 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of NPTEL, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the principals, the SPOCs, the mentors, IIT directors, all the IITM faculty here, my colleagues, friends, and all the other representatives from various colleges who have gathered here. Good morning, sir. As we know, due to the incessant rains in Chennai, we had to reschedule this event today. We are indeed very grateful to all of you who have accepted our invitation and found time and installed your busy schedules to attend this event. We also appreciate the wonderful efforts put in by all the principals, the SPOCs, the mentors of each college for joining hands with us and making NPTEL locals chapter such a huge success. You are our strength. Local chapter is our pilot initiative. And we are very excited to say that we now have 150-plus local chapters. More than 15 exam cities were included on request from SPOCs. And we have also given out 3,500-plus scholarships to students so far. Some of the colleges who have represented today include Anni Velankani College of Engineering, Dronajaya College of Engineering, Dronajaya Group of Institutions, Pula Reddy Engineering College, KS Rangasamy College of Technology, Kallasindilam University, Kamaraj College, NEC Kovilpatti, Pani Malar Engineering College, Pani Malar Institute of Technology, Prathisha Institute of Technology, Priyadarshili Engineering College, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Sausury Academy of Engineering, Savitha Engineering College, Setu Institute of Technology, Srimathi Kamala and Sri Venkappa Agadhi College of Engineering, Sri Shasta Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sri Sharda College of Women, Sri Vasavi College, SSM Institute of Technology, Thiyagaraja Polytechnic College, SRM, Kattambulathur, VHSM College and Vallyamma Engineering College. This is from all over Tamil Nadu, UP, Delhi, Karnul, et cetera. Now speaking of NPTEL online courses, we are happy to share that from the time we initiated these courses till now. We have tripled the number of courses that we have run. Also, we have tripled the number of student registrations. None of this could have happened without your help. So I want to say a big thank you to all of you. And we hope to continue this work with you and ensure that online education reaches every student and every individual who has a thirst for knowledge. Thank you. I would like to invite Professor Mangusundar to welcome him. Good morning. Professor Bhaskar Dalmurti, the director of the 80 Midrass and also chairman of the National Program Implementation Committee of NPTEL. Professor Andrew, Professor Pradap, who are the next co-ordinators for several years of NPTEL and I hope that they will take it through this and many, many other initiatives of NPTEL. My faculty colleagues from several departments here and the faculty and principal and administrative staff from all the institutions who are adopting NPTEL in one form or the other to improve their own educational needs as well as to tell us how to create better and more directly useful learning materials for the students. The entire NPTEL staff team led by three or four people to start with Mr. Fernand, Krishnamurti, Bhakti, and Bhatta and of course Kamala who was here and all the other staff members. So it is my pleasure to welcome you all as an outgoing NPTEL co-ordinator. I've been associated with this project for the last 12 years from the beginning but I'm extremely happy that the next team of colleagues and interactive groups like yours is following so much more directly and in the future we have very, very pleasant online learning as well as offline learning. Online learning is only for a short period. It's an event and we follow the model of groups. So it is my pleasure on behalf of the entire NPTEL team and to the chairman of the NPTEL to welcome you to this one-day event which will help us to interact with you face-to-face and also solve some of the issues which have surfaced in the last several months to a year in interacting with colleagues. NPTEL is offered unconditionally as you know but of course its certificate is a service and therefore it does cost the process if we have to make the certificate a factor of form. This follows very closely the massive open online course format except for the certification part which is factored seriously by the NPTEL body because this was discussed several times in our TIC and the chairman was kind enough to allow this process of factoring with a private body which had run the other examination but we hope that the certificate that is generated is also very credible besides all the learning that happens during the process of the online course. The courses will be offered several times during the whole day we would like to have an interaction with all of you to make this product further and also to bring in thousands of other NPTEL and open chapters to our country and some probably maybe outside this country as well. And we hope that as a family it grows very large, very fast but not without control that it keeps the quality and NPTEL is also leading the way for the entire National MOOCs movement which are now carried out by many other institutions. Therefore we have a lot to learn from all of you that we welcome all of you on behalf of the team and we hope that you have a wonderful day. Thank you very much. Good morning to all of you and welcome to IIT Madras for this meeting of local chapters of the NPTEL online course program. The NPTEL program started as a massive initiative to make a, use the, then fairly new medium of online repository in the early 2000 that period to make available to students across India but even across the world who whatsoever may be interested as we say in our letters who whatsoever it may concern. A whole lot of courses, course material which are prepared by faculty who are among the best available in the country in various disciplines. Actually if you do a analysis of the program which has been running for almost I think 10 years now you'll find that its cost benefit is, the ratio is very good. There's no way any other country with their