 So, what I plan to do is do a sort of a lecture demonstration of what I have done so far and then we will be discussing and I am sure as creators or mentors of creators, helpers of creators of course as you will have lot many questions. And I also have had these questions, but experience has given me some possible solutions and ways out. And again I should emphasize that what I am going to present here is essentially a personal view of mine, a personal experience, there is nothing formal about it. And I am going to take you to the actual course site on EDX. I am taking you on EDX because that is a fully baked site, the course is live and is being used. So, we will even be able to see the discussions and other things in it. One sort of a disclaimer that although Swayam is supposed to be a clone, not exactly a clone is based on EDX, the bifurcation took place a few months ago. After that EDX site is getting updated, Swayam is getting modified for our own purpose. So, the location of some switches, the options available in some options or some variation of the options will exist. So, just do not take a photograph of this and say the Swayam front end is slightly different, whatever was left side here is now right side there and such things will happen. But I think such things happen in almost all websites and other facilities we visit and we get used to them. So, coming to my experience, now why did I take this up? The answers are essentially there. So, that is to reduce my verbal overload, but essentially the four answers, the first two are absolutely personal, when somebody ask me to do something, will you do it and my usual answer is why not and that is how I got entangled with Professor Fatah some 25 years ago. I think the first major encounter was just after 1987, around 1990 I suppose, Professor Jaganmohan was the chairman of JEE and it was decided that JEE will be offered in N languages, even the question papers will be available in N languages. I think after a year of experimentation or some experimentation it was decided that many languages will be accepted as answer book languages, but question papers will only be available in English and English, but we did the first exercise of preparing glossaries and setting up procedures for translating formal question papers into other languages. I have another habit of when asked to do something, I will do it once with the best of my ability and after that if I like it and feel like doing it again, I will do it again. If I do not like it or do not enjoy it for some purpose, I am then free to say that look, I did not say no when it was asked of me to do it, but I did not like it, did not enjoy it, so do not ask me to do it again and that usually works at least in the environment of IIT Bombay and a few other organizations with which I am involved, it has worked. And of course there are personal links with Professor D.B.P. right from my early days, he was here earlier than me on campus, but there were mutual friends, I think Navathay was one of them, Gausar was another. Then some common things in teaching computer programming, particularly Fortran compilers and things like that, we worked together. And the three dots represents an absolutely personal link, the other half of mine, Mrs. Gayathonde works in this project, she started working with Professor Fatak soon after Crescent was formally established, then moved to the projects and now she is the one who handles all the finances of all MHRD projects of Professor Fatak and through her I came to realize that for setting this project up for the predecessor projects, a set of teams has been created so that the faculty members involved essentially have zero administrative overhead and that was the one which attracted me and that is the one which attracted others in this institute and I am sure that would also be an attraction to faculty members in other institutes, because science and technical faculty members and even other faculty members would loathe any administrative overload. A minor one which is part of your coursework and academic work is ok, but a major one like taking care of the travels and stay of people, taking care of the TA bills etcetera, it is something which is absolutely no-no for faculty members and that is something which is arranged by Professor Fatak and his big team of assistants and project managers and all that all that. I do not even know how many are there, once in a while I hear numbers like 70, 170, 270, the first digit goes on changing, the last two digits generally remain 7-0 for some magic reason. In fact, this zero admin overhead is something which I first felt experienced myself when I attempted a first NME ICT course on thermodynamics and after having confirmed that, I advertised it and that has attracted other faculty members particularly from my own department in offering courses. So, that is something which is to be noted and any one of you whenever you create a setup in your institute where faculty members will provide their brain wear teaching abilities and all that. You have to create a setup where the administrative overload on a administrative load on a faculty member is as low as possible preferably negligible. Now why thermodynamics? Again the reasons are there. It has been a personal favorite right from my student days at IIT Bombay. It became more of a favorite after my doctorate when I worked in BHEL for 3 years. After coming back here, I enjoyed teaching it to students and among the students I found teachers of other colleges who at that time came through the TTT scheme or QIP scheme for MTECH and PhD. And when the CD, a Center for Distance Engineering Education program was set up and I think around that time NPTEL started. I do not know whether CD was created because NPTEL project was on or it existed and hence it managed the NPTEL project. My thermo course ME209 was recorded by CD and it is available on the web in 2009, July and November. That was a change of attitudes because after that I found that I started receiving queries from outside people who looked up those things and then said that look why restrict myself to students of IIT Bombay I should formally expose my teaching to others. The opportunity came in the first NME ICT project or what I call the first NME ICT project that teacher thousand teachers I think started in 2009 or 2008. Initially it was restricted to teaching of computer programming and other computer science subjects like databases. Last month end of 2010 or so it was extended scope was modified and professor Fatuk was told that do not restrict yourself to computer programming and databases, move out to other departments and other basic courses. And naturally I was a willing guinea pig so I offered to teach thermodynamics because called the first version was called thermodynamics in mechanical engineering and that was implemented in 2011 June. The coordinators workshop for some 34 centers was conducted in February 1 