly different way and put skills before theory. A lot of interesting, exciting things becomes possible. So that's the diploma stage. At this point, you can exit with a diploma if you choose. On the other hand, if you choose to continue, if you do well enough, you choose to continue. There are two degree levels. You can earn a BSE degree. You can earn a four-year BS degree today from IIT in this mode. A lot of interesting features. First of all, these are Senate approved, valid legal degrees from IIT Madras. And at the end, you become an alum of IIT. So IIT is willing to put its name and brand behind this program. So this is not an easy program. Let me also say that. It's a tough program. We're not gonna make it easy for you. A lot of people think online equals easy. This is not easy. You should talk to some of our students. They'll tell you. But then, it is prestigious. We wanna make it prestigious. We wanna make sure that we give access and we add prestige to this degree as well. A lot of things that are important, unlimited seats. Nobody hears this in this country, I can tell you, unlimited seats. There's no seat limitation. You qualify, you get in, you're in. No problem. Look at the fee. The overall degree fee is less than $5,000. How is that possible? That's possible by online instruction. You can't avoid it. You wanna put up a big campus. You wanna have a fantastic place. Costs are going to go to $50,000, $100,000. And that's not really affordable. But $5,000, look at that. You can give a complete degree at that point. We don't leave the students alone. Online means that you leave the students alone. No, we invest in teaching faculty, instructors, mentors, who support these students extensively every week. Every class we teach, every term, there are eight hours of live sessions that happen every week. So that kind of involvement is there. Engagement is there. We make sure students stay connected. All exams are in person. Every month, you have to go to a center near your house and write an exam in person. So the rigor is there. Engagement is there. High quality content is there. Prestige is there at the end of this degree. And this is without GE. Today, IITM offers this degree. How well are we doing? Here are numbers just to show you what has happened. I want to remind you, we just started in Jan 2021. We are yet to graduate at full degree holder. People are making their way through the program. Like I said, foundation, diploma, degrees, a lot of levels, they're making their way. Let me show you how the funneling is sort of working. So we have had so far about 100,000 applications, 93,000 applications. And the number of people who qualified is about 24,000, about 1 fourth. Already there is that funneling that's slowly happening. The qualification is 1 fourth. And then out of that, about 20,000 started. Out of that, 17,000 are active today. After nearly three years, look at the retention of an online program. This doesn't happen easily. And we've made it happen. We've made it happen through engagement, involvement with our students. And look at the diversity. We're quite happy about the diversity. Maybe the female part can be a little bit higher. But then overall, age wise, employment wise, area wise, diverse, not that international yet, but fairly international. I want to show you the CGPA distribution. GPA distribution is important. It pretty much looks like a non-campus program if you look at GPA distribution. It's not easy to get high grades in our program. And you have to really work hard to make sure that you stay on. And so many thousands of people are able to work hard and stay on. And here is a little bit of a snapshot how students are progressing and the map across the country to show you people across the country are interested in this program. In fact, Bihar, you look at the density in Bihar. That's a bit rare to get into Bihar with a degree like this. We don't shortchange students on student life. This is an undergraduate program. We take student life very seriously. We put them into houses, groups, competitions, lot of online events. There's also an on-campus cultural, social, sports event which we call Paradox. Students came up with this name Paradox. It's an online program, offline event. It's a Paradox. So you should call it Paradox. Every year, thousands of students come into our country. You see a big picture, not country, and then to our campus and have a big celebration of this program. You see that big picture with that director. I don't know if you can see our director there. There's lots of students surrounding him. They come here. We have a huge celebration in May in case you want to drop by. Please let me know. I'm happy to invite you. This is a fantastic event to be a part of and see our students. So we celebrate this program as much as possible. Couple of BS learners I want you to meet. One is Viraj Sharma. He's from Jaipur, Rajasthan. Very ordinary family. He supports himself through his own work. And he tried for JEE. He couldn't afford it after a while. He dropped it. And then he ended up doing BSE math in a local college there. Today he's in our program. He's finished. He's about to finish both diplomas. He has a CGPA of 9.9. Just look at the talent there, right? And look at how the JEE system and the way the entrance works is simply not going to find this. Okay, so we're able to find today. Here's another example, a completely different type of person. Sunita Nair, she was a mechanical engineer working for a long time. Then she took a career break for whatever family reason. And after five years, she comes out and sees the world is different today. She took up our program, studied in our program, came up to a diploma. Today she's employed as a value engineer in a pretty big company. Again, a fantastic success story. I can show you stories like this that you won't believe. People from rural parts of UP who couldn't even dream of writing JEE, preparing for JEE today in our program. And you should meet some of these students. One of the most inspiring stories you'll ever see are there in our students. Again, I can go on. This slide can go on and on forever. And this is a fantastic testament of how IITM is able to reach all these things. So let me conclude. First thing I want to say is huge thanks to our team. There's a big team across IITs and in IIT Madras, faculty and staff who support this program, support from MOE. After support, the Ministry of Education has been steadfast with us over the past two and a half decades, supporting us through every single one of our efforts. They have to thank them. Of course, I have to thank IIT Madras and its administration for fantastic support. Let me just conclude with some thoughts. I think if more top institutions, more top institutions across the world, across the country, join us in this initiative. We are happy to help. We're happy to tell you what is it that we have learned? What are the tools and techniques we use for engagement, learning, how to reach out? This can provide the three cardinal objectives of higher education. Universal access, happy learners, skilled graduates. Thank you very much for this opportunity.