 In this first session, I am going to give a brief introduction on the Aakash project and Aakash on education. First of all, most of you have been conducting workshop with us, but there are at least about 100 remote centers who have registered of fresh and they have directly become Aakash workshop, Aakash project partners with IIT Bombay. They do not have the experience of running these workshops. So, very briefly in about 5 to 7 minutes, I will recapitulate the way in which these distance workshops are conducted. So, for those friends who have come here for the first time and of course, as a recapitulation to all others, I will tell you the background that we started the distance education program in IIT Bombay in the year 2000 after experimenting for a couple of years. We used VSATs for two-way communication initially and then subsequently, we switched to internet. Typhact sponsored conduct of workshops in our early days for two years. We gained experience of how to handle interaction with multiple remote centers and so on. And then we launched a plan called trend thousand teacher plan. So, under this plan, we would try to provide a two-week training to teachers of a particular chosen engineering subject and this workshop would be conducted like regular IST or QIP workshops, which you conduct for 35, 40 people. We said we will conduct it for 1000 people simultaneously. So, for this purpose, we identified remote centers such as yours and we permitted engineering college teachers from all over the country to register at one of the remote centers closest to their place or state. They would assemble at these remote centers about 35, 40, 50 teachers at one remote center. The modest opportunity of a two-week workshop was that we will deliver lectures from IIT Bombay which will be taken to all the remote centers as you have seen on the ABU. These lectures would be interactive, people could ask questions but in the afternoon the teachers who assemble at the remote center would be conducting their laboratories, tutorial sessions, etcetera, etcetera in the local remote center. So, this is a blended mode that we use, a synchronous interaction in the morning, interaction could be limited but the delivery of good lectures from the top of the rank faculty members who are available, not necessarily from IIT Bombay from anywhere else and the local conduct of the tutorials and the lab sessions which will permit exhaustive understanding by the group of people there. We did two innovative things in this to ensure that at the remote centers of tutorials and labs etcetera are conducted properly and in tune with what has been decided, we started conducting a one-week orientation program for the coordinator. So, for each workshop we would appoint a coordinator who himself or herself would be a faculty member in that subject and we call all of them here, we try to understand from them what is the syllabus in that particular course, what are the question papers that are asked to the students and then collectively with our faculty core faculty for the workshop will decide what would be the syllabus for this training course. So, that the workshop that is conducted is meaningful to the teachers, we try to get a blend of two things, one what is needed in the local places to teach that particular subject and two what we believe are the best practices in IIT and similar systems so that they could also be incorporated. At the end of one week the coordinators went back and then spent time in setting up the labs etcetera which have been agreed upon and on this side the faculty members will prepare the course material according. About a month or two months later the actual two week workshop will happen for which registration will take place, people will assemble at your remote centers and as I said lectures will be given from here. Now all the lectures are recorded including interaction, all these video recorded lectures are released in open source they are available freely for anyone not only your teachers who participate but the other teachers students everybody open source is open source. Additionally we introduced one more innovation that the teachers who assemble at these workshops at each remote center we form them into teams of three, four, five people each and we say that each team should work for two more weeks at the end of the workshop and prepare some contribution to the knowledge in that sense. So, it could be a set of question bank, it could be a lecture, it could be a video recording, it could be a project idea whatever that group feels. These submissions have to be given in the course model which we use extensively and it is accessible to all of us. So, the local workshop coordinators then confirms that all the teams from his or her remote center have submitted those assignments, only after those assignments are submitted the certificates are given for participants. So, there is a this is a rigorous program, there is not a conventional two week workshop where you just go attend of course, learn something and come back but here you are expected to contribute back, this is the theme of the workshop. We started with a few centers, we actually started with four centers in 2000, I do not know whether those people are here, VRC in Akpur is here, somebody from VRC in Akpur is here, that was one of the first remote centers. JSITS Indore was another, I think Nandhe was one, the three or four centers with Vsats, then we switched over to internet and we started using AVU system which is developed