 So, welcome to this today's video conference and I start the conference taking leave from the assurance made by Honourable HRM in the parliament in the last budget session while discussing on technology-enabled learning and teaching, Honourable HRM made an assurance on the floor of house that within next six months, the history of HRD will launch its own platform, primarily this platform will be a platform for all the centrally funded institutions and in year in next one to one and a half year, 50 centrally funded institutions will be offering the online courses through this platform and year one, 14 centrally funded institutions will be offering the online courses. As all of you are aware that the assurance is made in parliament, the process is that assurances get recorded and the parliament then follows with the ministry and every month from the ministry side we are supposed to submit a report that what is our action plan, Honourable HRM said on the floor of house that in next six months, 14 centrally funded institutions will be offering their online courses. The way it happens, those who are new to the parliament system just for getting everybody on board. So, the parliament section of the Lok Sabha, they keep interacting with us, they keep asking us every one month the progress report and after six months, then they start asking the ministry that the assurance was given on the floor of house that it is done in six should be done in six months, please tell us and let us know why it has not been completed, what were the reasons, what are the revised schedules and things like that. So this is the background in which from the ministry side, we are focusing on launching India MOOCs platform, there are series of meetings at the ministry levels that happened, secretaries are himself has taken meeting three, four times, Honourable HRM will have a meeting, internal meeting with us next Monday to understand our preparedness. We have selected 15 to 14 institutions and because we really wanted, because it is a phase one, we really want to bring the best out of our 150 to the citizens and the students of our country and out of the 14 best which we have identified in our area, your institution is one of them. In our internal review meeting in the ministry, the minister is very clear in our mind that the date is launched, nobody should say that this platform is only for providing online courses for engineering education. Whatever is the ratio of centrally funded institutions in ministry, which means IIT, ISRS, IAMs, central universities, scale universities, each has training institutes, in the same ratio the online courses should be offered at IIT. So, keeping that in mind, we are zeroing in on 14 institutions, 22 courses in phase one. We are also looking at, as I said earlier, the variety in engineering education, pure science, applied science, social sector. There is one very interesting online course which IIT Kanpur will be offering, which is MOOCs on MOOCs, which we will be popularizing among all our faculty members of centrally funded institutions and even from the state universities and private universities. It goes without saying, it's a technology-enabled learning and teaching, early days. Because we don't have the revenue model in place, all activities will be funded, 100% funded by ministry. Everything, all expenses, whether it's expense related to creation of infrastructure, expenses related to creation of courses, expenses related to hiring TAs, specs related to providing honorarium to the concerned professor. Everything will be provided by, 100% funding will be provided by ministry. We also want that every centrally funded institutions of ministry of HRD should come up with their signature course. Whatever they think is there, I'm sure all courses are important. The one which they think is the signature course we should come up. The date which is fixed for launching of our platform is 25th September. Being the birth anniversary of Pandit Deel, so it has been decided to launch this platform. Pandit Deel, the idea was that philosophy of Pandit Deel about education is that it was that we should reach out to the student in the farthest corner of the country in the most remote village of the country. Taking inspiration from that, the date has been finalized as 25th September. Yes, we know we cannot create a course by 25th September, but at least on 25th September, when we'll have a launch, we want the emblems of every, all the 14 centrally funded institutions on that platform. We should have name of the course which the centrally funded institution will be offering. And tentatively, day. And that day has to be minister made assurance on the floor of house in the second week of August. So it should be before February or March. It should be the day of launch. It should be before that. So with this background, I'll request Pataks up to tell us in detail about the different operations, different features of our platform. Thank you Praveen Prakash Ji. I have loaded some PowerPoint slides which I will use for explaining the modus operandi that we have planned. It is primarily for the massive Indian deployment of massive open online courses. As Praveen Prakash Ji said, we plan to deploy MOOCs on a very large scale. Luckily, several professors of many institutions in India have already experimented successfully with MOOCs. Many continue such serious experimentation. So for example, IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur, I know where they already have ready made courses. I also know several central universities have created large amount of open courseware and digital assets, which can probably be leveraged very quickly. The platform that we have been building is based on OpenEDX. EDX is an organization with which we have an MOU and we have been offering global courses on EDX. But they also have their platform