cost structures could have done a pre-creator repository of this kind for the amount of money that was spent. It's also been used quite well though it is sort of like publishing a book and putting it out, we don't know who's using it we don't know what they're using it for but we know through feedback when we meet people who have used it that it has served the purpose in many ways for different people. One of the things it did also collateral benefit was that because it takes a fairly large organizational effort to create such a repository the NPTEL project from the point of view of those who create the courses, the IIT faculty, the IIC faculty many other institutions who join in as partners in small ways it helped create a large family of faculty members who have similar focus in a similar mission. So a very large number of people across institutions who share some common interests and who share some common goals have become friends, have become to know each other have also seen each other's work online because you can always go and look up anybody's course and we have a feeling of being part of a common team that is trying to do something. This also is very important in a large country like ours very often otherwise we are just working by ourselves. When this new mass MOOC format started evolving in the west as a way of more interactive way of using the online medium for education compared to just putting an online course as a repository, we also started looking at it some small number of faculty actually offered courses on global MOOC platforms and we also started thinking about discussing among ourselves that's where the formation of this large family helped how in what way can it be useful in our country in our ecosystem, in our situation how should we adapt it, what should we do. So the various ideas that came up the various ideas that still keep coming up still learning is a long way to go partly our interactions with you we are seeking to find out what works what doesn't work and so on and we said we should also start experimenting because only then we'll know simply standing outside the pool touching the water with the toe is not going to help we have to get in. So even though the NPTEL project as it existed in the previous phase we just concluded this concluding actually on December 31st did not include a MOOC component we have enough flexibility and we have running the program sufficiently efficiently that we had enough funds left over so we said we can let's try some let's try this, let's learn so that when we submit the next phase for NPTEL for funding we have very clear idea of what can be done and what will work and we can promise something which we are confident of delivering not an experimental mode not a fully experimental mode so we started couple of years back with the help of Google's open source platform we started offering some MOOCs courses and that is how this NPTEL online program online course were started and whoever faculty were excited about trying this we roped them in and we started we also felt that from our discussions which I had mentioned we also felt that we must have a certification component otherwise it doesn't make sense and we started from pretty early in the game I don't think we offered any course without certification we might have one or two but not too many and we said we must do this and that is how there are some MOOCs programs in the world which do this but many don't and as we started we realized also that in the Indian context a large fraction of the potential user base are young students who are in college this profile is very different in other countries many other countries are targeted at working people at people who are otherwise in other professions or maybe not even employed just wanted to learn in more of a continuing education kind of mode and whereas we realized that we are actually going to be having a very large number of users who are young for whom they are in the graduate education program and this is something to augment what they are already going through so we realized that even the mode in which these courses are consumed if you use a modern word in the online world by users when we are very different it might be done more in groups if our entire classes may do it there may be a mentor or a teacher who is involved also which is very very unusual if you ask a MOOC program coordinator or somebody who is running even conceived of MOOCs in the US they would not imagine that that the consumer users will be sitting in groups and large number of them may even have a teacher with them so these are all things that are unique to us and we should therefore think about how to how to use the MOOC in this context and get the maximum of it with no preconceived notions about what should be done, what should not be done and so on so I think we started feeling our way forward and that is how the formation of these local chapters have happened we realized that many of the users our students are in colleges and there are teachers with them and they can be of immense they can be actually a partner in this and I think the NPTEL coordinators who are looking to see what will work best I found that this local chapter the formation is very useful and they have encouraged it and lo and behold we now have as they say 150 local chapters and we have variety of experiences from these local chapters different chapters have tried different things some of them have worked very well so we can now you know transfer best practices from one to the other we even have on local chapters Andrew was telling me in Ecuador and we have several across the country of course large number are in Tamil Nadu because of physical proximity the NPTEL online course programs courses are being taught by faculty from all over India but larger fraction of are from IIT Madras and since they had sort of the coordination of NPTEL is done from Chennai from IIT Madras the initial effort is also you know large fraction of it is from here so there are lot of Tamil Nadu colleges but what we now see is we have just got approval for the next phase of NPTEL program and the next phase of NPTEL program