week and then we had actual course over 2 weeks that is 10 working days through ICT that is using A view and things like that over the internet. At 31 centers 3 centers dropped out because one lost interest and 2 could not get enough participants and that was a success with some I think 650 or 750 participants. And soon after that other mechanical engineering courses were conducted by my colleagues and roughly a year after that that teacher thousand teachers was scaled up to teach 10,000 teachers so T 10 K T. I think the very first in that was this second edition of thermodynamics because I think simply called engineering thermodynamics at that time and that took place in 2002 December I think there were 167 centers and something like 8500 participants. And finally 2 reasons are that well because it is a personal favorite thermodynamics is my home ground very comfortable in teaching, discussing and solving problems with it. Even my industrial work and research work is around thermodynamics applied thermodynamics. So a take away for you is whichever faculty teaches a course through this should be a confident faculty members very comfortable in that course because now questions and comments are going to come from all over India. And the last one but very important one is that if you depend only on one faculty member for teaching and managing that course it is a dangerous thing you do not have a backup. It is like something which is only on in the memory of your mobile phone if that crashes or gets lost you are totally lost that should not happen. There should be at least one preferably to almost equivalent backup faculty members. I will leave it to you to decide what is almost equivalent or what are good faculty members. But I have been very lucky in thermodynamics that over the years initially I was the backup faculty for my teachers and other colleagues and later on even today for this course I have two backup faculty members one is Professor Upendra Bandarkar my own earlier student of the early 90s but he is in Trivandrum for some project presentation the other one is Professor Milind Atre. There was a question. So based on your experience a minimum number of faculty for a course. See minimal logically is one but. You said it is dangerous. It is dangerous it is something happens to you for example when I started recording I planned to record approximately two months in advance of that particular week. Then there was some flu sore throat and I lost three weeks of recording. I am raising this question is because for example in an engineering college you may have many faculties in a particular department. We have very we are a small institute specialized institute then the way out is do not announce the course till everything is recorded the whole structure is ready. And then for example that is what Professor Gadre is doing for its signals and systems there is absolutely no announcement. Only Professor Patak and now you know that that course is likely to be offered. He has been recording often on for the last two months he will continue to record for may be another month or two months at his own pace. After the whole thing is recorded he will make the structure everything will be ready physically and electronically and then it will be announced and may be two months later it will go like. So based on your experience how much time should it take for the whole course to be absolutely. I will come to that all that structure is being discussed. Thank you. Including some litigating. Let me go through this about ten slides and after that it is essentially an open house and demonstration. Now let me come to first preparation, operation, creation and all that. So first thing is you have to announce the course at least internally if not externally. That is the commitment. We did internal commitment as well as external commitment almost simultaneously within a few weeks of each other. But you can do the course announcement that is your own commitment on Jan 1. Create everything ready may be by April or something like that, your own time. If it takes four months for recording. A good idea is when you are teaching the course you are fresh. You all have you know you are running lecture to lecture. So if you can detach yourself from other work for about two hours a day, give your lectures in the morning in the afternoon or even on the previous day go to the studio and record those parts of the lectures which will go into that course. Then create an introductory video. This is required soon after or at the time of announcing the course to the outside world. Yes, we will all share. Now I will show you the. My request is can we get a CD of the entire workshop all the recording that are being taking place. I will modify. Yes, it is yes. Thank you. And the default is anything which happens related to these MHID projects in the public domain that means like this gets recorded whether we like it or not. All interactions are also recorded and are available on the NMEI CT site. And generally our site is well endowed. If you are connecting links are good enough. There is absolutely no effort required in downloading it. But if you are in some very odd place where just request and we will send you a set of DVDs. CDs are now out because we do everything in HD mode. So the videos are long. And you have to create a team of colleagues and TAs to help you with all the technicalities of the course. This is not the admin part of recording. This is your own. And usually the colleagues are backup and sounding boards and TAs are the ones who would do your sketching, problem solving, discussion modules, case study creation. So the concept of TAs are prevailing in IITs but in the university system there is no concept of TAs so far. You will need otherwise you will get overwhelmed. You will have to TAs, RAs means student level assistance. Yeah. So even RAs are not been advised to take the classes. No, they are not going to take classes. But suppose you have a set of exercises. You want model solutions to be created. They are the ones who will do it. Any university which runs a post graduate program will have research scholars and will have post graduate students. It is my understanding that the entire amount of scholarship that used to be paid earlier to these people has been converted into what is called TAship. So there is no free scholarship available. People have to work for the money that they are paid monthly. Now IIT system has evolved to use all of them very meaningfully as teaching students. That is how our courses run. Universities probably have not evolved that system. It's high time you did that. The research scholars who are working on an area related to that subject and the post graduate students are absolutely excellent support system for running a course properly for doing these kind of. If you have not done that, I would suggest you start it immediately and let this be the starting point. That is one. It is