 It gives me great pleasure in welcoming you to this workshop today. With respect to the scenario outside and the present circumstances the city is facing, it is really heartwarming to see such a turnout for today. Over the course of today's program, we will be discussing the various details and activities that went through during the July to October course run and about the process changes with respect to what will be upcoming in the next course of January 2017. Good morning. It's a great pleasure to have you all and even more importantly participate actively in the process of NPTEL. My name is Mangalasundar Krishnan and I was one of the co-ordinators of NPTEL for the past 12 or 13 years from the moment the project started until this year and that's because two years or three years ago we were so happy with the the young energetic and dynamic team that some of us decided that we should go back to the benches and watch and the club. That's the best that we could do. The current NPTEL team let me on behalf of all of you, Professor Andrew, Andrew Tangraj, Professor Pratap Haridas, Mrs Bharti Balaji and all colleagues and staff members of NPTEL team and professors from various colleges. Now the problem is how much time do I have? I don't want to take a large amount of time. Ten minutes. Ten minutes. From now, right? Okay. From now ten minutes. No, you have to be very careful because professors should not be given infinite amount of time to say what could be done in ten minutes. Most important is NPTEL is in the change phase. Change phase meaning it's moving forward faster than when we imagined 10, 12 years ago Professor M.S. Anant who was the former director of IIT Madras and Professor Anupree from IIT Kharagpur, Professor Gautam Biswas from IIT Gopati now. He was, he is Professor of IIT Kanpur. He is the director of IIT Gopati now. Professor Shagankar who was IIT Delhi director, Pune University Vice Chancellor and now back in IIT Bombay and stalwarts. Many, many such stalwarts were there and at that time I was like Andrew when I joined that team. I was very young and I didn't know what to say. Very often said things that were not liked by many others. But you do that often. Even now. You do that often. It doesn't matter. I think you have to say exactly what you feel you should. I think that's the openness with which this whole team has built the project. We have many inputs, many suggestions, many discussions and a lot of professors wanting to do something but then ending up with something else, all kinds of experiences we had. But in the end all of us were concerned with only one thing. The quality of engineering and technical education, the quality of science engineering and technology education today with management, arts and commerce also being part of the NPTEL, the quality. I think that nobody wanted to compromise on that. All the other things were extra. As we have 10,000 teachers, we have 20,000 opinions, but at the end of the day we have to agree that the students who come out of our institutions are they are getting the best of what we could offer them. And in that sense I'm really grateful to all of you that you have joined the team on your own voluntary efforts. We know that financially this is not the best alternative. It's not where you can make a lot of consultancy and money and otherwise. But the gratification and the social justification that this project demands in terms of the number of students that we have in the country and the number of students that we are not able to produce with satisfactory quality, given all these things we have a very large challenge to take up and to continue this process. MOOCs is a new phenomenon, recent phenomenon, massive open online courses and the NPTEL online courses also began adopting MOOCs to the conditions of India, to the conditions of the universities in India. And therefore, if you look at the MOOCs, of course, edX and Udacity, you will see a lot of differences between those methods and the methods adopted by NPTEL, where first of all we have a physical presence of all of you. I don't think it is there. MOOCs and other committees have faculty members meet physically as often as we do. Second is the Procter Certification. Thirdly, they get us online examination and this examination is not always a multiple choice question. It can be more than that. Therefore, we believe that the students who study and who come up on the examination do face the challenge that they get good question papers and they have to go back home with the feeling that they should learn more, not with the feeling that they have learned everything. So that difference is important because it's your urge to learn more and more as you go along is what drives you to discover eventually. Therefore, it's very, very important that we keep the quality of the course at the level at which it should never be compromised, but rather raise the students and help the students and also enable the teachers to measure up to that level and then go beyond. Therefore, if there are complaints about some NPTEL courses being unduly difficult or some courses being too many lectures and so on, please bear with us. I think that's what the faculty members in their wisdom decided as minimally required for understanding the topic. So please help us in this process. Most important, of course, many of you have traveled from outside the state at a time when Madras is not in the best possible position to welcome all of you. You see nothing but trees all around, not as they should be, but as anything other than that they should be. You can see even inside the campus if you walk around, I mean it brought tears in some of our eyes that 400 to 600 trees have fallen over the calamity that we had, but that's nature. It's not something that we can do anything about it. What we can do is that despite all the odds that we have, and I think similar last year also around this time you had a similar meeting and many of you ended up traveling by various means. You postponed it, but even then some of them were stuck in Chennai. I mean, this city loves you. Once you are here, you can't get out. I tell you, with great difficulty only you can get out. Okay. I mean times have been changing, but those are external circumstances. Internal to us is our own education, our own quality, and our commitment that the students who are with us look up to us and see that the faculty members who teach them, teach them with heart, teach them obviously with mind, but even more importantly that these students get to the next stage of their employment or their higher studies or whatever career that they want to, that they are able to do that. I think to that extent we have to help. NPTEL now has taken up the MOOCs. We hopefully will convince the ministry with the SWAYAM project that credit transfer be formally approved and the credit transfer be left to the individual institutions to decide. Not every course offered in NPTEL will be a credit transfer to every institution. I think each and every one of you decide which courses are relevant to the teachings that you have in your institution and therefore is it if there is a better course being offered, can we use that and then substitute that with our efforts in other courses and so on? So please think about it. Credit transfer will be something that MOOCs is hoping will happen in the next two, three years. UGC has formulated guidelines, but those guidelines are not formally published yet. I am supposed to be also with their committee in formulating the credit requirements in the next month, but these discussions will go on in the meanwhile, autonomous colleges, autonomous institutions and institutions which feel NPTEL is helping them. Please do not think that this is a one-way street. Things are not just coming to you. Please give it back the system, the inputs that it needs. In terms of course materials, if you think that you can offer a better course, please write. I mean everybody challenges the next person to say that I can do better and I think that is important, that dialogue is always open. We have a process by which faculty from outside of the select institutions that is about 20, 30 institutions for whom we