is largely going to be online courses I think the I don't know if there is any but there might be some continuing development of repository may or may not I am not find out but the focus is largely on these online courses and we actually want to figure out and expand in a way in which we end up being a force multiplier as they call in military we already have in India a large number of colleges the colleges have teachers they have students large numbers are learning every all these institutions have grown very rapidly in the last 15-20 years in fact most of them in the last 10 years when you have rapid growth there are always gaps they are not enough teachers, not enough infrastructure whatever whatever right students from different backgrounds come to these places they come with various handicaps as a result and everybody has to scramble to fill up these gaps what we want to do is to see how the NPTEL online course program can become a force multiplier in a different so the faculty of the IIT is ISC or tomorrow even some of the faculty of these institutions engineering institutions who are in a position to actually who are in a strong position and in a position to therefore reach out and be a force multiplier these we are trying to see how given their limited time and bandwidth because they are all functioning in a normal good old you know brick and mortar method of teaching and grading and research and all of that they are all doing all that so how can they function in a way in which this kind of technology this kind of tool can be used to really increase the value proposition dramatically for the students across the country as we saw from some of the feedback from the students who have who are giving their anecdotal views on this small video that you saw it can mean lots of things to lots of people some people just are very excited by the quality of the teaching some people like the content some people like the breath learning something about appreciating music whatever the point is how can we enable using this how can some limited amount of quality high quality but and solid effort but limited in scale because the number of people and amount of time they can spend on this limited how can that be amplified to some extent by this kind of technology and really made available to large number of people with the you know is an amplifier that whose performance depends on the impedance matching with the receivers which means the local chapters are very very important so we I think you will hear more from my colleagues on this but we are really looking forward to learning from you how the local chapters can play a big role in the oncoming years as we expand this program then the MHRE is in the process of creating a very large single platform for online courses in the country it is called SWIM it will come into existence soon I think the processes are going on so it is a way it is only it is not very different from what you are having now except that it will be nationwide and it will involve courses offered not just by the IITs and IIC through this NPTEL but also involve courses offered by other universities other institutions in law medicine sciences and humanities and so on so SWIM will be a very large nationwide program and what we are hoping is all our learnings from this effort will help us develop that into a really solid program which can be unique in the world first it solves our problems and maybe it will solve help solve problems for some others also this is our hope and I hope and you as the early 150 chapters involved in this whatever you are learning whatever you are sharing with us whatever you are contributing as your inputs to what will make this work better it is going to matter a lot to a lot to a whole lot to everybody in the country not just this it is not just for these courses and these chapters so I think we actually think as we are seeing what is happening that there can be a huge role played by people across the country who may be consumers but may also become contributors partly we can have situations where students or other faculty members in different parts of the country contribute various solutions to problems various small expositions on the way they are able to explain something which is very good so this can actually be augmented very well and we think a lot is possible other things that we worked out the certification is being done we want to make sure that credits can be obtained you know that UGC you know all universities are going to a choice based credit system so that has to come in place then there has to be a mechanism for credits to be transferred MHRD is working on all of that but in the meantime of course some of you are already doing it but this is going to become a long track possibility for all students in the country and as we move towards that kind of a system by the time we are ready to put all those nuts and bolts in place we must know what aspects of this new online technology works for us in what way in what fashion because we don't want to run something which doesn't do a good job and leaves which sort of one more sort of half baked at trying to expand education we don't want that kind of situation one situation that we have grasped this new tool properly and used it well and really used it to make a difference to the quality and scale of our huge educational expansion so I thank you all for coming today though we had rescheduled because of the rains I hope there were rains all over Tamil Nadu so those of you are from Tamil Nadu in your respective areas I hope things have come back to normal and I request you all to share your views and learn from each other and help us learn from you what works and what doesn't work so that the next phase the MPTEL when you see hundreds of these courses being offered continuously across the country that large numbers of students can benefit and we can learn and we can really grow this in a matter of couple of two three years to a really solid program which is a force multiplier for the huge education system that is going and evolving in our country thank you very much good morning everyone thanks for coming once again