possible that for some courses and in some universities you may not have such research scholars. Please go ahead and employ people who are experts temporarily for a course. We have done that. I will describe the budget that you have. But without a support system, the faculty member who is the lead faculty member will kill himself or herself doing it. We have tried that also. We have experience of all kinds. And that is why what he is suggesting is the gist of all experiences. That you should have a team in place which will support the faculty. This is not the admin team. This is not the technical recording team which I will describe the different budget heads I think tomorrow afternoon session as to how much budget has been allocated. And I have the clearance from Joint Secretary to actually announce it to tell you what will be the total budget available for this project for three years. So there is a budget. Now how judiciously you use that budget is your call. For example, we have provided for up to 10 teaching assistants for running a course. Now this is an average budget. If there is a course which has one lakh students attending, you may require more than that. If there is a course with only 10,000 students attending, you may do with only four. But you will need people. That is the only thing that the faculty member keeps attending to it with full academic energy. And I will, sorry for taking some time, but I would re-endorse very strongly the point that he mentioned. A faculty member who teaches a course, both the lead faculty member and other faculty members. We are primarily tapping their intellectual prowess, their experience and their expertise in academic area. If they have to draft and sign and send as much as one letter during the entire course, I think we have not fulfilled our duty. That is exactly what he means by zero overheads to the faculty. A faculty member, as in any other place in IIT, is a very, very important contributor academy. Now it is true that many of faculty members, all of us have to work as deans, as heads, et cetera. When we do that, we undertake that administrative responsibility. But in this particular task of creating a course, we are tapping only the academic resource. So in our case, what he says is correct. I mean, we have this workshop team. So when he conducts a T-10KT workshop, he never gets a letter from any participant saying, my accommodation is not proper or something like that. I get that way. Or my team gets that way. And we are supposed to solve that problem, not him. When he will come in, that is the reason why he is fresh. He can spare two hours a day, every day, to think about this. He can spare one hour in the evening to record his 10-minute, 15-minute clip. He can ponder over that material. He can go over that material with his colleagues, TAs and others and make that perfect. Because that is what counts. That is what will go to one lakh students, not his administrative ability to write letters. He can do that. So that I would emphasize again that you must create. And that is the reason why we have provided for an adequate staff provision. You have to employ the staff and you have to put them in place. And you have to tell them that the faculty member in the TAs will not do any administrative. Because many places, I know, it used to obtain even here 30, 40 years ago, we have changed over the years. The clerk in the academic office will expect a student to come to him to inquire about something. The clerk does not consider it his or her responsibility to proactively hunt out the student and inform that student that this is what you have to do. I mean, this is how we have structured ourselves thanks to the British League. But I think it is time to change all of that. So in the computer science department, for example, the new faculty member joins before the faculty member comes into the office on the joining date. The office, the furniture, the PC, the telephone, and the email ID is all ready. If it is not ready, some person in the office will have to pay for it. That is the process that we have established over 10 years of experience and working. Now, this may be going too far. But what I am saying is that this absolute freedom to the faculty and the TA group to concentrate on academic matters is essential. That is one. Secondly, when he says two months or three months, and when I also said that it will take two to three months, it does not always mean two to three months of full-time work for the faculty. But it must two to three months of peaceful work for the faculty. Maybe a few hours here, a few hours there, et cetera, et cetera. But every day, those people should concentrate on the academic. Second thing, he has been emphasizing the recording, which is the main crux of the course. But that is not the only thing, as I mentioned. There are several other things like problems, et cetera, which are to be taken. This is the basic backup that we have to ensure at our end. We can't possibly have the whole thing on the end. I think we are selecting all we want is a commitment, right? No, no, an announcement of a course. So that's too tight a bear. What he described is what we call the dynamic stability when the system achieves dynamic stability, which will be a luxury that we will have next year. That is when you start announcing courses after more or less the course is complete. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury as of 17th. So as of this 17th, you will have to, that is the reason why there are many people who said we have 10 courses ready, we can work on them, 15 courses, et cetera, et cetera. Please don't be that adventurous, but you have to be a little adventurous. And you have to say, we believe that with these imports, our course will be ready in five months' time. We believe that. And you believing it is not sufficient, the faculty member, the lead faculty member must also so believe. Now if I'm the lead faculty member and you ask me to make a commitment on 17th, I may answer variously. I may say no, not at all. In which case it will be prudent for you to say we cannot announce a course. I may say I will do it, but it may take three to four months. It will be prudent for you to add one more month and announce the starting date as one month beyond whatever the faculty member is coming. But once you make that commitment, it is up to you and the faculty member to fulfill that commitment. Now what may happen is that when you announce the course on 17th, and I mean tell us to announce it, we announce it on 25th, the introductory video may not be there, which is perfectly fine. But the introduction to the course as a content page can definitely be constructed in two days. And that's all we need now. You see the problem is twofold. One is urgent action required. Second is a stable period and stable operation. So what President Gayathunde has been describing is a stable portion. But he did not tell you that when