 First of all a warm welcome. I'll very briefly recall the activities that have happened in last one year in the context of these FDPs. As you know we are very keen to run these faculty development programs but unfortunately at the beginning of last year we had absolutely no funds. We had lots of problems but we were very keen to run these FDPs because we realized that the understanding amongst our faculty colleagues across the country about the nature of online activities that are happening and about how to use these effectively in their own educational processes, this understanding was very, very significantly lacking for no fault of our teachers because they had never been exposed to this kind of teaching learning process earlier. So when we designed these FDPs we wrote to AICT and AICT said yes we should run these primarily in an online mode but we suggested that just as normal education need to change to a proper blended mode or a hybrid mode we would like to conduct these accordingly. And they said yes. They approved it. Simultaneously they sent a letter saying we can't fund it. Now there are funds required to conduct anything. That is when through the office of our dean, alumni and corporate relationship we tied up with SAP and SAP came forward to sponsor the creation and conduct of these two MOOCs to take care of expenses that we would be spending in IIT Bombay itself. But as you know when we conduct any blended mode operation in any FDP there is an online component and there is a face to face component for which we desperately needed the support from our remote centers. The remote centers were agreeable but they had to be funded to the extent that the support will be extended to us or given to us. That is when we decided that we will run these FDPs as self-financed programs. So no TADA will be paid to participants. Participants will have to assemble at the remote centers at their own cost. They have to pay for their own food and additionally they have to pay 1000 rupees to each remote center for the local facility. Many of my colleagues were very skeptical. They said IIT Bombay has been running these faculty development programs or the workshops as you call them with complete funding from the government and therefore the entire teaching community in the country has got used to getting funded for their learning and therefore not many people will come forward to spend money from their own pockets. I felt otherwise because the previous surveys had indicated that our teacher colleagues if they see a value in some activity they are willing to spend money from their own pockets. And that is why I bravely announced these FDPs and I think teachers in this country created a sort of history when more than 4000 people enrolled for this workshop. This was found to be almost unbelievable by many of my colleagues that 4000 teachers across the country are willing to spend money from their own pockets because they believe that they will learn something useful. Of course I am aware of several remote centers where as an incentive for their own teachers they did not collect 1000 rupees from the teachers belonging to their own institute. It's a bit of a cheating but still forget the money part. People did spend their time which is far more important and valuable than money in order to attain this. At that time we had announced that the top performers in this FDP will be given an incentive cash award in recognition of their top performance and additionally they will be given an option to work as associate faculty for future FDPs. I think I had mentioned this in one of the communications that AICT wants us to train more than 3 lakh teachers teaching in all professional institutions not just engineering, policy techniques, management, architecture, pharmacy, everywhere and that's a very large task. Of course the government or AICT won't be able to fund this magnitude of training particularly when it has to be done very quickly in less than 2 years time or 3 years time. But we realize that if we have to scale up we will have to build an infrastructure similar to remote center infrastructure that we have built over the last 3 years. All our partners remote centers are actually facilitators in conducting all the past workshops. But now we will have to go beyond the local expertise available in the remote centers alone. We will need associate faculty who can act as mentors, who can act as facilitators for a group of teachers who will participate in our future FDPs. And it is in that context we have said whether people would be willing to be our associate faculty. I am very happy to announce that not only all top performers who come here agreed but there are a large number of other faculty members also who did not let's say perform well in terms of the assessment metric that we had defined. After all you would know many students in your classes who are extremely creative, very talented and very committed and yet do not score 99 out of 100 in their academic exams. So that happens with all people. But the intent was very much there. There are a large number of people who are interested. Of course we have to apply some yardstick and most unfortunately the only yardstick available is the performance in some common assessment conducted across the country. That is acceptable. That is not necessarily the right way but that is acceptable. And that is the reason why we also have gone with the same kind of assessment. AICD chairman himself was very appreciative of the fact that more than 4000 teachers participated. You will realize that we had originally said that we will be conducting two FDPs but we combined them for the purpose of logistics because registration for another FDP, etc. So we had announced two FDPs actually. We