software open source which we have used to create an India specific version. We expect the launch of this proposed platform to happen on 25th September as Praveen Prakash Ji already mentioned. The context of our platform development project is as follows. We actually made a request, a proposal, funding proposal to the ministry and ministry approved this development, which will actually take place over the next three years and it involves development, maintenance and enhancement of functionality. It also involves design of few courses and actual MOOC mode offering. More importantly, it involves setting up of a special purpose vehicle in the form of a not for profit company, which will actually operate these things across the country so that the operational handling, the revenue handling, etc., etc. will be handled by SPV and the entire activity becomes self sustained over the subsequent years. However, after this project was approved, the vision of scale has expanded and time frames have shrunk. We have actually already adopted this OpenEDX platform. This is a typical view that you go to the site. In IIT Bombay, we are actually using the MOOC operation in a blended mode. So, our students as we speak are actually currently using this in a semi MOOCs mode. This is currently how the site will looks like. However, it will change to the name chosen by the ministry called Swayam in a short while. So, the site has some course information, information about other institutions and so on. This is the typical screen that a student would see. So, for example, in IIT Bombay, the course CS101 which is being taught, a student will look at say quizzes or the weekly schedule from 18 to 22nd of August. This is a screenshot of what has already happened in the course. The point being made is that MOOCs course are actually seen by the students individually and they are always divided into weekly schedules. During the week at any point in time, the learner can finish the work assigned to him or her during that week. I mentioned about the expanded ministry vision. Actually, I was also taken aback by the large scale. As Praveen Prakash Ji said, 10 to 15 institutions are to join by the launch date and all of you who are joining this presentation and plus few who joined on the first have thankfully come forward to join this launch. We expect 15 more to be identified by 31st December. We expect 25 more to be identified before the end of June next year. A total of 50 academic entities thus will join some kind of a consortium and 50 more will join by the end of year 2 of this project. The number of MOOCs to be announced are 15 immediately, another 35 by end December, another 50 by June 2015, then another 50 by June 2016 and another 50 by December 2016. This is a massive operation and no single entity whether it is EDX or Coursera or anyone has taken up this kind of challenge to do it in such a short while. I think we are privileged to try and do this for India. First, the set of activities that need to be conducted to build and operate a course. Initially, we must identify the university and institute. We will be calling every such academic entity as a node in our consortium business. So, once the node is identified, each node identifies courses and the corresponding teachers will be designing these courses and offering those courses. Once that is approved internally at the nodal level, then these teachers will start preparing the course design, will completely create the course. Once the course design is approved and reviewed, it will be loaded onto the website and then course would be offered based on the timetable. Please note that when the course is announced, the start date and end date of the course offering is required to be announced. The assessment is completely online. It is done usually through weekly quizzes and through a mid-semester and end-semester examination. At the end of any course offering, there is important feedback and there is a scope for course improvement. This will be taken care of by the concerned faculty and the new version of the course would be then designed and offered. Last but not the least, as per the ministry directive, as per the mission directive, all content which are created in this course, in every course will be open source. This open sourcing of course content requires that all teachers who design this course take extreme care in ensuring that there is absolutely no protected IPR that is used or if such is used, it is used with appropriate permissions for release under creative comments. We will seek from each of our esteemed colleagues detailed information about each node. We have prepared a booklet which will be sent by email to all participants in this video conference as well as other colleagues who joined in the first of September. We seek the name of the institution, the SEAL logo and brand which will be a graphic image, introductory text, header graphic which means there should be a picture with some specifications here. Please understand that all these specifications are to maintain the uniformity so that when there are 100 universities or nodes, they all appear on the web in a similar fashion to everyone. Most important, we will require a coordinator for the MOOCs program from the university. This person should be single handedly responsible for all MOOCs related activity in the university or the institution. So, you would like his or her name, designation, email ID, landline and mobile. Then for every course that your university or institution proposes to offer, we will seek information about the course ID, any number that you give to the course in your own university. Of course, the name of the institution will have to be repeated here because this is a separate information about the course. Course title, maximum 60 characters, these two are the most important points. You will have to estimate when