the first time he did that, he made the commitment without batting an eyelash. And there's no preparation, no nothing. Now we are at the starting point of the national rollout. And that is why this is an extra request that is being made by the ministry to all participating universities. Do dare. What will happen in the worst case? Let me discuss. I mean as an engineer, worst case, best case is what I always think. Best case is you prepare that course actually in only two months instead of four months. The course will start later. Fine? The faculty member and the group get some respite. They can enjoy for some more time. Worst case, the course does not get ready by that. But let's say you have announced the course date starting as four months from today, from 25th. And about three months later you realize that there are 25,000 students who have registered but the course is not ready. Now you can take a call in the following fashion. You can say how much portion of the course is ready. So suppose it's a 14 week course which was supposed to start in November. And suppose four to five weeks course material is completely ready another five weeks in the office. There's absolutely no harm in starting the course. Because the weeks will roll out. We have done that by the way when we did the EDX course. We announced the course without preparing. And I mean he is much ahead as I told you yesterday. I and Supratik are struggling to keep just two weeks ahead of the course. He's doable. But it's very stressful. Somehow, I mean I have been trained by Professor Isaac to work 24 hours a day for at least three days in a week. That was the training. Not everybody would have been trained like that. We don't expect that to happen. But it will mean that people who have to do such courses while the course is running they may also be recording for some future week. Another reason why you should have a team so that when the course runs under such extreme circumstances the course starts running because you have only two months of material ready but two more months of material is yet to be ready. So this is a call that we will all have to take. I am suggesting that if your institute is able to set up the back end infrastructure within the next four months I think there is no danger. And what will happen out of 25 courses which are announced by the National Mission? Let us say we have the igno-limity of saying sorry folks we have registered but this course will not start now it will start three months later we are postponing it. Does that not happen day in and day out in our university? Yeah but that is the worst case madam that is not what we should aim for that's all. I think we should aim for getting at least one or two courses that we promise ready by the time and the time is available. I think the J.S. mentioned it I will repeat it again this assurance has been made by the HRM on the floor of the house. That is the most solemn assurance that the nation can be given that this will start. Now there is therefore no going back. All that we are doing is we are trying to honor a commitment made to the people of the country. Now to the best possible extent we will do it. We will simultaneously achieve stability in our teams over a period of six months, eight months money. So from next year onwards this will not be a problem. Secondly all of you would get first hand experience in doing. In fact one of the reasons on my suggesting that the model of this short workshop should be a lot of hands off. To actually it is not going to make you experts but I believe even that half a day that you spent yesterday you got a glimpse of what is required what is involved. Now you can expand on it all of you are experienced people and of course we will arrange more such workshops that the participants the T.A.s etc. who come will arrange specific workshops for them over the next month two months etc. That is not a problem. So two parts one what we have to do on 17 the other what is describing is what we ought to do going forward. Sorry for taking time but I thought they will be delighted to say that I do not have to commit anything now that that is not the case. And I will tell you from my own experience of visiting n number of institutions and university you will always find one or two faculty members who will say chalo karke dekte. That is another criteria you should have for selecting a course. The courses should not be nominated in my opinion by other you should actually have a judgment on the people who are teaching that course how well known they are how well reputed they are how their courses are perceived by the students and last but not the least how many maximum number of students are likely to win. In the worst case I would think that if you believe that there is a specialized course which is your signature course but it is not likely to benefit more than 20,000 students across the country no problem but it is that course by which the world will recognize you when you offer that course to people so that is also an important part. Another thing to note is any institute whenever it offers a course generally is not true that there is only one faculty member because just assume that something happens to that faculty member what happens to that course halfway through the university has a backup may be a dormant backup or a sleeping backup or whatever but that backup is necessary and it is like this it is like a sleeping backup may take about a week two weeks to come on board because he or she just does not even realize that he or she is a backup just to reduce this change over time if at all it is necessary keep the backup in the loop that is it so the backup just knows that something like this is happening and I may have to step in the moment he knows he keeps himself aware of what is happening and then this change over time if at all is required is reduced that is all so continuing with the preparation taken from thermodynamics or a typical mechanical engineering or engineering course but I think whatever be the type of course even from the social sciences this part and this part is going to be there you may or may not have slides you may or may not have animations and videos instead of exercises you may have exercises in a general sense some assignment some home some something so this will also be there but maybe in some different this these two could be replaced as appropriate for that particular course now this is something up to this it was essentially the previous slide was your own course that you will do anyway whichever mode the course is implemented now we have to fit it to the spym structure which is currently at least is based essentially on the edx structure and here the structure is at four levels section subsection unit and subunit now here my experience is this subunit is a bit too much of a detail and I think I am able to manage my course just at section when you have a number of subunits the subunits at