had given some tentative contents in terms of four modules and that is how AICD had approved them. But we combined both of them and we ran a rather long course of activity. As you know the thumb rule that we have followed is that in any faculty development program or workshop which is let's say a two weeks duration workshop would have one week equivalent of online work and one week of face-to-face activity followed by a team work or team submission that is to be done by the team. But when you combine these two you suddenly have four weeks out of week at least two weeks have to be online. We tried to reduce the face-to-face interaction and we tried to put it in three weekends. I do not know whether it was good or bad. We will be collecting feedback from you so we will know exactly what the opinion of the people is. But there is no doubt in my mind that some face-to-face interaction and it is not necessarily face-to-face interaction with the faculty members at IIT but face-to-face interaction among themselves as a group which is very vital for taking our discussion forward. So that is how we had planned it. Several people gave up on the way because they found the rigor to be too much. There were assessments. After all when we participate in any workshop where a faculty development workshop where we have to learn something then we are students and if we are students we have to be assessed and online activities the assessment is weekly. So every week you have to keep participating and then you get scores. Now depending upon how tough that week has been for any individual participant the nature of the score would depend upon the busyness or otherwise of that faculty member during that week. Technically it should not be impossible for the faculty member participating to find one day equivalent of work to be done over one week. After all I have a choice. I can do that work on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, nights, evenings etc. But this is all hypothetically true. In practice whenever I have to complete an online assignment where nobody is watching, nobody is telling me anything the priority for that activity will be the last. Tomorrow I have to give a lecture, I have to prepare for it, that is top priority. My wife or husband asks me to do something immediately, that is top priority. My cousin descends in my house suddenly from some other place for two days and I have to spend time with that cousin, that is top priority. So everything that we do on a day to day basis becomes top priority because that is tactically important. Anything that is strategically important is always relegated to low priority. It will be done later and therefore we found that many teachers were not able to complete their weekly assignments or did a very shoddy job even in simple assignments where it was very clear that had they spent some time they would have done well. But these are the vagaries of life, that is how life is. And that is how we need to adjust to the life and that is how we need to advise our colleague teachers to adjust. That no matter what, if there is a weekly assignment it is not to be done on the last day of submission but it is preferable to be done on the first day of announcement. Possibly on the second day, possibly on the third day and the last day is only left in case of emergency. Very curiously and this is not an observation only for the online activities of these FDPs but also online activities everywhere in the world. While a quiz is announced and some 8 days or 15 days are given sometimes 3 days are given, the largest number of submissions are always on the last day. So whether it is 3 days, it will be on the third day. 1 week, it will be the last day of the week. 2 weeks, it will be the last day of the 2 weeks. We are all human beings. Frankly we have no solution to this except the self-discipline which will evolve only over time. But the fact is that the quality suffers if we relegate something to the last moment whereas if we spend some time earlier then we have time to think about it again modify it, update it and make it better. Many of you have done that but I have seen many of you have also fallen to this compulsion of life to do certain things only at the last moment. Well, the fact that in spite of doing it at the last moment you have done well speaks volumes but that if all 350,000 teachers across the country in technical professional teaching start doing it, we have a problem. All right. Now going forward, how do we conduct these FDPs? Let me tell you there are two objectives of calling all of you here. First and foremost, we want to felicitate you. We want to acknowledge what you have done is extraordinary. To be top performers among the very large number of 4000 people is not very easy. Like others, you also would have had problems, issues and urgent things to be done all through those 10-12 weeks of activities and in spite of that you have applied yourselves and done well. Just like in any performance gradation if I score let's say 88% marks I become a topper but a colleague of mine who scores 87% marks is nobody. We all know it is not true. We all know that there may be a gradation but there are practically a very, very large number of people. In fact a total of 2100 odd people qualified in this FDP, I think they have been certified. There was a very sad occurrence when one of my TAs noticed that a submission made by a participant is actually a great similar copy of some other submission that has been made in plain words called plagiarism. All of you would be aware of the fact that I wrote a special letter to all of you. There was actually a trick which I have successfully used in teaching large classes here in IIT namely that you ask people to admit and