have funding mechanism. We have a process to follow, but the process is to the best of my knowledge is fair and open and will have a review and therefore please give us back your input and of course a meeting like today will also tell us the success stories as well as the stops that we have which would be corrected, the mistakes that have happened or things that could be avoided or things that should be done better. All those inputs have to come from you each and every time some 100 courses or 50 courses are run because all of us have the right intentions. We have the will, but at the end of the day having to manage 60,000 students or 70,000 students at a time and more than 700 faculties, a team of just about 45 to 50 people cannot just do that. Everybody else has to help us. We have other AIT team members here from AIT Delhi, AIT Kanpur and AIT Karakpur. I think those are the people who have come and hopefully we will have more and more of you taking MOOCs into your own domain. Please do the best of what you can. All courses are free and if you think some other courses need to be developed, please write to us. We will also try to look for faculty members, but I am so relaxed and happy. I do other things, but the fact that NPTEL team has been passed on to your team, which works much better than many of us, is the only message with which we can happily go back and relax and continue to do our job. I wish you all the best during your stay here and the best inputs that you can give. Please give it to all of us. We look forward to interacting with you. Thank you very much. Thank you, sir. Now I request Dr. Andrew Thangaraj, the project coordinator at NPTEL, AIT Madras to address the gathering. Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for coming once again. I know for many of you it would have been a long travel. I am happy to see so many faces here. This is a huge crowd. I remember, I think the question in the audience was reminding me. About two years back we had a small meeting in a much smaller hall with about five colleges talking to them about what to do, what are the various things we can do and I can say largely we have been much more successful than what we thought we would be and that's in a large part thanks to the participation of local chapters in NAREF. I think there's no other way to put it. You'll see some numbers that represent now. You'll see that service. Okay. So the day's workshop, as we call it, has several parts. We're going to start with a presentation from me on about some numbers, some statistics on what happened in the previous run, how many people participated, how many people passed, how many poppers were there, et cetera, et cetera, just to get to know where we are. So that's how we'll start. That's how we'll start. And then there are various things that will unfold. We're doing some new things now which might be much more interesting to you. We have begun to rate colleges based on the performance of local chapters, et cetera, et cetera. So we're doing some exciting things. So let's see how all of that goes. So I'm going to start by presenting some facts and figures from the previous course runs just to put in perspective where we are and how we can proceed. So let me be good. That's the agenda. So I'll skip this part. So like I said, the first part is reporting. I'll present general statistics about all the course runs. I'll focus on the previous course from a little bit. I'll talk about local chapters, how many local chapters there are. Can somebody guess how many local chapters we have? Exact statistics they have. So how many workshops we do update about the September October exam, some things that happened at that time. And then the newest thing is rating of local chapters. I think that is our latest effort. I think we'll talk about that. So I think the slide is something that mostly the credit goes to Prasamangas as he's sitting here. You should all clap. Give a big round of applause for the tremendous efforts they've put in. This is not easy to do. Let me tell you. So managing two faculty, getting two faculty to work together in IIT is a tremendous achievement. You know how big faculties are and how they think and how they act. Getting thousand plus courses recorded from faculty in multiple institutions, that's not as simple as you look. So I think the credit goes to the kind of person that Prasamangas is on the list, how he's able to bring people into the project like this. And the numbers are there for everybody to see. I don't have to say anything more. It's one of the largest viewed YouTube channels, largest viewed educational channels, huge number of content subscribers. And even today, it's not wrong to say that if you really want to learn any subject rigorously, properly, completely, you have to look at NPTEL. There's really no other resource. You go to other resources, they'll give a high-flying introduction, very sweet-sounding words. You really don't learn anything. If you want to learn something really deep, you have to come to NPTEL and that's universally acknowledged today, not just here in our country. So since 2014, like Prasamangal mentioned, we've been doing NPTEL online certification and this is along the lines of MOOC, MOOC became very popular at that time. And then we didn't want to stop just with online courses. We thought it adds value. If we do an exam after that, those people pay a small amount of money, come into the center, I think most of you know this, but anyway, I'm just repeating it for the benefit of everybody. And then after that, we give a certificate from the IITs to say that this is what has happened. So this has been creating tremendous value in the country as you see so many local chapters are interested in this, so many colleges are interested in this, so many students are interested in this. I'll tell you how some numbers soon enough and this is caught on like wildfires since 2014. So a brief slide about what NPTEL is, it started out as a project from MHRD but now I think it's a big enough organization that we should have a vision and mission and some things that we want to do to accomplish this vision, that high-axing vision. The vision definitely is to provide high quality, affordable education at large scale to a country of this size. I think that's the overall vision and we don't want to do it in isolation, it's one group of people talking to another group of people, but we want to do it together with all the colleges and universities that are in our country do have a two-way dialogue like Prasamandha mentioned and then improve the quality. So the mission is to do all those things and we've been doing all of that largely and we're continuing to do it and looks like the government's coming and going, we will continue to do this in the future as well. So let's look forward to working with you on that. Okay, so let's look at this number of courses that we offered in March 2014. We started with one course, it was a Programming Data Structures Algorithms course. It was just one course that was offered in the last semester, July semester, we had 104 courses. That's the way in which this has increased and you can see the exponential sort of increase in this graph and that shows a lot of things to me. It shows that faculty in many institutions, including IITs and so many other institutions we work with are believing in this model. They think that this model of conducting courses, conducting exams, working with colleges and universities, taking this content to everybody is a good model, that there is belief in that model and this is huge and I think going forward we can sustain 100 courses a semester quite easily. We are looking forward to 100 coming up in January as well, shortly, hopefully next week, we will have the courses in place for enrollments to happen. So we are looking to sustain this 100. I'll say a little bit more about how else we will sustain later on. And if you do a split, I think this is what is really interesting. You can see the difference between other portals and what NPTEL does. If you look at how this 225 courses split across departments, you will see a wide-ranging split. We have aerospace engineering, we have physics, we have