this program was rescheduled and thanks for being able to make it so I have a brief presentation that goes over the numbers I think sometimes each of us do our own individual thing it's good to see the unsolidated numbers of what online certification has done so far etc etc I'll start with that and then I'll talk about local chapters and how MPTEL has already benefited from local chapters and how we think of taking it forward in the future so that's what I'm going to do I'll quickly go through the slides I have several colleagues with me who are also going to share their experiences some of them have taught courses with us and interacted with you hopefully so they'll also talk about it so alright so these are some numbers MPTEL like Professor Bhaskar and Mangal mentioned it's been around for 12 years Professor Mangal was very humble in the way he said it but MPTEL has been a big phenomenon and there's no doubt about it for the money that we spent and the effort that he has put in has achieved tremendous results and these are the numbers and they tell the complete story the way it has to be and these kind of numbers you won't find in many portals and also you have to keep in mind MPTEL doesn't go for the hot glamorous sort of courses I mean we go for hardcore engineering courses we're here to solve the problems of engineering colleges and university systems in the country so we're focused on that and to make up these kind of numbers is really really impressive and a lot of credit goes I think we should all clap our hands once we've got a tremendous effort and like Professor Bhaskar mentioned bringing people in together and holding them together that's one of his huge strengths and he's able to do that and he has done it for so many years so it's all due to him okay so MPTEL online certification like most of you know is three steps I think I'm going to quickly go through this this is open online course which is run along the lines of MOOCs on the portal and then we have the proctor exam for language reader certificate so this is a sequence quite a good model for many people keeping the open online course entirely free so that you can do just learning if you like and then if you have if you feel like writing an exam you can pay a fee and write that so this is a story so far in terms of numbers and that's the portal it's got a new look now and we're trying to change it because once you have hundreds of courses it's difficult to have it all on the same page and it's very hard to look so we're trying to work with engineers at Google and of course I've acknowledged the contribution of Google they've contributed in time and effort and actual hardware resources I think close to a million dollars now if you hand up everything in two years and that's a lot of money they put in and it's most of it is due to their effort as well and January 2016 we have 43 course 45 courses which were redone or repurposed to be used in a MOOC and assessments are multiple choice you have a discussion forum lot of questions asked and like it was mentioned in that little video we also have hands-on programming in fact even subjective assignments are possible we have faculty members who ask you to submit PDF documents which are manually graded etc so that's also possible and mentors case we have a certification partner who runs exams I think many of you are also TCSI on certified exam centers I think many of your colleges are also that so you would have seen these kind of exams and the certificate right now comes from the continuing education centers of IITs and in future like Professor Bhaskar mentioned there might be a way to have a different body issue in those kind of things introduction to research which Professor Pratap Aridas is coordinating that's a very different sort of course not like a regular classroom course it has group discussions which really go beyond everything so in fact January 2016 there is a course on how to use a scanning electron microscope that's an important skill and apparently it's not that difficult it can be taught very nicely and you can use it in fact the faculty member says anyone who does my course can go and take measurements in an SEM directly without any problem so one more course three or four faculty members together are putting together a course on what is the career or how different career options and how to choose career options very innovative sort of course as in they are going to go into industry ten years experienced people talk to them about how their career took shape courses which don't have too many takers are supported by the courses which are huge takers so overall we achieve a nice balance and for instance civil engineering is a subject that a lot of people like good electives in and we are trying very hard to get make sure that civil engineering mechanical engineering we do offer enough electives and core courses to help the need there and the institutes right now item address and Kanpur are playing a big role we have also had contributions from smaller institutes like CMI and math science and other institutes are jumping into it Karakpur is offering eight courses in January this is their starting point and the way I see it they are very serious they are going to offer more courses we are going to get Delhi also we were at Delhi on 15th faculty they are really excited they are going to offer courses hopefully IAC and other IITs will also jump in once all of them come in like professor Bhaskar mentioned number is going to be hundreds of courses every semester and now that is a different sort of problem now how do you pick what course to take how do you advise students on which is interesting etc so we hope to work with you and help you in that process as well ok so here is a list of course title just to capture the length and breadth of the kind of courses we offer not just going for interesting ones everything you want to imagine is out there and I am enrolled in courses and 15,000 students have got certificate so far and that is the big number of course enrollment is always very big and number of people who do certificates is lesser and that is to be expected I mean you do not put