if they admit then you pardon them. But otherwise believe me we would have had no choice but to report the matter to heads of the institutions and to IIT. So what I said there was perfectly correct and that is what we would have done had people not admitted. There were of course other interesting channels of determining that there was some copying going on. I remember one person who was doing peer assessment. You are all familiar with peer assessment. She will actually be doing that as an exercise in the afternoon today. So this fellow writes an angry mail that I was given a randomly selected assignment for peer assessment and when I opened it I found it was my own assignment. How can my assignment be submitted by someone else unless I have shared that assignment with that someone else or I have shared it with someone or I have been careless in keeping that copy of the assignment on my PC which 20 other people can access and copy it. So you see plagiarism is not a one-way street. There are two parties required one who assists and one who gets assisted. I think both are equally at fault. This is something which we don't tend to emphasize but we need to. We did that. I am both sad and happy to say that more than 220 participants admitted that they have copied various assignments for whatever reason. Sad because they should not have happened. We are teachers. Happy because they had the courage in God's to say yes we made that mistake. More importantly I have said that while they will not get any certification but if they wish they can continue to benefit from the FDP. A large majority of them continue to work. A large majority of them continued to submit subsequent assignments from which they were not debauched. When I mentioned this to Chairman AICT he brought in a completely different element of thinking which I appreciated. Let me share that with you. He says Prashant Patak we as teachers know how difficult it is for any human being to admit that I have copied. I said yes I know how difficult it is because I deal with students every now and then and here is the case with you. Then he says that people who have copied will get punished and they will disassociate themselves with that activity because they know there is no point. They have been punished. They have been recognized as copiers so there is no value. But he says but you are telling me that majority of these people are still continuing. In spite of the fact that we have said we will not give them any certificate. Should we not acknowledge the guts of such people? Should we not acknowledge the spirit of such people? So I was amused. I said in which way? Because any acknowledgement will run contrary to the fact that we consider these activities to be absolute academic criminal sin. See see yes but if people have admitted have shown the guts and are willing to improve why not we give them a chance to improve. He suggested a mechanism which we later on adopted. The mechanism was that do not count the score for the particular assignment which somebody has copied. Although they were all required to resubmit that copied assignment no credit to be given. From the remaining assessment marks find out whether the participant scores adequately to get a certificate. And if he or she does acknowledge that and issue that certificate. You would all agree that this is a nice gesture because we believe that all of us make mistakes but each one of us can change. And if given an opportunity to change an opportunity with dignity I would perhaps work harder in my rest of my life never to repeat that mistake. We did that I will not reveal the number but a substantial number of these 200 people who were tempted to submit a copied assignment. Change themselves improve themselves and work so hard and they did not know that this recognition will come their way. Because this no announcement was made to that but only towards the end we compiled all their scores. And I think a fairly large number has been certified of such people. They are not here amongst us. In fact we don't even know what their identities are. Maybe there are one or two here but we don't care. But I think just as I am acknowledging all of you today for performing extremely well we must equally acknowledge the spirit of those people as well. Because they have had the guts to admit that they made a mistake. They have had the spirit to change and they had the understanding that they will benefit if they continue to work with us. I do not know how to get this spirit across first to large number of our teaching faculty colleagues and next to all our students. Please understand that whatever we are doing is with the sole objective to improve the learning outcome of our students. That is the objective. We try our conventional methods which don't seem to work very effectively so we are trying something new. But in this process whatever learning that we get from participating in such FDPs we have to find out a mechanism to translate these learnings into our teaching processes so that our students will benefit. So this is the context. The future FDPs will be run as partially self-financed FDPs. We will be running these FDPs as two separate FDPs now because a four week FDP spread over 12 to 14 weeks is too long a period. So therefore we will be running the first FDP which is the foundation course, foundation of ICT in education. I had given you the component modules. We have substantially updated them. The updated modules for both FDP 1 and FDP 2 will be circulated after the tea break and we will be discussing specific activities in the context of those modules. The point is the conduct of these FDPs now will be as I said two separate FDPs. So each FDP will be equivalent of a two week FDP. It will no more be run