ocean engineering, civil engineering, quite a few courses in all these areas. So this is again tuned to what our universities and colleges need, not just the popular courses that everybody can take. So of course the leaders tend to be humanities and computer science because these cut across all disciplines, but there are also other disciplines as well. And to show you how other IITs are entering the picture, you can see the number there. IIT Madras is still slightly larger, but soon enough I think IIT Kanpur and IIT Karakpur are going to overtake us, they will catch up. IIT Delhi are here, hopefully Delhi and Bombay will also get into the mix in a big way. And then we'll have larger numbers from all the IITs. And then you'll have variety. If you have a particular course, you don't have to do it with one professor, you'll have a choice of, okay, I don't like this guy, I like that guy, better. You'll have all those kind of things also working out. So it's nice to see that involvement. We don't stop with IITs. There are other institutions that we work with quite closely. People whom we know very well, they've also been offering courses and they've also been very successful. And we're happy to have such institutions partner with us as well. Okay, so in terms of numbers, it's good to see, okay, so this clip is not so critical, but anyway, I'll go through with this. There are 12-week courses, 8-week courses, 4-week courses. The 8-week courses tend to be most popular. And this trend is going to continue, I think, going forward. So this slide is interesting. This again shows the exponential increase in the popularity of our site and what we are doing. This shows three numbers. One is the number of people who enrolled in the course. That is the blue line you can see. It's very, very long. A lot of people enroll. Then red is the number of people who registered for the exam. And that number tends to be small. And there's nothing to feel bad about it, because that's natural, because anybody who goes to the website keeps on it and enrolls. You don't know whether they know the subject, whether they want, can learn, cannot learn, etc. Whoever can enter registering for that exam. And that number is fairly big. It's about 10% or so, 5-10% in many cases. It's not bad, I think. It's pretty good. In fact, anyway, I don't think we can handle more than that many people writing exams today. So we're happy that many people are writing. And then the green is the number of people who are certified. And that tends to be, again, a slightly smaller fraction. It's about 67% or so. Two-thirds of the people who are registering for exams are ending up getting certificates. It's very nice. We have quite a reverse standard now. We don't give certificates to everybody now. Initially, we were doing it. Now, we are not doing it. So we have to get 40% marks, minimum. It's not easy to get. And that sets the standard. And I'm really, really gratified to see that people across the country, from big cities, small towns, small villages, colleges from there, people are coming up and earning certificates. And that's really nice to see. And that definitely, last part, thanks to the colleges who are showing active interest in doing that. So the numbers, again, are there for you to see more than 10 lakh course enrollments in a little over two years. And then 65,000 people who have actually paid money and registered. Really, when we started, when I go back to the early days, I never imagined anything remotely like this. It's very hard to see, foresee these kind of things. It's kind of interest from faculty in offering courses. It's kind of interest from students and colleges in taking this up in large numbers. And it's been very, very nice to see. So another important figure to track is exam attendance. So you see these online exams happen every week. I don't know, bank exams are the most popular exams, many of you might be aware of. The typical attendance tends to be 40%, 50% in those exams. People just don't go and write. Now, the attendance in our exams has been above 80% or maybe even 85 to 90% in some cases. That again shows that the model we are doing is reasonably okay. We're not just throwing people blindly into an exam. We're giving them an opportunity to learn the subject, give them some confidence so that they feel like they can actually go and write the exam and pass it. Only then people are going to go and write, right? So otherwise, the money is not so big for many people to come in and write, but still people are coming in and writing. And that's again, a good thing to look at. Another important number is how many people are passing, what fraction are passing. If that is very dismal, again, it shows there's something wrong we need to fix. That number is hovering around a two-thirds mark. That again is a good achievement. Maybe you think 100% should pass, but I think that's hard to achieve today given the state of different people who are writing the exams. Even the level at which these courses come, frankly. Some of these courses are quite intense, very heavily mathematical and analytical. We don't expect everybody to pass, but still the effort itself is great. And then finally, two-thirds passing is a big number. I don't think it's a small number. It's a fairly big number given the way the courses are being held. Here is another statistic, which I think is very, very crucial. We asked people who did this course the reasons for taking the online course, and 33% said the College of Faculty encouraged them to enroll. 33% people said that. Another equal number said they wanted to explore new domains of knowledge, etc. But then the one below is what's more interesting. How did you know about the course? 76% of them said their college told them about the course. So I think that's again, it's a great indication that at least enough college management and faculty are believing in this process, which is again great to see. We're very, very happy with that. Hope that continues going along. And the next slide is again amazing, I think, in engineering in this country. The number of girls who wrote the exams in October are more than two times the number of boys who wrote the exams. I don't know. I mean, it's really unbelievable. And the last three runs, the girls have been greater. Number of girls who wrote the exams greater than the number of boys who are writing the exams. So this is highly, I mean, it was very surprising. The first time I saw this data, I asked them to check. Second time, again, I asked them to check. This is the third time that this is coming out on the screen. This is really hard to see. I don't know why this is true. Maybe some of you have. Okay. Okay. I mean, it's, I mean, maybe I'm not familiar with the IIT system. It tends to be a little bit cute, but it's nice to see this. I was really, really, really happy to see this. There's also another angle at which you can pursue when we talk about it later. Okay. So here's the other part. We looked at the people who are writing exams. How does that split? How many, what fraction are students? What fraction are faculty? What fraction are others? And here again, there is a, there's a very, very nice picture that's emerging. About 10% of those who register tend to be teaching faculty in engineering colleges and other colleges, which is again a very nice number to see because faculty development programs and other things are one of the highest priorities for IITs and MHRD and AICT and everybody. And this, while whatever its objective might be, one of the crucial objectives is achieving a faculty development, whether we like it or not. So 3,700 plus faculty took this courses, took these exams in the last semester. That's a huge number. And there's also a fraction of others who are neither faculty nor students just doing it. And that's not a small fraction either. It tends to be a few hundreds or maybe even a thousand in some exams. So people just in outside world, you know, whoever they are, they just want to write an exam and get a certificate for whatever they want. And these are all nice things to see. We'll have more specific questions on this later on in the presentation with you on that. But these are the numbers. Yeah, yeah, many of them. Many of them. Not just industry. I can give you statistics and I can give you some anecdotes. There is an inspector general of CRPF who wrote one of our exams on information security. There is a general manager of Chennai Metro who writes every exam. Every semester he'll appear for two exams. And he's a fairly senior person where he just writes exams. And he says, increase your fee to 10,000 rupees. 