your course will be completely ready for offering. So, you will have to do design, development work, etc. Once you estimate, when you announce the course on 25th of September on the launch date, that course will have a specific start date. As Praveen Prakash Ji said, it could be October, November, December, January, but not beyond that. The course will have a duration of number of weeks and therefore it will have an end date. We will require the teachers to estimate the time that every learner must commit per week to be spent on this course. It is typically of the order of 5 to 8 hours per week, which is roughly what a student spends in a course in the regular framework. If the course has any prerequisite and experience, it should be stated. There should be a brief course description and there should be a full course description, but there are limits on the number of words and characters. We request all of you to adhere to these. Last but not the least, we need the faculty members' names. There could be a team of faculty members. We require that every course should have a lead faculty member who is responsible for the entire course offering, but a course can be designed and offered by a team of people, in which case we will require names of all the professors, their titles, their faculty photographs, typically passport size photographs, brief biography, educational biography or professional biography. Then for that course, if there is frequently asked questions, these could be prepared by each university based on the past experience of offering that course in your own university where the teachers who have been offering it would have come across a large number of questions that the students ask, not about the subject but about the course, about the way the course is offered, about the way the evaluation is done, about the way the grading is done. Any such frequently asked questions could be prepared and answered along with the preliminary information. It is useful to create a separate email address for every course. We did not do that and as a consequence, I personally suffered getting about 1,000 emails every day when the MOOCs course started. So, this is one example cs-101 at iitb.ac.n. And of course, the concerned teachers and the TAs who offer that course would have access to this kind of email. We expect every institution to make a small introductory video, typically of 2 to 3 minutes duration. We will explain this kind of video later but this is something which is available from day one and many learners across the world typically take a decision on whether to join the course or not based on not only the course description but also on the introductory video which is prepared by the institution. There could be a still picture from the video which will be used to highlight the video play key. There could be a lead graphic image for the course. If there are any additional resources, for example, any open courseware or any third party links, the list of books, et cetera, et cetera all additional resources are expected to be listed while announcing the course. Of course, the teachers have the freedom to add more resources later when the course is offered. Finally, there is a subject category tagging. We have created certain tags like biology, life sciences, arts, commerce, accounts, whatever, whatever to the best of our knowledge we have created this category. It is obviously possible that there could be courses which do not fit into any category in which case we request the concerned university to suggest a category name. We will make every endeavor to add that category right now before the launch. The institute contact information for course content and review process. This is extremely important. This is not the contact information of the person who is the in charge of the entire MOOCs program nor this is the contact information about the lead faculty member. Although it could be the lead faculty member. This is a person typically in IIT system is a senior TA or PhD student or something who is going to be associated full time with the offering of the course who can actually interact with the central server here and the people here who are managing the program in case there are any questions on the course content and the review process, et cetera. I will briefly describe the activities at each node. First and foremost as Praveen Prakash Ji made it very clear the funding is proposed to be provided by NME ICT through project mode. We have been asked to make a large project proposal which is under active consideration of the standing committee of the mission and the ministry will appropriately decide how the funding is to be provided. We expect infrastructure at each node to be created which will involve creation of a MOOC course creation lab. We also expect a mini cloud to be set up. It is a server platform which the university can use to offer any one of the courses which are offered in the main platform to be locally modified and offered to their own local students. This will also permit local faculty members to experiment with versions of the course locally before they commit anything on the main cloud. We expect up to 20 staff members to be hired and trained over a period of next 2 to 3 years in order to permit these activities to be properly supported. There would be of course some consumable budget and travel budget as a standard in any project mode operation. We have constructed a small lab here for studio editing and so on. This is our studio at one corner of which is our editing framework. These are video editors, video mixers. This is the audio mixer. These are video recorders here. Small monitors for the person who sits and assists in the recording to handle these things. So, in order to save time, I will skip the images which essentially describe a small studio that we have created. I must hasten to add