under IST that we have run our workshops in. These will be FDPs directly approved by ICT. Now there has been a strong suggestion to try and see if these FDPs can run purely as MOOCs, purely as online courses. My own instinct says that that's not a very good idea. An interaction of some kind is very, very useful. We have found it time and again. Of course if we have to do some activity purely online there are mechanisms to incorporate interaction even in the online activity. So what kind of interaction comes to your mind if it is a pure online activity all of you have participated in our IIT Bombay X or Moodle thing. So discussion forum is one thing for example. What we are trying to do now is we are trying to refashion the AVU which we have been using for audio visual interaction with remote centers. And we know perfectly well that we can interact comfortably with about 200 remote centers. We are now trying to see whether we can use this AVU tool which is also an open source tool in a much wider context. So consider the following. Suppose I am one of you an associate faculty member and I am sitting somewhere in Tumkur or Jharsukura some place where I serve. I am in that institution which is not a remote center. Now suppose in the new methodology of the FDP we said that participants can come from any place they don't have to travel to a so-called remote center. Wherever they are that is the remote center. The only condition we put is that a single individual will not constitute a remote center. They must make groups just as the groups which will have to work for a team assignment later. So they must make groups of 5 to 7 people in whichever city they are. Do you think this is feasible? They could be from the same college or there could be two from one college, two from a neighboring college. And they could come together for the purpose of interaction. They don't have to travel to any remote center. So wherever they are, suppose that group now sits in let's say a town called Devas in Madhya Pradesh. They become a remote center. So there are 5 people. They sit around a PC. All that we require is that the PC should have speakers, audio-visual facilities and an internet connection. Hopefully their own institution where they teach will provide them with this facility. If not any one of the teachers who has the internet connectivity can do that. What will these 5 teachers do when they come together? They are now ready to interact using AVU. AVU client software can be downloaded by any one of us by the way. In order to connect it with some other AVU center, you need the back-end servers and other things which are established currently at IIT Bombay. Now what we propose to do is as follows. Any one of you associate faculty members, wherever you are, we say you now are the hub like IIT Bombay, you are the hub. And you will connect to some 20 such remote centers, artificial remote centers. Meaning you will connect to 20 such groups. Each group is about 4, 5, 6, 7 people. So about 100, 120 people you can connect to. In short we will make you the hub of AVU and we will make these 100 people the remote centers, 20 remote centers from which they can see you, they can talk to you, they can hear you. You can talk to them, you can hear them, you can see them. Exactly like what we do using TechMawa. If this approach succeeds, then we don't have to depend upon the remote centers for the consolidated activities in every aspect of AVU. And therefore the face-to-face interaction can now be broken into multiple parts. Much of it can happen from wherever the group of faculty members are. How will these people connect? There is a logistics involved. Every associate faculty will be given a choice of slots. Because you still need the back-end server, you see. In your own place you will not be able to set up the entire server. By the way, any hub that is any one of you dealing with these 20 associate groups will require a bandwidth equal to the sigma of all 20 bandwidths. Now how each one of you can produce 80 Mbps or 100 Mbps bandwidth? That we will provide. So effectively all of you are connected to IIT Bombay. But we will hand over to each one of you the role of a teacher. So you become a teacher's note. You may have only 4 Mbps bandwidth that is good. And then you will interact with all these 20 groups. Now let's say 20 groups interact with one associate faculty from 3.30 to 4.30 on a Friday. From 4.30 or 5 to 6, another group can interact with somebody else. Morning 10 to 11, some other group can interact. Is it not possible to set aside just 2 slots in a week for such interaction one hour each? The choice that is still a synchronous activity that means these 20 select groups and the associate faculty must agree on a common slot. So you will give choices of slots. The first priority will be for the associate faculty to find out when that person is free. And then we will say this is the slot on which a view interaction will happen. The view interaction is mandatory because that is the face-to-face part. And therefore that attendance will have to be certified etc. etc. and the whole lot of logistics. For example, I am part of the group in one town and I have a friend visiting my home exactly during the slot in which I am supposed to be. And he is my group coordinator of these 5 people. So I say, you talk, I will come tomorrow. You brief me tomorrow. So I won't be present there. But this is like a class. I have to attend. Even if I have a friend, I have to tell the friend that look I have a class, I have an engagement and therefore I won't be able to miss it. So we will have umpteen logistics problems of attendance, absenteeism, reasons given, excuses given, all kinds of things. And we will have to work out through that