1000 rupees is too less. That's what he says. So you should tell him you pay the fee for nine other people. So anyway, so all walks of life. I think if you actually write an exam next time, maybe in Chennai, Chennai tends to see a bigger mix these days, you can just walk around and see who are all writing exams. You see different age groups, different people, different motivations. It's amazing to see one amazing statistic is for the last exam, there was a PhD student from VVT Vellore. She had delivered a baby five days before the exam, five days. And apparently her doctoral committee had approved the course for her editing and she desperately wanted to write the exam. So she wrote to us. So she came to our office, the NPTEL office. We had a special exam for her with a five-day old baby with her old family. She was feeding the baby in the middle of the exam. So it was all I don't know how to describe. I think Kamala is the one who administered the exam for her. So people are really using this opportunity in so many different ways and that's nice to see. Okay. So what about how well are people doing in these courses? Let's look at a few statistics in that direction. Our score is out of 100. So if you look at in the 225 courses, how many courses had somebody getting 100 marks? The highest marks, how many courses had 100, 115 of them had a person getting 100 marks. So there are people doing well in these courses and there are one or two where the highest mark is only 50. Okay. So you can see at the bottom here, there were two courses where the highest mark itself was 50. So maybe those were courses that didn't go well or just different kind of level, etc. So we do look at these things. So these numbers once again are ways for us to tell you that we track the statistics. We look at the statistics of every course, how students are doing, and we get back to faculty, give them feedback on this, help them improve their course content, etc. And you can also participate more actively in this process. So here's also another statistic which is interesting. How many toppers were there in courses? So we have a way of deciding who toppers are. Roughly top 5% of a course are considered toppers. That's how we think of it. If you look at the number of toppers, there was one course which had 250 toppers. You can see out there. That was technical English for engineers. That's actually pretty good. It shows English is a pretty popular language. I think a lot of people know that. Then there was one other course which had 160 toppers. That is introduction to modern application development. Again, it was a very popular course. It happened last time. We're hoping to rerun it. And there were 24 courses which just had one topper. So what this is telling me is there is a big spread of courses. Some courses are easier than the others. Some courses are more difficult. Which is all good. I don't want a situation where all 225 courses has everybody as toppers. It's also not good. You don't want to have a situation where it's easy for everybody to become a topper. Then the entire process gets undervalued. So it has to be had enough not too hard. These are all good statistics in that direction. Once again, we keep monitoring these statistics. If you see that there is some big fluctuation, there are problems there. We do point it to faculty. We get back to them. You can see there are three courses that had no toppers. In fact, it turns out in our study, and this is also generally understood, a first semester calculus course is easily the most difficult course in all engineering colleges. It's not even science colleges everywhere. This is just a commonly felt need. First semester calculus course, basic calculus. It seems to be a big lacuna. We are trying to fill that gap. We have not succeeded. Hopefully we'll get a good course in that direction going soon. And the other important point I want to make is about forum activity. This is again an important metric for us. It shows how active the course is, how active the students are in asking questions. And here is again an opportunity where I would say you have to motivate your students to ask questions in forum. I think this is very, very important. The reason is in class, when a faculty is teaching, they see the students. And if some concept did not get through, they see that the students are staring wide eyed or they're not understanding something, et cetera. In a MOOC, when the faculty is delivering the lecture, he doesn't have students in front of them. He's not going to be able to see it. So the only way to give feedback about concepts and not being able to understand something to the faculty is to ask questions in forum. I know this is hard thing for many of our students to do. In general, our students are a bit docile. They're encouraged to keep their mouth shut, et cetera, et cetera. But please do the opposite. At least in our forums, you should encourage them to type in questions. Now, there are a lot of other things that happen. First of all, feedback to the faculty is one thing that is achieved by this. Second thing is another important quality that your students have to develop is how to communicate professionally in English, how to write an email or post a forum question in a proper manner in good English so that somebody can understand and answer the question. So these are important things for your students to pick up. A lot of people will see that they're not employable for that reason. They cannot communicate through email. Today, communication through email is absolutely vital. And you can teach them in so many different ways. But one very nice way to teach them is to encourage them to post questions in our forum. These are technical questions about the course. Let them post it in the forum. Let them claim the question in English in a short way. They can't write a long story. They should write it in a short way so that somebody can understand what their doubt is. Then in somebody's answers, they should be able to read and understand. You'll be surprised how most companies work today. You don't know something. What do you do first? You go search in Google, right? That's all. Most of the work today gets done like that. You search in Google. Okay, you search, but you'll be able to understand what the answer is, right? Somebody has put up the answer. You should be able to read and understand. Again, this quality is built up when you participate in forums. So encouraging your students to participate in forums is a big and important thing. And we are looking at means to incentivize that. You want to track how many people are participating in forums and see if we can give some incentive back for participation. We're trying to do that. But again, in spite of that, you see a huge amount of participation. For instance, in introduction to modern application development, there were 800 forum threads every week. It's a huge number for people to respond to. And faculty are happy to do that. Please encourage your students to actively participate in forum. That's very important. Okay. So now how are NPTEL certificates used? NPTEL exams and certificates, how are they used? Primarily, and most importantly, they have to be used for credit transfer in colleges. This is absolutely vital. The more this happens, more easier it is for students to take it up. More serious students will be automatically. So very important. And IT Madras has already done this. All our students can take up to three courses for credit through NPTEL online courses. Now, IT Madras has already done this. Our senate has already passed it. It's approved. We are also encouraging other IITs to do it. Other IITs will also, I think, follow suit. It should be possible. This is easier to do for doomed universities and