least in the current web front end are managed one below the other and a student takes to look at only the top part and does not scroll down so it has some students have missed the second and third video and later on when they came to the quiz they said you never taught this and other people said no showing a snippet in that loop there is a notice here indirect or direct that there are more than one videos or more than one but in principle everything is arrangeable could be arranged in four weeks I think all of you have this and I have said may change because EDX is evolving Swayam will definitely evolve so this is what the structure is and this is looks on the actual web page as I will show you the course is one particular subject or one particular paper as people say S1 S2 S3 S4 are the various sections each section will have one or more sub sections and each sub sections will have units I showed it horizontally because on the web side you will see them horizontally arranged vertically without you being conscious of it because the list is not provided it is just on that web page one below the other for example this slide is 16 by 9 and I go to the next slide but instead of that I could have made this slide in a bigger thing shown you just the top half now if you do not know that there is a bottom half you will not scroll down the current design of the subunits so my recommendation I this is what I learned the hard way while implementing the course as far as possible do not use subunits but if you use at the beginning provide a hint that there are subunits there is one place where we have found that these subunits are absolutely useful that is whenever you give a graded quiz and you have let's say 10 questions of two marks each now those 10 questions of two marks each together will count to a 20 marks quiz and you might be arranging such quiz every week now when you arrange a quiz every week then at the end of say 10 weeks you might announce that best 7 out of 10 will be considered for your score so these are called droppable quizzes now you can drop an entire quiz based on the lowest score that the system does automatically provided that quiz is available as a single entity so all those 10 questions for 20 marks must appear one below the other each individual question can be constructed as a subunit so that you can replace or rephrase in case there is a mistake in the wording or whatever it is can replace one question from a quiz but it is useful to put all these 10 questions as 10 subunits and mention in the unit head that this is a weekly grader quiz which contains 10 questions all listed one after another below as he said and by the way when there is a grader quiz and I know that there are going to be 10 questions there is no way I will miss out scrolling down so that is one place where there is no danger of people missing out the total score becomes extremely difficult because a weekly quiz preferably a droppable quiz is a good idea for scoring people people will score poorly or well in some quizzes we do that I do not know what the university system is but in IIT of course every faculty member decides one's own grading system so that's a freedom that we have but it is for a quiz or we'll say out of these 10 assignments we'll take the best 7 marks or so that is a recommended approach for online courses and subunits will help them sorry I digress but this was important because when you construct a quiz a single quiz with so many questions coming out as subunits is best if they are different units then replacement totaling etc which is done automatically by the by the system this I learnt from Rinda very recently after making the mistake which I am suggesting you don't make yes please so this is in context of the structure that you are suggesting for the course I can foresee that some people might be more comfortable writing out the text to themselves once and then they would like that content to be straight away ported to the online form so is there some way we can pipe structure documents like a latex document or html document directly to yes yes you can see anything which you can put on a computer screen either through a camera or by any other method is captured I think one should remember that if you can anything which can come on to a screen is captured no but I was thinking more in terms of if I am planning a course I will break up my units into what I feel are logical units or length which I am comfortable with and I write out a document some kind of a script to my video to myself and then I don't want to go through the extra effort of coding this into the final format so it is that kind of a document and writing is good do that in fact that would be excellent because a good handwriting is much easier and comfortable to read than any font ever facility which you may not have explored but just as you have a facility to upload a file that is exactly how you integrate videos and others you can upload a PDF file you can share and you can actually give a link so in any document as part of the course if a student clicks on that that particular document which you have uploaded that will come and become you will see illustrations when I come to my course most of these things are there now after having said so about these subunits remember that subunits do have a place and it's some discourse either a video or maybe a stanza of a poem or a part and below that is the place for discussion or even a quiz so once you start having a design of a particular kind then the students will expect that sort of a design and if you repeat it then there is no harm but all I am saying is these four levels are a subject to you and although the edx says that a section is a week just look at it as level one level two level three level four this weekly thing is only for the point of view of time table time way but you can always have a section as a lecture a subsection as a video and unit as something else it is and other thing if you want to make section as a lecture so be it if you want to make a section as a topic which occupies may be two and a half weeks or three weeks so be it it is left to you these are just four levels available then here in a move since we are here the quizzes can be inserted anywhere so we should use this facility to provide may be small quizzes after every section or subsection or weekly quizzes the design is left to you but that is a conscious decision one has to take my thermo experience has been in the first week I provided quizzes after every some three lectures and the quizzes were available on day one at time zero and what I found is smart Alex he said oh I know everything of thermodynamics let me go straight to the quiz and he goes to some quiz may be the third quiz in that week and then he misses out on all the structure meaning less your question is wrong such comments started coming within minutes of releasing that now even the first video which is maybe four minutes