just as we work through similar problems in our classes. But that's a smaller issue. We need to test the efficacy of this. This A-view has never been tested like this. Tomorrow we have a special session. My colleague Mr. Sajjan Dixitu is the senior manager in charge of audio video. Oh, today is it? In the afternoon. Yeah. So he will explain to you how this A-view setup has to be used by you. We'll of course have afterwards some sessions where we'll experiment. We'll see how it works and so on. And Amruta has assured us that they will give additional inputs if required and modifications if required. So I'm very clear that we'll be able to do that. Now out of the two FDPs, the first FDP, which is what we call the foundation course. This is actually, as I said, we have modified some of the modules. We have removed the emphasis, for example, on devices for information, representation and storage. But we are saying information, representation and storage is the more important point, devices are seconded. There are small but important changes which have been made. As I said, we'll circulate the detailed module list which is updated and that is what we'll be sending to AIC. The second FDP, of course, is the pedagogy module, which is... Now you will agree that when we discuss the pedagogy, which is online and blended teaching learning, that is where the human interaction is most required. That is where the group activities are most required. Our current thinking is that as far as the second FDP is concerned, we will conduct it at remote centers. As far as the first FDP is concerned, we believe that it can be largely conducted purely in an online method. It is possible to assess whether people have understood the basics of ICT or not. You have all undergone this course. So you know that the assessment is possible to be done if necessary through peer assessment or whichever way. You see, any activity of teaching learning will benefit from synchronous human interaction. There is no doubt about it. But if we have to choose, then it appears to me that the first FDP is largely doable online. Whereas the second FDP will necessarily require human interaction and group interaction. Recently, by the way, I digress, but I must tell you that last time we had this funding problem as I mentioned. But as we rolled out the FDP and when the news reached out to the ministry that 4000 teachers have come forward, and there is another person whom I call a Miracle Man who became in charge of the NME ICT projects when Mr. Subramaniam, the additional secretary, who saw the value of the work that was being done here and he immediately released funds. Last December, they released even another tranchef funds. So suddenly we have now funds and that is how we have been able to conduct some other workshops and so on. But going forward, the ministry has said that they will extend the projects by one more year without any additional sanction. We have almost 80 crore still saved. They have not released them. Of course, they won't release 80 crores, but what they have said is that if you want to run online FDPs or online and blended FDPs, then some support can be given by the ministry. For one year, we shall be able to run five to six such workshops, three of the first kind and three of the second kind. AICT, on the other hand, is very firm on the fact that there shall be no free lunch for participants. Participants have to be willing to shell out some money. There will be nothing free because free is not valid. Tentatively, we have said that the fees for the FDP will be now about, I think, 1,440 or something. 1,400 or 1,450. In future FDPs, these fees will be charged by IIT Bombay. So there is nothing hypothetical about these charges. It is not that my remote center will say, you are my own teacher, you don't have to pay 1,000 rupees to me, come and attend. That option will not be available. That money will have to be paid because this is what AICT believes will guarantee people's interest when they spend money from their own pocket. That's the reasoning. We also appreciate that because nothing free makes sense. We are not very sure whether people will still attend in large numbers. There is a positive side to the funding now because MHRD is likely to release the funding and we will know that only in the month of May or June. The happier side is that for the second FDP particularly and if required even for the first FDP where we have to depend upon the remote centers and we have to force participants to come to remote centers, their travel, their food and the remote center costs will be funded by the MHRD funds. That will happen only at most for three such FDP. Subsequently, if there is no funding, people will have to fund their own thing. My first feedback that I wish to have from all of you is, do you think this model is feasible? And do you think people will not mind paying 1,400 rupees to participate in this FDP? And later on from 2018 onwards, if there is no government funding, people will not mind spending their own money to come and attend these interactions. For first FDP, we will make sure that very little movement is required for teachers using the model that I suggested, that people can interact. They have to interact. There is a fixed duration for which they will have to interact but that can be done from their own place. So they don't have to travel and therefore there is no cost involved in travel, stay, food etc. etc. They operate from wherever they are. The second FDP which will require definite proximity of a group of people at a remote center, there will be some cost involved. Tomorrow when heads of the institutions come, amongst other questions I will be asking them this, that whether they as a representative group of