that some of our esteemed colleagues have brilliant facilities to create video recording lectures. I have personally seen the excellent studios that Ignu has for example and NITTR also has excellent facilities. I am sure many of you have such facilities but I would still request you to consider setting up of a small studio and an associated lab to concentrate only on creation and editing of MOOCs courses. Typical activities in creating a course involves preparation of video clips. I would like to reiterate that these are not one-hour lecture videos but these are typically 8 minutes to 10 minutes, 12 minutes kind of clips. In any weekly schedule of a course, there would be a clip followed by an activity list followed by an online quiz followed by some practice problems followed by another video clip and so on and that is how the entire concept covered in a V is broken and packaged into different concepts. We have found this part to be the most difficult part to design pedagogically. Once that is done, you prepare the video clips, prepare the transcripts, synchronize the transcripts with the audio so that subtitles appear on all the videos that you have uploaded. We have to prepare a weekly sequence as I mentioned. Quizzes and examination schedules have to be defined. These could be per week as I said. All online quizzes, tests, practice problems all handouts and other course material has to be created. All of this has to be part of the course design and development. Last but not the least, every bit of material needs to be reviewed and corrections must be applied. I will tell you that ordinarily when we conduct a course and suppose there is a mistake in either a quiz question or in any handout we can simply announce to the class that this is a mistake but when 50,000, 60,000, 1 lakh students participate we have had experience that we release the course material of a certain week and within 5 minutes at least 10 to 15 people start shouting back on the discussion forum pointing out even small mistakes of brackets and full stops and so on. So extensive beta testing has to be done for every course material that is created before it is offered. We also expect many of our courses particularly the foundation level courses to be translated into multiple languages. We have suggested a significant budget for doing this translation. In this video transcript is actually taken the transcript which is the audio transcript is then back dubbed into the video using spoken tutorial methodology which has been perfected through a another national mission project which is championed by my colleague Mr. Kannan Mautgalya. The translation of other material also needs to be done in the process such as tags, problems and solutions and so on. And all of this needs to be reversed integrated with MOOC. On the platform we have kept a provision for language selection. So the moment a language is selected the learner will be guided through that material the videos of titles will appear appear in that language etc. We expect efforts to be made eventually to translate all courses in all Indian languages and to expect majority of courses may be translated in much fewer languages to begin with. We have recommended an appropriate budget for this activity. When the course has to be offered the course will start on the date that we have announced during the announcement time. So for example suppose a course is announced on 25th of September to begin from 15th of November. Then before 15th of November all possible learners will register for that course. There could be preliminary course survey that the teachers might want to conduct. Typically one week before the course starts once the course starts there has to be daily monitoring of discussion forum answers must be given as early as possible. Please note that this is the only equivalent to a classroom discussion that we have. In a classroom a student ask me a question and I respond immediately. Online also a student would actually psychologically expect that kind of response. Within one day if the response does not come the student gets discouraged. Additional material might have to be added during the course. For example more practice problem, alternate quizzes any additional explanation sessions which the teacher might record and insert while the course is operational. Final grading and certification will have to be done. Currently we are considering only the audit certificate which means anybody who attends all the courses all the weeks and so on or honour code which is based on the exams and online quizzes that the learner gives. But guarantees or at least gives on his or her honour that he or she has not cheated. Subsequently as many of you would know there are efforts to ensure that UGC will permit and the universities will adopt the actual grades to be accepted as part of the university degree curriculum. But for that the examinations will have to be proctored and there is a lot of activity that is going on but that is a policy matter. As of now this is what we will be offering. In a nutshell while offering a course the faculty team and the teaching assistants have a major role to play. It is almost a full time job and this is something that all academic leaders should take cognizance of in permitting the course team to actually work full time by reducing their load elsewhere. Obviously many of us who have never prepared a course on MOOC will require some training. We ourselves have undergone this training. We are creating lot of training material and what we call the training MOOCs. That is massive open online courses for training. We additionally will conduct specific training workshops. One workshop is immediately planned I shall describe that in a short while. There will have to be refresher training for people who have already been trained but I would like all of you to appreciate that since all of