you can't you have not completed and you have started commenting on the quiz so after I think one week or two weeks of this my structure has been released the material on Tuesday at 12 noon our time but the 10 days away so the issue is not with the deadline the deadline is left to you and immediately I found that the discussion moved away from immediate discussion on quiz questions to discussion on the contents of the course and when the quizzes came the comments on that were much more mature than those unbaked comments which I got care of yes sir sir I am Dr. Kusuma from mass communication Jame Wilia I wanted to know do you also give us some kind of grading system which is yes universal not universal are the courses or is it no there is no hardwired grading system initially when you set up the course structure you say how many grades you have that is the edx and the current swam structure as we evolve it will definitely change as required you have to say that first is what is the passing level you can say 50% you can say 60% you can say 40% the slider can be moved from near 0 to near 100 then in the passing level it is A, B and fail and in three grades in which case it is A, B, C for example in thermodynamics I think we have said 50% is the passing grade 50 to 70 is C grade 70 to 85 is B grade above 85 is A grade but these partitions are sliders like the widths of a spreadsheet you can always go there and move them back and forth from universities introduction to communication like they used to give twice you can repeat this quiz yes those the number of attempts can also be but you know there is something like true or false you should give only one attempt because if you give two attempts everybody will get different so you have to be careful in giving the number of attempts there is the moment you provide four attempts everybody is going to get now this is now we are getting into some technicalities the first one is really technical we want to provide a transcript it is possible in some courses that you first create a transcript then essentially say that of course you may say slightly different I attempted to do that but immediately gave up because what I write and what I say is essentially the same thing but not as read out there I have this habit of not stopping my thinking process even while recording that is a disadvantage I should be able to switch off that or maybe create a script and get some you know it may be a professional presenter to do this one person specified that look if you want 100,000 people to register for your thermodynamics somehow get Amitabh Bachchan to present it for you you just give him the script and all that but that is not we are in the teaching business we are not in the acting and presenting business so I think without saying so everybody would agree that the one who teaches would be the one who presents it then you have to work with your so these are the technical and admin team not much of an admin here I suppose or if there is an admin that is absolutely transparent I do not even see that so you have to match wavelengths with the studio team and MOOC lab team because we depend on them so get used to working with them their timing their frequency of thinking etcetera and make life comfortable for them also for you the transcription software we use something called dragon maybe there are competing products available there are some question marks here for example in my case I train the dragon the dragon is a computer program it starts off by giving you some about 45 minutes and then it knows what that text is so it matches your style of speaking and all the all phonetic characteristics with it then it I think the second part of the training is you create your own passages if you are teaching thermodynamics read out something from a thermodynamics book and make that audio file is given to it it will convert it into a text file our job is to correct that text file and provide it back to dragon so that it keeps on learning I found that in the first week the transcription was not that good but second third we one of the other colleagues who is working with me dragon has not been able to make sense of his speech whereas the third colleague it seems is okay there are still some issues and dragon is essentially made for the western accent not the Indian type of no sir actually I have used it only we need to train the dragon actually yes but the experience is some people you know pronunciation it understands even after training well some people for some reason it doesn't I don't know why I don't know the innards of dragon can I ask a small question yes sure when you do the video recording and the teacher lectures and you have a transcript and say the lecture is from a textbook or an article is that copyright or okay now if you are suggesting that there is a teacher who actually reads the textbook as a part of the course teaching I am saying if that happens if that happens please change the teacher or or specifically say I have not seen any teacher who will repeat verbatim whatever is stated in that transcription the transcription does not appear as a separate document the transcription appears as subtitles in the movie so in the video of the teacher the subtitles will appear there you might have seen some videos that's the only place where the transcription appears the transcription is never to be given as an independent course material if a course material has to be published on the page it has to be reworded and re-read okay at least for my course on thermodynamics the transcript is I think for any transcript only the characters which are available on a standard keyboard are accepted so subscript superscripts are out so when I say the system goes from a state 1 with temperature T subscript T1P1 with bracket open T subscript 1, P subscript 1 bracket close brackets don't come there this is let the state transit from an initial state T1P1 so initial state space T space 1 that type of a thing comes okay so if somebody reads the PETA theta is written as T-H-E-T-A even if you have a technical typewriter that is not allowed a standard typewriter capital A to Z lowercase A to Z and whatever you see 0 to 9 and all those hash at exclamation mark comma code that's it whatever you see on an ordinary keyboard no special character at all that is a requirement in transcript now if like that it doesn't matter because hardly any special characters come but in technical thing for example if you provide a course in real analysis the reading through the transcript would really be fun even the mathematician may not be able to understand it so now your own backup support that is T-H you have to set the undergraduate and post graduate level so I just grabbed them in fact I got too many I had to say no to quite a few but then again you have to have a sort of a narrowed initially and then wider later type of a network you should be able to talk you should be talking only to one