heads of institutions all across the country would be willing to support the teacher's participation in such FDP. The initial feedback that I have got informally suggests that a very large number of institution leaders are willing to take care of these expenses if they are not very large for supporting them. It is quite possible that either the ministry or AICT will make participation in these FDPs obligatory for every teacher. And that is because there is a clear understanding in the council as well as in the country that there is no denying the fact that online activity will be increasingly become more important for both us and our students. And therefore understanding how to handle that online activity has to be there in all of our teachers. In fact although I digress but it is important for you to know that when these FDP news leaked out last year I was approached by two completely different segments. One is the skill council. So they said this blended MOOCs idea we like. So can you design MOOCs for skilling? And in the context of the face-to-face interaction they say instead of your face-to-face interaction where you have labs and tutorials, we will have actually hands-on experience and mentoring by a worksman who is working with those interns or whatever on a shop floor everywhere. So we are actually working towards that. The second segment was high school education. A large number of people including an NCRT, CBSE, they believe that what is useful for teachers of professional colleges and institutions is useful for 10th, 11th, 12th standard teachers as well who are trying to teach science, maths or for that matter any other course. Why not those students and those teachers should also benefit. So before I realized what was happening I suddenly have the humongous task of possibly training about a cruel teachers across the country. That is even I can't, I mean I am supposed to be a big dreamer but I can't fathom the logistics that is required. Why I mention this is you people actually are now going to be the kernel of the future history that will get written. I have no doubt that lakhs and lakhs of teachers and crores of students subsequently will have to be benefiting from whatever we are doing. But the basics of what is right, what is wrong, what works, what does not work will require a lot of experimentation. It is not that we all know how exactly to do these things. This pedagogy is still evolving, technology is still evolving. But these 250 odd teachers or prospective associate faculty will help IIT Bombay, will help the country to achieve this. In that sense I think your role will be important. I do hope that your role as possible associate faculty members for future FDPs is not limited to just one or two FDPs. And that brings me to the second question which needs to be raised with heads of your institutions. You attend an FDP, that's a professional requirement, that is fine. Institute may sponsor you to do that, FDP may fund you, that is a different story. But now you go back and say, suppose I am your head of the institution. You come and say, Professor Fatak, this IIT Bombay is running these FDPs and they have invited me to work as associate faculty. So can I participate? I will say that's a good recognition. But don't forget to add the name of our institution also along with your name. Then I will ask, by the way, I hope you will be able to do all that while taking complete care of your normal load. And I will say, of course I will try to, but would you not recognize my work as work done in this institute? No, no, no, how can I? You are working for other people in the country. You are being paid salary to work for our students here. You are being paid salary to contribute to the institution. You are not paid salary to contribute to somebody sitting somewhere else. How can I recognize that? Well, you are enthusiastic, go ahead and do that, but don't expect me to recognize. And in fact, now that you are telling me that you will be spending so many hours per week doing that activity, I will watch you very carefully, whether you work properly or not. Don't you think that will be my reaction as head of the institution? If this is the reaction, then how will we sustain our enthusiasm? All of you are very keen to work, so you will work for maybe one FDP. Some head of the institution like me says, please be careful. Last time you did not come for that important meeting, because you said Friday afternoon is a slot when I have to interact with some 20 jokers elsewhere in the country. That is not all. You must attend faculty meetings here. In spite of that, you will say, you will do it for the second time. Can you do it for the third time, fourth time, fifth time, eighth time? Not possible. We have seen this problem in every major institution of the world, including in IIT Bombay. We have a large number of faculty members who have been participating in these FDP. We do recognize their contribution by giving them an honour. But let me tell you very proudly that not a single teacher in this institute has ever asked me of whether any honour will be paid for this activity or not. They work out of sheer interest and enthusiasm. But go to their department. Their own department head is not convinced. So if my colleague, Professor Gayathonde, has to teach thermodynamics again second time, third time, the only thing he says is, don't ask me to be co-ordinated, let Professor Bandarkar or Professor Millinder be co-ordinated. But this trial has been conducting these courses. Professor Gayathonde was telling me that in a faculty meeting, when the course allocation is to be done, you know, all of us have a teaching law, that is decided in a faculty meeting where we'll give our choices. And he says, one of