us have been teachers of very long standing we might believe that this is just a minor variation in how we teach normally unfortunately it is not. It is a major different thing and all of us need to spend considerable amount of time in learning this technique. We propose to have a large setup at IIT Bombay. We will be establishing a center of excellence in MOOCs related R&D and online education. We will be collaborating with all of you as partners of the consortium more specifically with few of the universities which have excellent track record in handling MOOCs related activities and a pedagogy for technology enabled learning. Now I come to my concluding side which is the action agenda. As Praveen Prakash Ji said the site will be launched on 25th on 25th all the university partners who are assembled here and will be participating must have their presence on the site. We can guarantee such presence only if all required information is available to us by 15th of September. To begin with I would request all senior colleagues to send the name and email to the program manager. That is the person who will be single point responsible for all MOOCs related activities in that university or institution. It could be either a faculty member or a senior admin person. We call them program manager but that term program manager or PM actually coincides with our esteemed termed of prime minister so we have decided to rename it as program coordinator which is a more common nomenclature used in India. A short training workshop is arranged at IIT Bombay. Kindly note these dates. September 11th, 12th and 13th we expect participants to arrive by 10th evening or 10th night and plan to depart on 14th morning. This three day session is meant for the program manager or program coordinator plus the lead faculty of each course. So if your university and course the lead faculty of that course if you are offering two courses then two faculty members. Later on we will also arrange a similar training program for the technical staff of each university. Kindly note that as Praveen Prakash Ji said the entire workshop including reimbursement of travel expenses etcetera will be handled by IIT Bombay through this project. So there is no financial liability of course important time of these people will have to be invested in doing this. In any case the people that we are talking about are people whom the university will be identifying to work full time on this activity and therefore that is all in order. The objective here is not that teachers will immediately become experts and start designing the course but the objective is that each teacher and each program coordinator will go back and estimate how much time is required for creating a course at their end. Now this decision will be different in different universities because many of you would have portions of the material already ready for the course. So what you will have to do is you will go back and estimate how long it will take to repurpose that portion how long it will take to redesign something whether you would like to start from scratch our experiences typically it takes three months in a course with at least some basic facilities available. You will have to take cognizance of your existing infrastructure and the readiness of other things to decide this. Now this all of this can be factored in deciding start end dates. We will have to act fast after the colleagues go back to their respective universities on 14th because by 15th we need to know the final announcement dates for start date and end date for every course that you offer. Once that is done on 25th we will be able to launch all of that our infrastructure is getting ready to currently bear the entire site operations. What I did not mention is that eventually this entire site when the operations become very large scale will shift to the national mission cloud that is being set up in Delhi or we might even share some other cloud which operates from the Indian soil we do not want to take our contents and our students data outside India for these operations. Well that is all I had to say I am delighted in fact to have you know while I have not interacted with some of the colleagues here but I know many and I had a pleasure of working with them I look forward to this opportunity both me and my team here are eagerly looking forward to this opportunity to make a difference to the entire national education system and all of you are going to be remembered as pioneers in this thank you very much over to you. Reactions from from different universities we will start with Delhi University We are we are already working in any ICT project and we are privileged to be selected for this pioneer project which we are going to launch on September so we will try to we are planning to offer two courses one in accounts and one is in commerce for unique courses All right so please identify your coordinator names and please send it to send it to professor Fartag and I must have noted down that 11 12 13 there is a workshop in Delhi please send those coordinators please also inform the our VC that many of us have seen his open course where his videos on Delhi University website one of the most impressive open course where in India so please convey to him if it is possible for him to offer a course because definitely we will attract because we want that the first 15 or 20 courses and we will be spending lot of money in actually publicizing this Indian platform one estimate says that the amount of money actually will be spending will be almost two to three times more than the what actually goes into creating the platform therefore we really want the first 20 courses to be the really in their field the best courses of the country as somebody said in the meeting with secretary sir was that these courses these 20 courses will decide the future of open online courses in