autonomous colleges. Quite a few of them are already doing it. You know, some names you put up there. Maybe we are missing some names. Quite a few are doing it. What is slightly more challenging is for affiliated colleges. Affiliated colleges, some of them are using this for internal marks. They're trying to get around it in that fashion. But we are trying to push the affiliating universities also to accept this for credit. I think this is absolutely vital. A few faculty are targeting people who do well in their courses to come and spend the summer term with them, do some research, etc. Some faculty are doing that. We are also trying to put in place a process by which project positions in IITs for recruitment for them can happen through NPTEL online certificate process. We are trying to put that in place. Once that comes in, we'll also have a place where faculty, if they have project positions open, will be able to advertise that in the NPTEL websites and students can respond to it, etc. So we're trying to do all of that, work with people. Of course, we're also trying to work with companies. We'll talk about that. That's a little bit more complicated. There's so many other factors. But primarily, I think credit transfer is very important for Soprata. He has an entire slide on it. He'll talk in more detail and we'll have a more interactive session and find out what are the challenges to get that implemented. A few other things that happened, some unsavory things that happened in the past thing. Many of you might have noticed sometime in the second week of October, our site went down. It took almost a month for us to bring it back up for various reasons. Apologies from our side, but we are also heavily challenged in terms of computers, coders and general server staff. It's very hard to get good people in that. You know how it is. So our server got hacked on October 11th, but we didn't lose any data. There was no problem with data. Just the front page got hacked and it took us a long time to bring it back up. But now I can say that we have good support staff now for server, and we have brought up all our servers and they're all up. Mostly up. Some features maybe have to be turned on here and there. But one redeeming feature in all this is our MOOCs portal, onlinecourses.npital.ac.in. We'll pretty much never go down because it's managed by Google. So we don't do anything with it. So it won't go down. So there's no problem there. But other portals where we interact went down. We are trying to do our best there and apologies for those delays. I think even last few days because of the Cyclone app server was down again. So we are trying to avoid that as well. We'll probably have replications going on. So this is one issue we had in the last couple of months. Okay. So I think that's basic reporting on facts. I want to move on now towards local chapters. Just tell you how many local chapters we have, how they interact with us, what some statistics related to that. These are extremely crucial as well. So I'll go through them a little bit. So first is numbers. We have apparently 700 plus, but this total is adding to only 685. We are processing. Okay. So because of all the server being down, etc., we've not been able to process new requests for local chapters. And every week, we get about five or six requests for local chapters. That's the rate at which the number of local chapters keeps increasing. We have 700 plus. No, we have one in Andaman and Nicobar islands. We have one in, I don't know, Meghalaya. In fact, we have one in Ecuador. Some country we have. I don't know how active they are, but they are one local chapter. They wanted to be a local chapter. In fact, there was a faculty member from university in the US. There are a lot of universities in the US, slightly second or third year university. He was visiting us. I was talking about all this. He said, can we become a local chapter? I was very impressed with that. So maybe we'll expand that presence internationally as well. So a lot of advantages to being local chapters, all of you are local chapters. You know what the advantages are. It's good to have so many of them. And this has been widely popular, hugely popular effort from our side. Okay. So here are some numbers to show the role that local chapters play in making this entire process work. Okay. So if you look at the number of people who registered for the exams in September 16, out of 23,000 roughly, 17,000 came from local chapters. That is 76%. Okay. So this is something, this is phenomenal. I think we can all applaud ourselves for this effort. I think this shows something. I mean, there's a lot of people who say a lot of things about colleges in this country. People are not interested, but this tells me that colleges in this country are serious. They're serious about education for their students. Many of many colleges are very serious about giving students good education. I think that's, that is something that I think is valuable to see in these numbers. Even in October 53%, so overall a significant fraction of exam registrations are coming from colleges. And that's very, very nice to see. And this is a, this is a very good way of doing it, because colleges can keep the students motivated, keep the students in the process longer, help them do things better. I think this is, this is tremendous to see. So in terms of regions, maybe because IIT Madras started at Tamil Nadu, tends to be the leader, far and away, a huge fraction of registrations for exams comes from Tamil Nadu. I wonder why? I think that should be a challenge to the other IITs. You should work on this and make it better. And the South region tends to be stronger. I think it's also natural because quite a few southern states have, have a lot of colleges, a lot of students go to engineering in the southern states. So Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala put together, really constitute the majority of engineering colleges in the country. So it's not very surprising. But nevertheless, I think this picture will change a little bit going forward. I hope it changes a little bit going forward. But anyway, but this is the split rest of North Tamil Nadu is a large fraction and then all the other states are coming in. So workshops is another thing that we do. We keep getting a lot of requests for workshops, but I have to point out that there are just three of us traveling for workshops and we try to travel as much as possible, but we also have some serious commitments, more domestic commitments being at home, et cetera. But in spite of that, we have done so many workshops. And you can see in the South where IIT Madras is, we've had so many different workshops. We've covered more or less the entire map. We've put on all those points. We're trying to look at loopholes, places where there are no workshops and go and find colleges there and do workshops. That's what we're trying to do. I know all of you would like to host us for a workshop, but that's something that many people have desired to do. But you have to understand that we do have concerns. We are trying to do it. We're trying to do one or two a month going forward as much as possible. It's hard for us to do much more than that. You have to convince, I think you have two more people because I'm younger than them, so I just walked in. You have to catch them and convince them to come and give workshops at more regular intervals. The more faculty we have, the more easy it is for us to conduct workshops. It's harder for just all of us to travel, same group to travel every time. But still, we've had January to December 2015. 