us tried to say we are also doing the MOOCs courses for IIT Bombay. They had immediately said, what does that do with the department loading? So you see, the departments in IIT Bombay, the institution itself, has no mechanism as yet to recognize contributions done by the faculty for such activity. Now if that is the case in IIT Bombay, why should the case be different in any institution? What should be the solution? Any suggestions on that? It cannot be evolved bottom up because we don't control the organization. But what can happen? What can be done from top down? I have had some suggestions. I have suggested to AICT and to UGC that they should advise all universities, all colleges, and a majority should advise all IITs and NITs, that as a part of the normal academic load of a teacher, this activity should also be counted. But you know how difficult it is to change laws. Adarkar happened decades ago. Laws came just now. Till such time that laws and rules are changed properly to acknowledge such activity as part and parcel of our activity, we will have to carry on with our enthusiasm. The moral of this long speech is that there are hard times ahead, better times will come. But while waiting for the better times, we must not let our enthusiasm win. And we have to carry on just because of that large dream and our ability to contribute. But this point is well recognized and this will be hotly debated. In my own department of computer science I have suggested, suggested to IIT Delhi director, many other people, that we find out how many faculty members are required, what you call the sanction strength, based on the perceived student-teacher ratio or whatever, and in IIT system the amount of research work to be done. In my department of computer science, we have a close to about 45 faculty members. This is the largest department. We are very proud of it because after all, if 44 out of the top 50 all India rankers join my department, we must have done something useful. What I have said is that instead of targeting for 50 faculty members, we should target for 70 faculty members. Instead of counting faculty members as required for conducting your normal courses, you must count an additional 10% faculty members who will contribute to the national efforts. And that is to be factored as their law. It does not mean that every teacher must participate in outreach work. But it could be that 10% of the teachers are doing only outreach work and yet are recognized in their own institution. Hopefully this will happen someday. But this shall be our endeavor. I thought I will share that with you and we will see at all levels how to actually get this thing. What I have found is that a large number of leaders and administrators who recognize the value, they don't make rules but they permit participation as has been happening in IIT Bombay. And departments without changing their rules are implicitly very supportive. For example, last year in the first semester, I was not given any course by the department and it was officially recorded national MOOCs activities. I am very thankful to my head and my department policy committee which allocates courses because otherwise every one of us has to teach a course. I am teaching a course this semester but I did not have to teach last. Would this happen everywhere? Would this happen in your institutions? Perhaps we will have to inform the heads of the institutions to be a bit more considerate for a few years or till such time that actual rules are made like. Government institutions may be willing to do so and may be able to do so because they are funded by the government. When I say government, I mean institutions which are funded by the government. But if I am a private funded institution where my students are paying fees for me to run this institute, they are not paying fees so that my teacher can teach someone else in Jharsupada. How would you justify that? These are not easy question strengths and they will demand a different answer. We will find that out. Till such time we will carry on with the as I said enthusiasm and with some funding support that comes primarily for recognizing the individuals who participate as associate faculty and possibly their institutions where they work because indirectly their institution is also supporting. We have not yet worked out any details. We will be doing that in the month of April when we announce these courses. The first FDP is likely to run in May and June. That is the two months period. The second FDP will start immediately thereafter. But if we have to run multiple FDPs, the concept of running these FDPs in summer and winter vacation is no more relevant. In fact, we will all agree that we used to run these workshops in summer and winter months because that was the only time faculty members could physically go to a remote center to attend activities. So there will be some questions that we will raise today and tomorrow to get a feedback on what because you represent a micro cosmos of the whole country. You come from all over the different places. So you would know what works best for your colleague teachers in your city or in neighboring colleges or in your own college. What days are more suitable, what weeks are more suitable, what months are more suitable, etc. But fact of life is that if we are going to run an online activity we will run it like the MOOCs and one day activity to be completed in one week is roughly the charter that we will maintain. You all agree that that is a reasonable workflow? About eight hours of work I should be able to do in a week. That is what you are expected to do even if you are doing a regular MOOCs course in Corsair or EDX or wherever and that is the kind of activity that we will expect people to do.