India so please convey our request that if we can have VC Saab's course I just meanwhile I would like to mention that the workshop is planned in IIT Bombay and not in Delhi Praveen Prakash Ji I think mentioned Delhi we can continue our discussion over to you Delhi okay sir I will comment this request to the professor today I think he will definitely and I hope that he will agree to this course and we will be part of this and we will try to be here in IIT Bombay and we will have the larger view of it more feedback and how to proceed on this looking forward to see you there sir can we have other colleagues to respond one by one in the meanwhile may I request somebody in Delhi to organize shifting of the control to other colleagues one by one in the other universities hello doctor sir I am R.K. Riaz I am from the Institute of Life Love Learning Dr. Dekishan and myself will be representing Delhi University for these MOOCs course and as I mentioned somebody briefed you that which we taking two courses in novice and commerce and we have a good background of developing key contents and we have got our own the B&A site virtual learning environment site available where we have got audio, videos and key contents available and we are also part of the ICT program of FHRD which is big program and hope in the the direction which we are getting and we will be able to fulfill the needs which is being very profitable for Delhi University thank you now can we go to Igloo so we will Igloo I think there are some issues and link we will go to Aysar Pune yeah Aysar Pune so we would like to know one of two things because we are quite new to this class of now so to what audience we are targeting is it generally covering undergraduate level or undergraduate level at what level are we expected to give this course let me answer this the expectation is that the course that we choose should be one which is likely to benefit the largest number of people so while all courses are important my own recommendation would be that one of the undergraduate courses which is the required to be studied by a very large number of students across the country and the course chosen should be such that the syllabus that is offered in Aysar should be similar to at least one course that the students are required to do in their normal university because that is how we believe they will benefit most so you can choose any one of your star courses which might come close to fulfilling such an expectation that they satisfy the needs of large number of people it is in this context that an undergraduate course could be better suited thank you over to you yeah we are done we get back after you know after talking to the director and you know hello sir I am Dr. Bose here from IGNU our honorable VC is away so you know that we will definitely you know that take this issue and also you know the send the coordinator's name and which course you would like to offer so we will put up to this to our honorable VC and we will come back to you in a short while thank you we will go to Calcutta I am Calcutta yeah this is Ashok Banerjee and he sir yes please go ahead yeah we would like to know that you know we have recently submitted a proposal so there we mentioned two courses so is it a part of that or it's separate so we were wondering so that day also it was discussed enough so we will get it on this platform and if you want to keep the same course on this platform and if that if we eventually decide to run on this platform it's okay if you eventually want to experiment with another platform that also was okay with us but the idea is to begin with on 25th when as I said that there has to be the whole idea of the ministry is and particularly it is flowing out of the thought process of minister said that my that MHRD MHRD MOOCs platform which we are going to dedicate to the nation on 25th should not look too much biased towards engineering education yeah and other centrally funded institutions also should contribute so that these will run parallelly should not be an issue and anyway other things I will look as part of supplement because you know we find there is a training program from 11th to 13th September and the faculty has to attend the program so now we have to identify you know we didn't know these dates because our term is going on so you have to identify the faculty and then get back who is available so please please go ahead and do that definitely would like to have the presence of IAM Calcutta on that platform on 25th September okay I will get back thank you sir we will go to Calcutta Vishwabharti good afternoon hello Prof. Sushant Dattagutto is out of station he had a pre-assigned meeting so he could not be available myself Dr. S. N. Oja head of computer center so we shall like to contribute to this MOOC platform in a big way and we will be especially interested in science and humanities courses and we would also like to attend the training program at IIT Bombay though the time is very short once the vice answer is back in campus we shall discuss and decide how to coordinate it and we shall let you know accordingly yes yes so please convey this to the vice chancellor and if there is any confusion then please tell me that I will also speak to him he can also speak to me for any further clarification so because these are the names which we have we have already finalized mentally funded institutions to be part of us now we will go to definitely sir only two points please go ahead two points I would like to highlight before you number one we are very poor in NK bandwidth the bandwidth you might be experiencing that audio and video both are with lot of jitters and second is the infrastructure required for this studio for recording the lectures etc that is not available in the campus so we need to set it up as you as you saw in the as you must have observed in the professor presentation