2015, we've had 30 workshops. In 2016, we've had 27 workshops. That's a huge number of workshops that we've done and this does help in getting the world out. So there are some workshops upcoming. On Jan 4th, we're doing one in Kakinada. I don't know the exact college name. On Jan 11th, we're doing one in Tiruchangoda, which is near E-Road. So these are the two workshops that are upcoming. We are trying to have a workshop in Chennai. For the Chennai colleges, this was a need for a long time. We will do that. So the registration for this is through our website. If you go to our website, you can register for these workshops. If you're anywhere in this neighborhood, please do go ahead and do that. It would help you in understanding how the process is. It's a much more detailed workshop. We do presentations individually and much more detail tell you a lot of things about how to do things. Okay, so now comes maybe the most controversial part of the proceedings of the day. So this is a need that came from the local chapter colleges. We're not just doing it on our own because of our fancy. People said, you know, when NBA or NWAC comes into the college, they would like to say something to them in terms of, I mean, so one question that apparently they asked is always what do you do with NPTEL, etc. So to answer that, these days you can say we are a local chapter. Yes, of course. But then, how well are you doing as a local chapter? That becomes the next question. So if you have an official way in which we can recognize you as being a very good participant as a local chapter, then that helps you in your college with things like accreditation, but also otherwise also. I mean, we're also happy to do it. We're also happy to look at our local chapters who are working very well and then recognize them in whatever way we can. It's not very hard for us to be doing that. But then we wanted to have a reasonable way of doing this. Now, I mean, there are a lot of pressures, right? So one thing is, there might be a local chapter which gets like 2000 people to write exams. Yes, that's great. We are happy to see that kind of involvement, but that's not the only thing we want to recognize. Then it becomes almost like everybody is forced to write an exam. We don't want that. We want people who are comfortable with the exam. Course itself is free. Anybody can enroll and learn for free. Let everybody learn. There's no problem there. But let the confident people write the exam. The reason is we want to see how many of those who wrote are able to become toppers, are able to pass first of all, are able to get a life certificate, are able to get gold certification, are able to get who are able to become toppers. We wanted to give more weightage for that. Even if you have fewer people writing exams, if enough of them become toppers, we wanted to recognize that because that I think is a better way of going about it. But at the same time, we also want to make sure awareness is there for a large number of people in the college. But performance should also matter. So in many ways, we wanted to keep academic performance in NPTEL online courses as the criteria for this rating and recognition. Because there are so many other ratings going on. And once again, remember, we are rating the local chapter in your college. This is not a rating for the college or any system. That's why I said it's for the local chapter. And it's based on the academic performance in NPTEL online courses with weightage given suitably, depending on who it is. So I'll describe how that weightage went and what we decided to do, et cetera. I think please don't be upset if your rating is not the highest or anything like that. There's always a chance to improve. Take it in that spirit and hope this is interesting to you. Okay, so first let me recollect how we do our scoring. So our scoring for any exam, any course that we offer, 25% is from assignments, 75% is from exam. So that's how we do it. And for the assignments score, we don't take all the assignments. If it's a four week course, we take best three out of four. If it's an eight week course, we take best six out of five. It's a 12 week course, we take best eight out of four. This is how we do it. This is how we compute our final score. And there are various types of certificates. So if your consolidated score is below 40, you don't get a certificate. That's the first thing. If you are between 40% and 59%, you have successfully completed the course. That's what we call a successful completion. If you are from 60% to 89%, we say you're an elite category. If you are 90% and above, we say that you're a gold model category. So this is the different categorization. And beginning September, October, everybody wanted something called topper. Again, based on feedback from a lot of people who wrote to us saying, okay, you say, like gold, it's not clear what we are. It's good to have topper. Topper, everybody knows. So we decided to do a topper seal on the certificates. Again, roughly top 5%, there is a more careful way in which we did it. Because if there are only 10 people writing an exam, we can't say 5% and all that. We have to be careful about it. So we have different metrics for all that. But topper roughly means top 5% of the people who wrote that. So the topper's certificates will also indicate how many people wrote the exam so that you can see how many you did that. So here's the logic for toppers. It's already here. I thought it was not there. So to be a topper, you have to get at least 60 marks. If you don't get 60, you will not be a topper. So if a course has nobody above 60, no toppers. And out of the number of people who are certified, this is not number of people who register for the exam, number of people who are certified, if there are only 10, less than 10 people, there'll be only one guy who's a topper. If there are 10 to 50 people certified, there'll be two people who are toppers. 50 to 100, there'll be five people who are toppers. And if there are more than 100 people certified, we'll say top 1%, 2%, 5%. So the total number certified will also be displayed on the certificate. So total number certified will also be displayed on the certificate so that people can know exactly what bracket they belong to. So this is the logic for toppers. Hopefully this is clear. I've explained the logic for different certificates, logic for toppers. So this is how our certificate will look. You can see the student name, course name. It'll indicate online assignments, it'll indicate the proper exam marks. It'll also indicate the total number of candidates certified in this course. So everything is as much as possible squeezed into the certificate. That's how the topper certificate looks. Okay. So for the toppers now we will have recognition in our portal. In the NOC portal, we'll indicate who the toppers are. You can see this is a course on satellite communication systems, especially interesting because the top 1% is actually a faculty member in, she's here. Okay. Oh, okay. We should clap hands. And the top 2% is actually a person from Cisco systems. And then in the top 5% you have somebody from Delhi Metro and three other people from colleges. This again shows a wide variety of people who take our exams and benefit from it. It's very nice to see, very glad to find this. Now I come to the important part of rating of NPTEL local chapters. Okay. So here's the formula that we have come up with. This is a formula that our program committee has approved. So it cannot be changed for this term. Okay. We cannot change it. And it will also likely to change. So don't try to mug up this formula and try to do something around this. We will look at it very carefully in April and our committee will approve some other formula for rating. Okay. So it'll be similar. Okay. So this is what the general rating formula will look like. But I'm not saying that this will be the exact formula. We'll be looking at it. Okay. So for every local chapter, we look at number of people from that chapter who are present for exams in that local chapter. Now they have to be present. They have to come and write, not just register. Okay. It doesn't matter if they're registered. Only people who are present for that exam. We multiply that number by 0.1. But we will cap it at 10 points. You cannot get more than 10 points in that first category. Okay. Even if 1000 people write exams, you'll get only 10 marks. Okay. You won't get more than that. Okay. So this is to not emphasize that too much. Okay. And then we give a weightage of one for the number of people who successfully completed among this across all courses. It doesn't matter what course they took. Number of people who successfully completed as get a weightage of one. And number of people who got elite certificates