by Amruta University. And then we started increasing the number of remote center. So, we started this program in 2009 and up to May 2012, we had trained about 9400 teachers in ten workshops. IST president told me that to train so many teachers, they would have to conduct more than 500 workshops. So, that is the advantage of this process, the feedback that we received was very good. And then MHRD asked us whether we can scale this up. Because as you all know, there are 4,000 engineering colleges and the number of engineering college teachers is humongously large. So, even with 1,000 teacher at a time, remember we trained them only in one subject at a time and each teacher as you know in your place would be teaching at least two or three subjects. Very rarely, you have the luxury like IIT system where a teacher may teach only one subject every semester. So, there is a large amount of training that is required and therefore, we planned a mega workshop. This workshop was conducted on introduction to research methodologies in June, July 2012 in which 8,400 teachers participated. We wanted, we called it a trained 10,000 teacher program. We actually had 12,000 teachers registered, but we could not scale up the number of remote centers. You know, ultimately you should have 30, 40, 50 people at each remote center. But we permitted larger numbers because this was a peculiar requirement of the day. People wanted to get familiar with the research methodology. So, out of 12,000 people who registered, we could accommodate only 8,400 teachers in 168 remote centers. But we also permitted 1,000 ME students in the local colleges to attend. This was a great success and we got an excellent feedback. We confirmed to ourselves and to the world that when the number increases, the number of interaction requests do not increase linearly. They do increase and there is a problem that we need to solve. How to address this interaction request? But essentially, this project was successful. We have now made a proposal to MHRD to scale up and to empower 10,000 teachers at a time. We plan to run 15 such workshops over the next three years. The model is refined. First of all, we have one more hub institution. IIT Bombay is a hub. There is another hub institution, IIT Kharagpur, which has joined us. They will be conducting six workshops. We'll be conducting nine workshops over the next three years. We also propose to establish 10 nodal centers. Now, these nodal centers will not fall from the sky. Some of the well-known institutions amongst yours will be chosen and will be made into nodal centers. The idea is that each nodal center will coordinate with about 30 to 50 remote centers, which was the model in which we found that interaction was the idea. So the interaction and the supervision of the activities, etc. Problem solving for the local remote centers would be handled by the nodal centers. And we propose to have a total of 500 remote centers. We already have about 350 remote centers. We'll be advertising again for additional nodal centers and we'll rope in about 500 remote centers. It does not mean that every workshop that we'll conduct will be run from all 500 remote centers. That is not necessary. A particular subject may be conducted only at 250, 300 remote centers, but still there will be much larger than 50 or 60. That is one. Secondly, we also expect some workshops to be conducted simultaneously. So while IIT Bombay is conducting a workshop, let us say on thermodynamics, IIT Kharagpur can be conducting a workshop on basic electronics. The idea is that these two subjects will be attended to by different faculty. And therefore the centers could be divided. Some centers could simultaneously run both workshops if they have the infrastructure. The idea is to engage teachers. Please understand the difference in, this is not a distance education in the conventional sense. There is a deep interaction between the teachers here and the teachers who are participating. There is extensive interaction between the group of teachers who assemble at the remote center and the remote center coordinate and the paraffin. And I believe personally, like many of you would believe, that teaching learning happens best through interaction in groups. Individual learning is not very easy, although it is facilitated by the technology and that is what we are trying to do. Unfortunately, the final meeting of the project approval board has been postponed. Otherwise, I would have been able to give you good news that this proposal has been approved. I can do that. The Standing Committee of the NMEI City has approved this proposal. Tomorrow is the project approval board meeting. My colleague is going there and hopefully, by tomorrow evening, we will know if the government has approved this proposal. If this proposal is approved, there is special provision for some equipment and something for each of the remote centers. So far, we have not been giving any grant to the remote center for equipment and so on to remote centers. They were doing it on their own. We usually provide a little bit of honorarium for the coordinators and the other associated faculty and technical staff who help us conduct that workshop. And of course, we fund the TADA requirement of the participants if they are outstation candidates and so on. But here, we have proposed that we should be able to give at least some notional support to each remote center to set up the best of real equipment. Because we have seen what happens that many times, for example, during