or two T-H the leaders of the pack of T-H they in turn should be talking to others like queries from 12 people at a time all those queries should be filtered by the senior T-H or senior T-H we just have two of them for thermodynamics and if you have to prepare any specific type of documents prepare them for example thermodynamics we prepared steam table based on temperature not listed densities are different so we just have to create it according to our idea more on the subject because as you said that you are teaching a thermodynamics for engineering students right thermodynamics used to be taught to the chemistry students to chemistry students yes thermodynamics used to be the content basic philosophy of the thermodynamics remains the same right so whenever you are targeting the audience for the thermodynamics are you targeting the audience whether I am targeting audience which are first engineers and then mechanical engineers that is why the name of the course remains ME-209 X because that's the so let me let me add one more thing it's an important question are not expected to create new courses for the general population of the country this entire effort to take the best courses that we currently teach in our universities and to make them available to students that is the limited endeavor there is of course a lot of merit in saying that some common themes which are required across fields or across domains should be done that will happen one more thing which I stated but it is not emphatically stated perhaps you say I mentioned that there is a move for recognition of the course credits eventually by the students who take the MOOC courses there cannot be any credits associated with the course if the course that I am offering is not one of the regular running courses of my universities which has a whatever be the intent of that particular paper or subject as it is taught becomes the intent available to everybody those who will benefit from that intent are welcome to attend others may join for partially benefitting but that is not our concern our concern is that our statement to the public is that the best courses from Indian universities will be made available to students so for example that's why what he said is very important it is Amy 209 there could be a CH 209 where a chemical engineer who thinks differently from him about how thermodynamics should be talked about would be teaching that if that course is offered most probably many mechanical engineers across the country may not take it some may take it to benefit but many chemical engineers so be it and that is one of the reasons why we are saying select a course which is likely to appeal to maximum number of people but the course should be taught exactly the way that you teach in fact that is your expertise and you should announce along with the course you should announce the structure of that paper in your own university not every university may give credit some may have marks for the paper whatever so you should say this is the subject which is taught it has whatever 100 marks and it's typically even it is taught in the university the evaluation or assessment comprises of one mid semester one end semester two tests or whatever for the benefit of the MOOC students this has been mapped onto this but if effectively it is a 100 mark paper and if your student getting 78 marks qualifies to get an honors then a MOOC student getting 78 marks out of 100 should definitely be considered equivalent to be an honors so there is expected to be a corresponding match between how these students will be assessed because for those students even though they may get an honor grade now but they will get a grade so for example in our courses we have announced both of us that the evaluation will be like this and depending upon the marks that you score out of total 100 weightages have been given so for example in my course in order to pass you must score minimum 40% marks then you have to define A grade B grade C grade D grade E grade like that which is in consulance with the kind of grading that I would do for my CS11 course unfortunately in IIT system another teacher who teaches CS11 next year might change the grading pattern that is the academic freedom that we have that is the reason why the course is created and offered it has a kind of the teacher the lead faculty member and the team of faculty members would be remembered would be tacked to that course that is the course offered by them even in the university the syllabus may change later whatever one but we are not talking of creating a new course for general public interest we are talking about offering a course probably CEC will be the only exception where CEC does not but it is preferable if they also pick up a course which is being adopted by someone for teaching which is being used by someone for teaching so it is very important that credits be associated with the course they should be defined and described in the introduction so basically we say when this course is taught in IIT Bombay it has whatever six credits it has so many and you are expected to spend so much time so that is it is it is not immediately relevant what will people do with 100 mark paper here and a six- rate course there and an eight- rate course there but eventually when the country moves towards the recognition of these credits across universities which is the fond hope then that time these kind of moment credits foreseen right at the launch and credits or at least some evaluation is it foreseen right at the launching time and the second is if this is going to be done would it be a good idea to simply convert all of them to a standard normal distribution and make the grades on the basis of that so I will take a second suggestion first there would be a good idea to convert the university you and I and all the people here have neither the competence nor the authority to do so this is a matter that will have to be decided by the larger university system across the country this is being debated in many nations it is not that all nations have these things only United States has succeeded in setting up an independent university goes to that agency and says give me the equivalence in fact Pradeep Parma pointed this out to me and this is so well done because in the United States students often do some courses in one university and they go to some other university and now that university has to decide how many of these grades are to be accepted what is the equivalent so invariably they go to this agency and tell us the equivalence and they tell each university as a body which examines every such transfer request so it is not uncommon for example for Bombay University to say that this student from Calcutta who has done become second year there and is coming to become third year here there is such a body which is the chief controller of examiners or the board of studies or whatever this body examines the courses completed by