get a weightage of two. Number of people who got gold get a weightage of 10. And number of toppers, each topper gets a weightage of 20. Okay. So this is our logic. So you can see we have emphasized performance. We've also emphasized numbers. Okay. Numbers also enter the picture. It's not that numbers don't enter the picture, but they enter it with the weight which based on performance. So it's nice to see in our triple A rated college is the best rating. There is a college which had only about 200 people writing exams. And there's also a college which had thousands of people writing exams. So it makes it meaningful for different types of college. There might be a college which has only 500 people total. Not everybody is going to write exams. So we wanted to be fair in terms of performance. So this is a very good formula we found. And going forward, we will keep tweaking this formula and it's not going to stay a constant, but this will be the rough form for the entire process. We will not change these weightages too much, but this is over there. So if you want to go to very high ratings, you have to really get toppers. So you have to get toppers and courses. That's really, really important. So we emphasize that a lot, not just large numbers writing exams, not just sort of number game. At the same time, people have to do well. Okay. So one person writing just counts as point one. On the other hand, if the person even passes, that's one weightage. So it's very important for them to have the confidence and do that. So this is the formula we used. We came up with a score and we ranked colleges based on this score. And that's what we did. We ordered the colleges in increasing ranks according to this score. And we didn't want to give the rank number itself because I think this is still an evolving formula. We want to be very sure that number one and number two mean something. Number 11 and number 12 mean something. I'm not fully convinced that we can go to that level of granularity based on the score yet. Maybe we can do it later on. So that's why we've consolidated the ranks. Rank one to 10, we will get, we'll get a triple A rating. Okay. So I don't think there is much to distinguish between these top 10 ranks. That's what I mean when I said I don't want to distinguish it beyond that. There is a different score. You can ask for the score. They might give you later on, but this is the rank one to 10 is triple A rating colleges. 11 to 50 is double A, what we're calling. And 51 to 100 is rated A. Okay. So that's the rating for our college. And this will be put up on the website. We will also make it visible on your local chapter website. We'll also give you certificates and plaques to take back, showing that you have certified this. Now remember this will change semester to semester. Your certificate will also indicate that it is only for that semester. Okay. It'll keep changing. And like I said, the criteria will be tweaked depending on how the courses are. Because one of the things we're looking at is some courses might be very, very easy compared to others. And being a topper in a difficult course should get more credit than being a topper in an easy course in some sense. So we want to, we want to look at that also. Let's not enter the formula yet. It will enter, I think the next one. So we will, we will look at it that also very closely. So this is our rating. And I think, can we switch to the, okay. So we wanted to recognize the colleges that are rated to play who managed to make it here. We're giving away a plaques. I would like to request for Subhaskar Ramu to maybe address the gatherings. Hey, good morning to all of you and party, welcome to our campus for this meeting. I think last year also we had one like this one. So I'm happy to see such a large number of colleagues from colleges. Are they pretty much mostly Tamil Nadu or mostly Chennai? Good, people were very good. So thank you all for taking the trouble to come. This is a, we had a review of NPTEL, the PIC meeting, program implementation committee meeting a few couple of weeks back and we were reviewing the online courses program. And certainly it is taking off and share numbers, number of students who are taking the course and the number of students who are taking the ride in the exams. Everything is increasing dramatically. We are also learning a lot. We are learning about how to engage with the colleges, with the students, with the teachers through these local chapters. The local chapters seem to be a very important part of this whole new approach to learning. And it's therefore evolving in a different way compared to how MOOCs and such courses have evolved in other parts of the world. China also is a very big program. But I think it's important for us to find our own sort of sweet spot of how to do it, so that it works for our students and our colleges. And that's what we are in the process of discovering. I can see the many things getting nailed down over the last one year and some more will happen. Very important aspect of this is your participation, participation of the colleges, the teachers. I think one person offering a course, no matter how gifted the person is in terms of teaching, it can only be effective up to a point. The local chapters, the teachers, the partners in this are very, very important. And as we discussed last year, I remember all of you can continue in a major way. There is an enormous amount of interaction that is possible in which you can all contribute. And course of time, I'm sure, some of you will offer very good courses too. So this is a moment. If we can make it happen, we can really expand this. It can probably benefit a lot of our students. I saw the list of courses that are coming up in the next few months. I can see that a lot of most or good many of them are sort of what you would call elective courses, typically. I saw a few courses which are core courses and some which are traditionally known to be tough core courses. So I think these are the right things to do. The core courses that for some reason are considered tough, though they may not be, and a lot of electives. These are things that we think we can encourage students to take. One of the things that I want to share with you is that we are beginning to think about, now that we know a little bit about how this might work well, though as I said, we are improving, tweaking it all the time. We are beginning to look at how we can work with these universities and try to work out some method of credit transfer. Some autonomous universities are already doing this. So we are beginning the discussions. I think your views on all of this, your thoughts will be very valuable. If we really want to use this resource when assuming that we figured out how to make it work, then we should enable students to take some of these courses of credit. And otherwise, we are simply piling on more and more work on students who already have a fair amount of load from the universities they belong to. So that's something we have to look at. And I think that will be an important aspect to scaling the numbers. So we need feedback from you and from students about courses that they think where this might be very useful to the students. Electives will definitely be useful because electives are always given by people who know a particular subject. They are not available everywhere. So instead of giving a few electives and making students choose one of them, we can offer a whole large number of electives. And in this mode, if the exams are conducted in this manner, there's no real reason why universities should not encourage this. And at least the elective courses allow the students to explore and maybe discover some subjects which they really like. But even for the core courses, as a companion to whatever teaching is done in the universities, in the colleges, especially with the partnership of the local chapters and teachers, this could possibly be a good force multiplier. So this is sort of the model we're looking at. And for some other things also can be useful, some soft skills, some language, English language and so on. Programming some of the some of the skill-based courses also this can be very useful for