the AVU testing, we have found that the connections are not proper. The PA system used is something that is used in marriage functions and so on. It is not a professional PA system. The connections are made in such a way that eco reverberates all across the country. So please remember that if I am interacting with you, whatever we two are talking to each other is heard by everybody else, all other remote centers. And if there is an eco and there is funny thing happening, all the funny things are seen by all participants. But be very careful. Camera, some people put a webcam there and anytime a teacher has to ask the question, the teacher walks one mile from a corner, comes to that webcam and stands in front of that. That is not how a class is conducted. See, for example, in this room, if somebody gets up and asks a question, all of you can see that person. And I can see all of you and the person. Now that is the model of the group activity that we do. So you need good quality cameras. Now obviously not all colleges have been able to create an adequate priority for this activity and provide funding. Some colleges have genuine problem in providing funding for an activity, which is not conventionally part of the regular academic requirement. So I have proposed to the government that rather than spending a lot of money in creating just hubs, which government must do, additionally they must support engineering college. There has been an argument because see, even if you take 2 lakh rupees support to each college, now there are 500 colleges I am talking about. So 500 into 2 lakhs is 10 crore rupees. Now the government does not have problem with 10 crore rupees, but disbursing 10 crores to 500 colleges which are not government colleges, etc., etc. I have tried to answer those questions. Hopefully we will have a good news by tomorrow. But this is the plan. And if this succeeds, these 500 colleges, please remember these 500 institutions will be more than 10% of all the existing engineering college. And I expect each of these engineering colleges to emerge as a hub, eventually conducting courses on your own for neighboring colleges, not necessarily engineering college. For example, teachers in accounting, teachers in history, teachers in geography also require training. Who will give them the training? The experts may come from science college and arts college and commerce college, but they have no technology. And in each town, your engineering college holds the key to technology. You understand what internet is, you understand what audio video is, you understand how to put these things together. So eventually I expect each one of your colleges to start offering such workshops locally in the town on internet for other subjects. And there is no reason why you can't extend it to trans school teachers eventually. In short, you people represent in my opinion the initial thirst of a completely new innovation in the Indian education problem. And depending upon what you do, a whole lot of things can happen in the regions around. So the nodal centers, the ten nodal centers which are to be established, I expect them to first become the hubs. And the remote centers are to be strengthened in technology infrastructure as I mean. There will be further refinement of pedagogy, which I'll speak about later. These are some of the early remote center thing. Those of you who are coming here for the first time, this is how all the participants across the country will be seeing your center. When somebody from your center asks a question or is interacting, all the country will be able to see this. That is the advantage. This is essentially a single logical classroom across the country. The better the bandwidth you have, the better the connectivity that you have, the less the noise that you have, the greater will be the clarity. These were the remote centers. This map was drawn by my colleague, Gaitonde, who jokingly called it the railway route map of India. So you can see frontier mail going like this in Madras Express, Calcutta Mail, and rest of the places, they were hardly any centers. We have tried to, we'll populate now the, not 250, but 360 remote centers that we have, out of which 250 today have volunteered to become our partners in Akash Project. That is what I'm going to talk about. So this last workshop was inaugurated by Mr Kapil Sibyl. These are some of the snapshots from there. You can see very nice facilities at some places. In some places, participants attended from the lab itself. So they had a PC in front of them, and they attended the workshop. These are either ways up to you. On that day, Akash 2 was unveiled, what we call a soft launch. I'll speak about the Akash project, but this was, one tablet was, four tablets were given notionally to the principles of four engineering colleges where our remote centers. The lady here's the, so many engineering colleges, so many. Now I come to the tablet computers. Most of you know about it, so again this will be a revision. For those of you who are not completely familiar, tablets are primarily excess devices. And they got introduced in the world when Apple introduced iPad in 2010 as excess devices. Connect to internet, surf the web, do some mailing, et cetera, et cetera. But essentially, excess the contents, participate in the chat sessions, do Skype, whatever one. These were excess devices, primarily. Now, the estimates are that the tablets are likely to proliferate the whole world. Already the sale of PCs all over the world is