any filter at the beginning you admit anybody you want enrolls and then you say you have to learn suddenly you know programming and data structures not everybody is tuned to that they do not know it also and after the second week only they will know that course is not for me maybe in some countries they expect results in this fashion but I think in our country it perfectly makes sense you can be in any discipline you can do courses in any other discipline if you do not like it you drop out I think that is much more liberal way of learning than you know going into one discipline whether you like it or not doing everything in that only I mean I think that is not the correct philosophy in fact I like this number from what other portals might see but that is not the only thing about 13 percent are employed so the significant number is also employed in work and 7 percent are others others meaning various people and when we go to exams we see I mean it is quite interesting this there is a IG from CRPF even the January run I think Hanpur is also getting into it they are also trying to push that big time in their state so West Bengal will also come up as correct port comes up so other states will slowly jump into this as well some testimonials from students you heard quite a bit on the video that I think is a very good testimonial so in fact there is a college called Amini College of Engineering in Palakkad which about 75 students from there have got certificates and they made a nice video where each student comes online comes on the video and explains for like two minutes or something what they got out of it so that is something that would encourage all the local chapters to make I mean if you can make a video like that with your students it would be very nice also couple of things we do to bring students into prominent students spread out all over the country we do not know who the good ones are so we have a toppers page on our portal where for every course anyone who got more than 90 their little photograph and college name and the score is mentioned in the toppers page and it is so heartening for me to see for instance in the programming data structures course programming in C course I think couple of students from Kamaraj College of Engineering do we have representatives from Kamaraj yeah so couple of students from there their phase the name comes up I don't know I mean I group entries of someone far away from the big cities to see their phase in a big portal saying okay I'm one of the toppers in this course I don't know the kind of confidence that student would get is it's yeah so it's tremendous it's nice to see that kind of thing from spread out from all over the country I mean of course all the colleges are also mentioned I was personally happy about that but you know so many nice things come out when you have something like this and this is a nice thing that I think our staff came up with this idea of putting in toppers on the webpage I think it's a very nice thing as well so every student has a profile on that page okay so the profile shows for every student what are all the courses they did how well they did in that course what marks they got what exam marks everything so the student has a record or transcript of how they did the course in the portal available always not only the student anyone who wants to verify also can do the same thing so it's a nice setup in that session okay so in terms of numbers once again the enrollment is always very big but the number of people who submit the first homework in my opinion is a good representation of people who think they can do this course and from that number you can count your dropout I think that's a more reasonable measure at least as far as I am concerned and we have seen in many courses where local chapters were involved and the mentors interacted with the student the number of people who submitted the first homework they stayed on till the end so I think that again brings out the importance of colleges supporting students doing these courses it goes a long way in retaining them helping them be disciplined about the course because the discipline part the regularity part is something that you can't enforce on an online portal so it has to be done from the colleges I think it makes a big difference in that fashion so this is some list of courses we will go through this in maybe detail a little bit later so I want to say a few things about what we learnt so I think Prasabasco is mentioning general things and there are a few specific things we have learnt from local chapters already and we are trying to enforce them into our system okay so one problem we have had is in IIT when we run a course we are supposed to declare the method of grading and stick to it but usually there is a lot of flexibility in that I mean that is how I am used to running a course here I can say okay half way through the course I find the first exam did not really work I will reduce the percentage for that things like that it is very flexible here because we have a small group of students and we have the liberty to assist the class on its own because that is how our university works and many faculty keep that flexibility in their mind even for online courses so we had a few mishaps because of that that was invaluable feedback once again so now we are really pushing our faculty to declare a clear scheme of evaluation and stick to it whatever happens till the end so that is the huge learning we had that we had to push that into faculty's minds when they are ready to offer the course that is one issue we had the other great important issue was actually I was in Karnul for an exam and a few students from I think Pula Reddy College is here as well they were coming out and was talking to them about how the course went etc they said we all did assignments we used to just take assignments from others and put it in asking don't you have lectures where you are not able to do the assignment based on the lectures and the student I still remember the way she said the lectures don't show how to solve the assignment I was really a bit puzzled by it because for me the lectures are talking about