that student compares those with second year in Bombay University and will say out of these 15 courses that you have done 13 we accept these two you will have to do again when you but you are admitted to be become third year in the become third year one course which is running here now you have done it in become second year there we accept now this equivalence is actually established in individual cases as per the current universities what he is talking about in generalizing we all hope that it will happen now my experience with this normal distribution is not good at all so I taught courses at IIT and of course the class size that time was small when I was teaching I no okay so I think if the course becomes very large then it can go to normalcy I have taught a 60% course electromagnetic fields I often used to get bimodal distribution there were a lot of people around 40 50 all gone basically yeah so I don't in fact we have a new rule for grading for large courses where we have 500 students and so on when you have 500 students actually the distribution is not as screwed as you think and we have a very simple rule the teacher decides the A grade and the past grade the past grade is required to be announced by the teacher ahead of time it works but the teacher may marginally reduce it if he examines the borderline cases and things that there is enough evidence for the student to have known the minimum required so for example I have announced 40 but I have the freedom to say alright 37 will also pass but once I decide that 37 is the passing grade and I decide let's say 86 as A grade then everything else is automatic and whatever is that point that becomes A B B B C D etc and it is not uncommon to find people losing a grade or making a grade by 0.5 whereas when you have less number of students you can study the distribution look at the break points and say this is the point where there are two students with almost three marks in the large courses and for the MOOCs courses I would strongly recommend use a linear structure where you define affran that this will be course grade again this is the stable system starting now it is not necessary for you to define your grading system at the point of announcement but it should be announced preferably about two weeks before this total marks which are typically allocated in your own university for that paper should however be announced because that is public knowledge information and that is how people will do I think if it comes to simply honor of completing a course or not completing a course I can understand but I think in a MOOC kind of situation when you start giving that is going to be resolved see in my opinion and particularly the way I look at the scores which are coming up in my thermo course I find that I should not use the proper Hindi four letter word for this which is used in advertisements but there is absolutely no meaning in the grades which you get online for these courses so the best thing is the blended learning is and resources are available online may be these quizzes etcetera you take as practice quizzes but the actual evaluation for grading purpose is done locally by appropriate local authority so by the way let me clarify he is referring to only one aspect which is heavy discussion on the discussion forum which gives away clues to the question about people being dishonorable that is not seen by either of us in fact if you see the total number of students who attempt those quizzes a large number of people don't actually the total number of people who attempt quizzes or questions are much fewer these are one of the reasons why you say that there is a dropout rate so many people don't complete it it doesn't happen honour code is by and large respected that is our observation honour code is by and large respected how much credence you would like to give to the marks code for an actual credit transfer was the question but as I mentioned yesterday I do not see any which way that a university will automatically accept a MOOCs credit as the credit for my university there is no way the only way supervision of an examination where the examination is conducted at a fixed time and not open for one week now when you run a course on online the primary objective is to benefit a large number of people from learning the grade is incidental on the pure MOOCs kind of but when people want to take MOOCs courses for the purpose of gaining credit which is recognisable obviously there will have to be an aspect I have not circulated the my blended MOOCs paper to you but an important aspect of recognition of such grades is proctoring or supervision of all online evaluations by people when we run a blended mode in CS101 that is what we do when students appear for online quizzes they are supervised and their fixed time quizzes a 20 minute quiz share with you a very unique experience that we had when we we said we will conduct a back to back test because we had more students and number of computers and back to back test means I don't have to change the quiz paper because one set of students goes out of the lab the other student comes in there is hardly any time for people to discuss with that assumption we started a back to back first time it worked well mechanically found that the second batch had too many right answers and that is because when the first quiz was announced from starting from 8 it was visible everywhere on the internet so several students in the hostel had actually seen that quiz before they came for the second back so it is what one facility which we desperately require in the MOOCs platform is to ensure that we can make a portion open not to general public but to a selected group that is almost impossible because the current structure is all people are equal all people are students so these are some of the problems yeah my question is slightly different it is with regard to the pedagogy that we use for a particular course for example for us in a course the pedagogy can be a mix of some lectures and for example case discussions the entire class may be on discussion of a case so is that kind of a pedagogy possible for a course on MOOCs it is possible provided you announce a discussion and the discussion is moderated through discussion forum and you say that next three days this matter will be open for discussion people will make discussion points and you then have to give a concluding thought on that discussion it's not as easy because this is not face to face please understand that there is nothing synchronous possible on this yes sir everything will be asynchronous now the pedagogy that you mentioned has evolved because of our assumption that we are teaching a set of people who are physically here we will have to think of adopting that pedagogy differently many of the current thinking in teaching and learning are changing as we adopt in asynchronous philosophy that is one of the reasons why I believe that blended mode we have to break