declining. The sale of tablets is increasing. The tablets were very costly at one point in time. But anticipating that the tablets will reach the masses much sooner than the computers will, just as mobile phones have reached the masses in India. The government of India started saying that can we use these devices for quality education in future. So, the Indian L-CAD project, L-CAD is a short form for low-cost excess cum computing device. A stands for excess cum computing, L-C is low-cost. We are not ashamed of saying that we want low-cost devices because affordability is not very good. If India was very rich and if we would attempt effort, that's a thousand dollar solution. I bought an iPad to recent, it cost me thousand dollars. And I could give it to each one of 300 million students of the country, no problem, but we don't have that kind of money. So, we are looking for affordable solutions and that is what the government launched this project. Affordability is very critical in our education. Please understand the dilemma. We want the best cutting edge technology to be used to improve the quality of education. But we want that best technology to be affordable. These are contradictory points and we are attempting to do that. The nation's main plan was to fold. Fundamentally, it wanted to offer tablets at subsidy to all students in the country. You would have heard about it in the newspaper, 50% price. Students have to pay and they will get these tablets. But this plan envisages that before that, some effort should be made to understand whether giving these tablets will make any difference to education or not. So, for that, the government launched the project, which is called the demonstration of the usage. And this particular project, which is called the phase one of the project, was launched in 2009, 2010, actually. 2010 it was launched, 2011 it was rectified. This was to purchase one lakh tablets, deploy them in engineering colleges, and see how engineering colleges are able to use these for quality education. If that succeeded, then there would be some sense in government spending money on, you know, 5 million tablets and then 10 million tablets and so on. It is expected that the ecosystem of tablets in this country could grow to about 20 crore tablets in 5 to 7 years time, provided the tablets are inexpensive. So, the Akash was actually launched, which was called, now it is called Akash one, but the Akash was launched in October 2011. There was a lot of confusion because this was launched by our sister institution, IIT Rajasthan, which was doing that project at that time. Primarily, as a part of this one lakh teacher empowerment or one lakh tablet deployment in engineering college. However, when it was launched, the ministry announced that it will be given at 50% subsidy and so on, so forth. And then tablets started coming in the market, saying Akash tablet, whatever work. So, there is a lot of bad press you might have heard because initially there were some problems with the device. Those of you who are familiar with the development of new embedded systems will know that such embedded system evolution requires a lot of iteration. It is not that overnight something can work because we are not talking of ready-made Apple tablets. We are talking about very low cost tablets. The tablet cost was $49 at that point in time. IIT Bombay was given this phase one project in March. So, there were some problems IIT Rajasthan then submitted to the ministry that look we have intractable problems we cannot carry on for some reason and they returned the project to the ministry. Then when ministry scouted around, I will also tell you the reason why I volunteered to take that project. I realized immediately that the objective of this phase one project was not merely specifying technology and getting tablets. It was actually to deploy these tablets in engineering colleges and try to see whether they can be used for education or not. Now, fortunately as all of you know we were running these workshop programs. So, we had first hand relationship with so many engineering colleges. At that time we had about 100 engineering colleges. And we had already thinking of ramping it up. So, I told the ministry that it is possible for us to create 200, 300 remote centers who may be interested in participating with us in this Akash project and therefore give us two years time we'll be able to develop new innovative applications and contents and we'll be able to demonstrate whether this makes a difference to education or not. That's the unique advantage that IIT Bombay has and that is why my director and dean said all right for that we can go ahead and do it. This project came to us in March, 2012. We placed the order in May, 2012. The specs were strengthened further. So, some of you might like to write down the current specifications. They have undergone a change even after we placed the order. The tablets now have a one gigahertz processor. Remember it started with 366 megahertz processor in 2011. When we got it, we increased it to 700 megahertz and then to 800 megahertz. Now it's a gigahertz processor. The memory was 256 MP, then now it is a 512 MP RAM. So, one gigahertz processor, 512 MP RAM. It has a capacitive touch screen instead of a resistive touch screen which was originally there because we believe that capacitive touch screen will make a better interface to people. And finally, it runs Android 4 ice cream sandwich as it is called, the version of the operating system which is the latest. We would