how to use for loop it was a programming course how to use for loop how to use while loop how to declare the lectures are talking about it but the program is asking them to solve some last and on a rod problem okay so for many students in IIT or even people like me we are used to students who don't need that kind of hand holding so they know how to solve problems so you put a problem they know how to solve it they have been solving problems from a very young age they know how to solve problems so when you describe some scheme they know how to translate their problem in that language you describe that to them you know so when we describe in the lecture okay this is how you do it and then you give any other problem they will know how to do that translation so our faculty are used to such kind of teaching so they don't do that last mile of working out problems in detail for students in class in fact you do that our students will get bored they will come to those classes so they are used to that kind of a setup so this is great feedback once again so we are passing on that feedback back to faculty so we are telling them that every week you have to have one specially works out problems so if it's a programming course you have a video where you are sitting in front of a computer typing a program you know debugging compiling everything you show literally how you do it so these are things that we are passing on to faculty now getting them to do those kind of things in fact come up with solutions for assignments quite often when we give tutorial problems in class here we don't have to put out solutions there is a group of students who solve it they already have solutions we really don't have to do that we are testing on solutions etc so we are slowly trying to use this kind of feedback and I want to take this opportunity to say we really want more feedback from you so really what work it can be anything what work what didn't work any problem you had we don't guarantee that we can fix it because ultimately this entire system relies on academic freedom given to faculty in running courses we won't overly disturb that but nevertheless the feedback is important in giving guidelines and we can give guidelines to faculty of course we can give guidelines to faculty saying this is what works well our experience works well please use it and that's good enough in most cases faculty will follow it they know they understand that their ultimate target is of course to educate people they are not trying to fight anybody here so this feedback is very important and quite often I have seen many of you are a little bit reluctant to give feedback I mean our staff are quite friendly you have seen them you interacted with them so if you think you are little bit you don't want to tell me anything you can definitely tell them to us and sometimes you know our culture is such that you don't really question the teacher too much you know if you don't feel like questioning teachers you can tell them that many of them are available out here so please use this opportunity to give us good constructive feedback and how to make things better okay so of course getting marks is important but like I said the wider thing of what to do to help your students learn better I think that's at the heart of it please take this opportunity to do so okay so I'm done as far as the presentation is concerned I think we have some time budgeted for others to talk so thank you sir next I'd like to invite Professor Pratap Reddy talk about local chapters good morning I join Andrew Professor Bhaskar Ramurthy and Professor Mangal and first of all thank you all for joining us today NPTEL has been a learning experience for us it still is a learning experience and I expect it will remain that way I mean we are already I mean the courses we teach but this process is itself new so there are many things that is a learning experience for us that are learning experiences that we are using along the way so whatever it is that we have accomplished so far is something that's an evolving process so we have got some procedures in place some method of doing things and so on but these are all things that I've evolved over the last year and a half and we are actually continuously looking to see if we are headed in the right direction if there are things that we can do to improve the experience of this online course initiative for all the students who participate in it and all the faculty who are interested in it so as we started out initially the audience was typically you know individuals spread across the country and in many ways that is nice it means that you know you can have two people in Delhi one person in Karnol five people in Assam who are interested in the course and we still offer the course and people benefit from it so really this is an inverted model I have I mean we have come to many of your colleges you know experienced your hospitality and shared many of our experiences with you the model is inverted because in general in India we have always had the situation that you know 100,000 people who get into a college there are only 1000 seats so the first and most important job of the college is to figure out a way to eliminate 99,000 people then you work with the 1000 people so the most you know you become most famous for that process by which you have eliminated 99,000 people this is an inverted model we don't really mind many 100,000 people want are interested in a course they can take the course there is no problem they can take it and so that as Andrew uses the word it is very liberating you can take really education the way we have always wanted it to be that is you know people are interested in something they try it out they are not denied the opportunity of even trying out what they are interested in they try it out maybe after you know three classes they feel in fact I thought it was into my you know my line of work but it is not I am not quite comfortable with it so you pull out and so that contributes to those drop out numbers they just join check it out see if you know it is really as interesting as they thought it was or they really connect with it the way