we have kept funding for the creation of cloud and the related infrastructure for every node so definitely under the project the funding will be made available to Vishwa Bharti to set up that studio Niter Chandigarh good afternoon sir professor M.P. Puneer from Niter Chandigarh it is a very good initiative because we are the institute which are meant for imparting training to technical teachers certainly the courses which we will be proposing will be related to teacher training in fact so one already we have planned and already curriculum everything is ready that is related to ICT tools for technology-enabled learning and I think in time to come within one month time two months time it will be ready everything we do everything for every subject five subjects are proposing into that one another one may be second one may be this some teachers eligibility test testing of the capabilities of the persons who are joining this being professional at least some four or five subjects related to pedagogy say instruction planning or instruction delivery or evaluation part or communication skill so four or five modules can be and students who are pursuing their MTech during that time itself they can do these courses and eligibility can be decided on the basis of the course which he has done during that MTech program or even after that one you can clear those courses and then it should be eligible for the teaching profession so these two courses we can propose one more or less it is ready and second one if it is being said yes then we can plan for second one also and on this training as far as training part is concerned already for the first course that is ICT tools our team is there one one nodal person will be sending there and another one for this one also from education department another teacher may join for this one so two teachers from our institute will be participating I think that you are I think Partizan also was there in the meeting your institute is a pick of secretaries he has selected specifically Niter Chandigarh I think what is there going in the mind of so first you understand you are sharing a platform which are only the 14 institutions in India IIT Bombay IIT Madras IIT Guwahati University of Delhi IIT Sarapune IIM Calcutta and then Niter so it is a big opportunity for Niter to so you have to take it I mean you have to really give your total your total personal attention is required in this A, B what was going on in secretaries mind when he suggested was can you do something on skill side one perhaps you are saying for technical teachers training some you can prepare something on technical teacher side in which I will suggest I think that one course which was very popular when talk to teacher program itself started I think there was one signature course I don't remember the name of the course it was about research methodology I think that is one course which was one of the signature course during talks to teacher talk to teacher program look at it, look at that course because primarily if you are catering to the polytechnic lecturers and the lecturers in the engineering colleges and even in the other side and that will be the signature course large number of people will be looking at this that is the one course you should pick it up and the second is think of something about in scaling side so for that sir you have given opportunity to us to write a proposal for this skill university, online skill university already that proposal is ready and some of the courses we have planned into that one one or two courses can be taken on that part also sir so I think do that that project will go on its own but for this project pick up these two courses research methodology and one related to skill another one this ICT also sir that already it is ready one skill we can take and another one research methodology we can take still both skill hard skills one can be on skills another one for teacher sir may I suggest that Neeter should pick up instead of research methodology they should pick up the courses in which they have extraordinary expertise so Praveen Prakash ji I would suggest that what Prasapunia was saying that one course on the skill side and another course on the ICT tool for education so they could fashion a course which will be meaningful for large number of students across the country to understand how ICT is to be properly used for learning may be we could together fashion such a course based on their expertise is my suggestion and sir then I take that discussion further from the IIT Bombay is it possible to because that day we can say on 25th that look these are the courses we are doing for the students but the same time we can also say there are few courses which are meant for the teachers think of any in-shoot which can offer this research methodology yes you are right we had offered that course and you are absolutely right it became the most popular course in fact that was the course which for the first time we understand 10000 teachers I will immediately get in touch with Professor Karma Khair of IIT Madras who was the lead faculty 3 or 4 faculty members from IIT Bombay who participated and yes it should certainly be possible we will announce the course however the start date of that course will be slightly delayed there is another course on what we call educational technology which is also meant for teachers so I will discuss this with the colleague and we will be certainly adding one more course at least to be announced on that day thank you thank you sir yes IIT Guwahati yeah I am Professor S. V. Rao from the USA department yes sir good afternoon and we noted down the details about this mock launch and this workshop and we will discuss with our director Professor Gautam Viswas and we will get back to you that is what we can do yes sir just please also tell the director I will also I will talk to him but you