not have launched on this ambitious thing with all of you unless we are sure that these tablets work properly. They do work properly. Two of them have been given to you. Unfortunately, the deliveries in large scale have just started happening because we had to certify the samples which they gave and so on and so forth. This launch formally is slated on 11th November. So, let me tell you 10th and 11th November is our two day workshop. However, 11th November happens to be the education day for the country. It is celebrated in honor of our first education minister, Abdul Kalam. So, Abdul Kalam, if you remember, was the first education minister. Now 11th November annually there is a function held but this time the ministry has decided that because of the success in Akash development, there is a one and a half hour function in Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi where the president of India will be launching Akash. And I naturally said that if the president of India is going to launch Akash too, then instead of having only 500 or 1000 people in Vigyan Bhavan attend that function, why don't you permit more than 13,000 teachers participating in the workshop also to attend? So, this has been agreed upon and all the participants of this workshop from 11 o'clock to 12 30 on 11th November, the only session will be the education session happening in Vigyan Bhavan. I have further requested the president of India and the other dignitaries to possibly interact with some remote centers so that the country gets a feeling that people at different places in the country are actually watching. So, we have selected some names. I'll be interacting with those people separately. Like some of you will remember we did that during the previous thing. Of course, we will select different centers this time but we'll try to be representative of the country. So, this is I think a great historical occasion when so many teachers will be participating in this workshop. So, 250 colleges are our R and D partners. I think 230 only have been able to come. Each college is to use Akash for classroom teaching and for final year project. I'll elaborate this further. For this purpose, we will be giving about 100 tablets to each college give and take some depending upon the classroom strength. Please remember that when we conduct those trained 10,000 teachers workshops in December and May June, all the tablets issued to that college must be made available to the participants of the workshop because they will be using them. But during the working semester, the tablets will be given for a classroom teaching. The idea is to create innovative educational applications and contents and not necessarily innovative applications only for engineering education. There are some final year students who may do a project on how to teach geography in Telugu to nine standard students. Somebody may create an application on how to teach geometry in Hindi to students of say 11 standard or fifth standard, whatever. So innovation should be across the bound because we believe that the tabs will proliferate across the country. I will conclude by saying that there are disruptive changes which are happening. This is something which many of you may not, may have realized but not articulated. Look at the entire education system that we have today. What do we offer to our student? If I am a student and I register for a course in your place for each semester, what do you guarantee me? 40 lectures per subject, so many subjects, one hour lectures, so many tutorials, so many exams. In short, you are guaranteeing me a fixed time. What should you be guaranteeing? You should be guaranteeing me a fixed minimum knowledge in that subject. It has not occurred to many of us that when we guarantee a fixed time, we are unable to guarantee a fixed minimum knowledge because the learning capacity of each individual is different. Different people learn at different pace. We just shrug our shoulders and say, sorry, we can't do much. The smarter students will get 80%, 90% marks. The people who are laggards will fail. Somehow for 200 years, we have been comfortable with this scenario because nothing else could be done. Given the positive, one teacher, so many students and the fixed regimented time available, nothing else could be done. There was no technology. But with the advent of this technology, can we not suggest that the laggards could work for two hours extra at home? But not in isolation. The technology will help them to give them the material, the guidance, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore, for the first time in the history of the world, the nations and societies are in a position to try and guarantee a fixed minimum knowledge to every participating student. There will be differences. Some people will learn more, et cetera. But the question of failure should simply not arise. Absolutely. Because the minimum knowledge can be guaranteed. That is the ambition. There are efforts like Coursera Khan Academy, you might have heard of, spoken to us, we'll speak about it today. But there is a new pedagogy that is emerging to ensure focus on learning and not on lectures and delivery. Please understand that even today, many students in your colleges are attending coaching classes rather than your lectures. And that is because they believe that is more to the tune of solving problems in the exams and so on. The best lectures today are available on the net. So the lecture or lecturing and delivery of that lecture material is