they would and if they don't they pull out which is wonderful I mean in fact so now you really have even a liberated individual he or she knows that you know okay I won't live my life thinking I never got an opportunity to try this course I tried it I mean of the five things that I thought I was interested in it turns out I am only interested in one of them great so then they can really you know focus with all their heart on that one thing without having this you know always this feeling that you know I was not allowed to look at this stuff and that is really the case here because you can take engineering student you can take an electrical engineering course you can take you know some chemistry course you can take computer science anything you can take aerospace course you can know we are not stopping anybody if they do well they do well they get a certificate from us so that's the thing so as I said you know initially we started off with individuals now we we were also looking at new ways to you know make sure that most students benefit from this whole process lot of effort is being put in and interest is there we just wanted to make those two connect and the local chapter process has really helped this happen and so first of all we really thank all of you for you know having enabled it because because of local chapters we really have a much more coordinated way in which we are able to reach out to students understand their concerns understand any limitations in the process and address them so just to give you a few examples so I think I mean some have already been mentioned I think puller ready colleges here we had the 500 candidates from that college to participate in one course so specifically for them examination centers were open so this is something that we understood our exam partner enables these things if there are a large number of collection of students in one location we can add more exam centers in that location and getting some knowing this ahead of time really helps so that we can plan our logistics much better so that we had about 500 students and we had centers and carnals specifically for them in a mini college in Palagart we have 100 plus students who wrote exams and at that point they didn't even have a local chapter so that was very nice then we also again learning experience you know sitting in a city we assume certain things and they are not necessarily true so for example with respect to Anaya Velangani college what we learned was that you know many students may not have online payment processes available to them through which they can make we just set up a portal we say pay your fees online and so on and that may not work and the college authorities were very helpful they worked with the students I think they are here Anaya Velangani colleges yeah so great so that's them they really worked with those students try to enable payment of those fees in a coordinated way through DD and so on and so that worked and we had lot of other things that are going on side by side throughout the country there are you know people are certainly looking at these idea that such online courses can be used for credit in some manner that is acceptable to their university and as the professor Bhaskar Ramurthy was pointing out the government also wants to you know expand this program and have something called Swayam which is expected to come sometime soon and presumably more actively get colleges to you know benefit from this in a formal way right now it's going on we give a certificate the student takes it and he or she can use it when they see fit this would make it much more formal many universities are doing this in some manner so for example in Madanapalli college in Andhra Pradesh one online courses compulsory for all engineering students three credits so any one course they can take and three credits worth of content is there then and they clear the course successfully then they get credits for it this kind of a model is actually being tried out by different universities within the flexibility that is there in their system so they are asking for one or more courses to be taken by the students and and an NPTEL course ideally fits that kind of requirement in Maharashtra University also students have been allowed to take one online course for credit many students from Pune are taking this kind of courses from us UPTO has mandated all colleges to take NPTEL open online open online courses and about 25 have joined with local chapters so this kind of initiative is on and I expect it is very likely that it will grow that one or more courses will be specifically picked up by students and that again I think local chapter really helps in helping us decide what is that course that would make sense our faculty right now are offering courses based on their expertise their knowledge domain knowledge what they feel students in that area should you know it is important for students in that area to learn specific colleges may be looking for a particular elective and they may not have faculty so that kind of feedback helps us also plan our courses to tell our faculty that you know certain types of courses people are looking for and so on even the new course that we are offering the one that coming up on research methodology and to some degree it is based on feedback we also had the idea that it would be a useful course but we did have specific written feedback from number of students saying that this kind of a thing is not there we are joined for some research degree and we are not really sure what we need to do so we have now that kind of feedback helps us put such a course together we already have such courses in our campus but we had not thought of it as something that we could offer as an online course now we are going to do that so in any case I think that is all I really wanted to share with you we really thank you for being you know actively being local chapters in your respective colleges it is a very important you know concept and you know activity for making this whole you know community activity of education successful so I thank you all for being that thank you for having come here thank you very much