please also tell him that the list which he prepared IIT Guwahati was not part of it Gauti name has been included personally by minister so because she was very particular that I want to ensued from northeast to be part of it and she said I want to include IIT Guwahati so it is her pick the IIT Guwahati has been selected by minister herself so definitely we are looking for a very strong contribution from IIT Guwahati and request will be that definitely faculty member and the coordinator from the IIT Guwahati should attend the IIT Bombay's workshop okay sir we will discuss and inform the director and we will let you know we will go to IIT BHU I am director IIT BHU also holding additional charge of vice chancellor of BHU we will be naming our coordinator soon in a couple of days and in this case we have an advantage that IIT BHU got involved with the program last semester which was being conducted for all the IIT's which was content for source from IIT's and it was reaching out to 100 colleges so we have that experience with us we will take advantage of that and we will be sending from BHU our coordinator for this workshop in Bombay we would of course like to know on the 25th September when you are launching the platform you were we have lost all the videos except the daily video, yeah yes sir we can hear you sir okay so as I was saying we will send you the name of our coordinator in the next couple of days and take a little more time to decide what will be our signature courses and they would be from the area of science plus maybe humanities, law etc that we will work out yes you were asking some things sir yes so on 25th when the platform gets launched sir it was mentioned that 15 courses will also be started you would like to know which are those courses sir courses will not be started as you are saying the two courses from BHU will be there so only on that day that start date of the course will be announced alright understood so when we launch the platform then the emblem of the BHU will come and then it will suggest that BHU will be offering these two courses and the course will start in November and this course will start in December I understood that way it will be there sir and sir we are trying to bring we are planning to invite the prime minister for this program so definitely all eyes will be on BHU when he will be launching the platforms any other university I think we interacted with all of them sir can I go back to I think I have interacted with everybody I forgot to mention one thing Professor Parashuraman from TESS is also going to be one of the participants fortunately a colleague of his who has joined him recently and was my colleague till recently the prospective faculty member Swami Sasarapudde is here directly sitting with me so I will get the necessary details about the coordinator and other courses from Professor Parashuraman directly I would just like to in conclusion I would like to mention this to all esteemed colleagues please I mean I probably used a wrong word the three day program that we are conducting by no means training workshop it should be regarded as an orientation workshop and the main objective of the orientation workshop is for the concerned program coordinator and the teachers to actually estimate how long they will take to set up the infrastructure or to create a course etc etc and as Praveen Prakash Ji rightly said on 25th all of us should be in a position to see our university names on the website the course names on the website with the indicated time of launch start of the course and end of the course that is the objective the second thing I would like to mention is that I notice that three of our colleagues had to come back with an answer that they will get back to I think mostly it was Vice Chancellor and then they will come back to us that is only proper in an order but once the MOOC activity starts the MOOC coordinator that you appoint must be empowered to take decisions and go ahead because we are working at very short time frames as everybody pointed out and that is the way the whole program will be driven in fact from now onwards for the next six months and one year it is absolutely mandatory that the course coordinate or the project program coordinator that you appoint at each place as also the teacher that you appoint as the lead faculty for a course should be empowered to take decisions and take action there will be no time for any further discussion and backend activities as Praveen Prakash Ji said funding is being provided by the ministry and of course we do expect universities to use all their enabling clauses to permit this project to operate in a mission mode that is all I would like to say I look forward to receiving the names of colleagues who will be coordinators and possible names of courses and of course I look forward to welcoming colleagues from all the universities on 10th night or 11th morning thank you so much over thank you very much with this I thank everybody hello yeah please go ahead wanted to ask something can we have the transcript of this lecture in our emails because we lost lot of words and news I think the presentation copy sir is asking for a presentation copy that can be mailed to everybody I will do one better I will have the copy of the presentation it's about 3 MB long so what I will do is I will try to reduce it by removing the photographs and make it smaller or they can download it we will put it on a link more importantly I will request my team to quickly separate out the audio recording and we will create an audio file which we can send separately as an email attachment so people can at least listen to the voice along with the slides they can see I will do that within a day by tomorrow this will be shipped to everybody thank you with this we close today's video conference I thank everybody for participating in this video conference