no more the important point of the education, not going to be in coming year. That will be available. The important point will be prodding the minds, igniting the minds, discussing with them, solving problems. Some of my colleague teachers have already started experiment. They don't teach in the class anymore. They announced that in the next lecture, the question answers will be on this particular topic. Please undergo a one-hour presentation which is recorded and available on the mood. So people have to listen to that lecture in advance and come only for discussion. Things are changing very drastically. Eventually we'll discuss all those things. But that is where we believe that the Aakash tablets could be maximally utilized. We'll unfold how we should become ready. My contention is are we even trying to be ready? I think all of us are still attempting to strengthen the traditional systems of one-hour lecture, tutorial, how to do that better? Of course we must do that. But additionally we must do something else which hopefully technologies such as Aakash tablet will help us establish. So Aakash project is one such attempt and you all will facilitate creation of a completely new teaching learning paradigm starting with using Aakash for strengthening the present system, because that is the beginning. You can't demolish a present system unless you create an alternative, then only chaos will result. So first we try to strengthen our system and then we continue doing something better. So this is the background. Welcome to this, you people are special now. You're not merely conventional workshop coordinators. You're Aakash project coordinators. That means you will be guiding at every step. You are colleague teachers and students in your college who are going to work on Aakash tablets and this association is expected to last at least for two years. That is the expected. As I said, in this proposal we have requested the government to permit us to strengthen the basic infrastructure required for running projects on Aakash. Now since we propose to use Aakash tablets for conducting quizzes in the classrooms, you will require Wi-Fi access points in one classroom that you so designate. You will require a small server in which you can keep all the open source contents which will be synchronized with here. Tentatively therefore I had said in my communication earlier that we'll be supporting you to the extent of setting up a server and Wi-Fi access points. However, this workshop has overtaken our planning. So for this workshop we would expect there are no labs in the main workshop. The only lecture sessions. So I'm sorry I've taken some extra time but I just spent two more minutes to tell you some decisions that we have taken about this workshop. So far as I said we have about 13,800 registrations. Now some places we have as many as 150, 170, 120 people registering. Ordinarily all of you have committed that you'll be able to conduct a workshop for 50 or 60 or 70 teachers depending upon A the classroom and B the labs that you have. Luckily for this two day workshop there are no labs. There will be a moodle session in which the participants will have to give a feedback and appear for a quiz. Ordinarily this is conducted in a synchronized fashion across the country. But again for this time there is no need. So on the final day on Sunday afternoon when people are required to give the feedback they can go to the labs in batches. That means even if you have 50 to 60 computers at one time and you accommodate 50 people to appear for that moodle and then next 50 as long as they all finish by that weekend by that end of the day it's okay with that. We have therefore decided to remove the restriction on the number of participants that can come from every college. There will be one limit. And that limit will be decided by you. The total number of participants you can reasonably accommodate in the auditorium or the hall where you have arranged and tested the AVU. If you have tested AVU connectivity to a small classroom and now you suddenly say okay I'll shift to this larger hall. You are welcome to do that. But it is your responsibility to ensure that the PA system, the internet connection, et cetera et cetera works as perfectly as it works in your. If you can do that find out the largest hall and get as many teachers to participate as possible. Last but not the least another decision which has been taken because this we are contemplating. You'll remember that we had mentioned that the teachers who participate in this today workshop and also complete that assignment, our team assignment for two weeks are likely to contribute subsequently in our efforts to guide projects. It need not be electronics or IT or CS. It could be mechanical engineering anybody because educational contents, educational contents and everything. So therefore it would be nice if these teachers had a tablet with them for the entire two year duration. Now remember in my earlier mail I had said that hundred tablets will be issued primarily to the students. What we have now decided is all the participants of this workshop who complete the two day workshop properly is not just for the sake of attendance and complete the team assignment at the end. Each one of them will be issued a tablet. The idea is that your colleague teachers will be empowered to think differently by using it, trying it out. The idea is that you do not know where the creative ideas will come from. So we try to spread it. I hope you like this idea. Yes. Okay.