our students. So this is going, you know, our conclusion at the PIC meeting was this is going in the right direction and we have to now scale this further. As you know, there is going to be a nationwide platform. There is already one called SWIM. It's just a platform on which different institutions all over the country will be offering their courses. And the NPTEL courses will also migrate to that platform in your course. It will have no impact on what we are doing, just that the platform will change. But we shall have to work out all these things about, you know, how might some of these courses be credited by the students and how can we increase the contribution from the large pool of teachers who are also familiar with these courses and who are doing, especially the core courses. And how can we help students numbering in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands to understand some of these subjects better. This is a new tool that really allows us in some ways to scale but also has some limitations. The whole thing is to figure out how to work, how to exploit the scaling and how to work within the limitations. So I hope that in the course of this interaction today, as well as your interactions online and throughout the year, we will figure out more and more how to make this thing work and break some of the scaling barriers that we have faced in the country, at least as far as engineering and science education is concerned. So welcome you all again to our institute and thank you all for coming despite the recent difficulties with the cyclone and so on. And I hope you have a good time here, hope it's productive and I hope you all make lasting friendships. Thank you. Good morning everyone. So we will start with recognition of the local chapters that have been dated AAA. We'll start with, this is the list, this order in which the colleges will be coming forward to receive the plaques. So kindly be ready. Firstly, we would like to call upon University of Engineering and Management. They are from Calcutta, West Bengal. The SPOC is also here, Mr. Sukalyan Goswami. The Dean will be receiving it in place of the SPOC. So we are very thankful to them that we actually have University of Engineering and Management and Institute of Engineering Management from Calcutta. We requested them asking, can you travel to Chennai? We have this function and they most happily agreed and they're here with us today. We'd like to call upon Madhna Pali Institute of Technology and Science. The local chapter representative Professor Parthiban is here. He's the SPOC of that college. We partnered with them for over a year. I think we've gotten about 1000 students every semester from them. So they're pretty serious about the NPTEL courses. They do credit transfer too, I guess, for the courses. We'd like to call upon MEPCOSH LENGK Engineering College, Sivagasi Tamil Nadu. Pravesh Shanta Selva Kumari is here to receive the plaque. Next we have Institute of Engineering and Management from Calcutta, West Bengal again. Prasarathna Chakraborty is here to receive the plaque. Thank you so much for coming across. So these are all thanks to our efforts from the IIT Kharagpur NPTEL office. Mr. Sivashankar Das of that office is here. He plays a major part in getting all these colleges to participate. We'd like to acknowledge you in this respect. Next would be Pondicherry Engineering College. Professor Vijay Lakshmi. So again we have been partnering with them for over a year. Again continuous interactions and a lot of back and forth goes on between us. A lot of students from their college. Next we'd like to recognize Thangal Kunju Musaliar College of Engineering or TKM College as it's popularly known as from Kullam Kerala. Prasadash is here to receive the plaque on behalf of the local chapter. There's a college that was started in 1958 apparently. One of the first government aided colleges that started. Yes. Next we'd like to call upon Shiva Subramanianadar College of Engineering. Professor Sethuraman is here to receive the plaque. So SSN is an example of having smaller numbers but they've just caught up on the certification categories that the students have gotten. So that has been huge. So Pravazha Chitra was one of the first people that we were talking about. The five colleges we had for brainstorming way back I think in 2014 when we were discussing what to do with our NPTEL online certification courses. She is also an alumnus of IIT Madras. Next we have SIS College of Arts Science and Commerce but they're not here with us today. They are from Bombay Maharashtra. Pravazha Malakshmi Nada is the SPOC of that college. Next we'll have SRM University Katankulatur. We have another representative, the SPOC has not been able to make it. Next we have National Engineering College Kovilpatti, a long-standing partner of ours. I think one and a half years of partnership now. Absolutely enthusiastic people. I think we keep working with them all the time. So we have Professor Kamilis and Professor Karna Karan, the librarian here. Most active in getting all the students to register and do things on their behalf. So we thank Professor Bhaskar for coming here and awarding the plaques and sparing his time. Except the remaining plaques and things we'll give it away later. I just want to go through the list and point out a few colleges that are in the AAA, AA and AA rated category. There are quite a few colleges. I mean once again this is the first time we're doing it. There's no reason to be disheartened or anything that you didn't make it to any list. We are happy to recognize people. We're doing this once again because a lot of local chapters requested us to do this. They wanted a different rating and show what they're doing. So this is a list which is in AA category. Quite a few colleges which are quite well known in their states and maybe even outside of their states. You can see all of them listed here. This is AA continued. Quite a few local chapter representatives right here. I'm just quickly going through them. I don't want to spend more time on this. Okay. So we also beyond the colleges that we rate in three categories, we also have active local chapters. Here we keep the bar a little bit lower. So to say that even if 10 students were present during the exams, we say it's an active local chapter. I think that's a definition for active. It's quite low right now so that a lot of local chapters can be active. So we don't do any other criteria for that. About 114 additional local chapters have been tagged as active. So if you include the rated and active, the total comes to 214 colleges which are active and rated. So 100 of them are rated. Another 114 are active. So 214 is quite a big number I think across the country. Out of the 700 total, we have 214 are active. We are trying to push more colleges to become active in this, to get them to believe in this. I think credit transfer like Rosa Baskar mentioned will be a big part in making more colleges interested in this. So the SPOCs or our college representatives also are getting certificates. We are recognizing all active local chapters with certificates for the SPOCs. We'll give them away as well soon enough. So the SPOC certificates look like that. I just want to show you a few pictures. Nice designs for the certificate, very colorful. So now for mentors, there are a lot of mentors on the portal. But when we look back at it, some mentors are active, some mentors are not active. So once again, some mechanism by which we screen the active mentors compared to mentors who are not active. Mentors who play the role versus those who did not play a role. Here again, we had a formula, which is similar to the college formula, but slightly tweaked to make it work for mentors. So once again, I mean, you can look at the formula, but really what is important is the star items down below. How do you get a mentor certificate? So if you had 10 students who showed up for the exam, you automatically get recognized as a mentor. So that's the one way of doing it. But let's say you have only five students, then they have to write the exam and successfully complete the course. Then in that case, you also become a recognized mentor. So it's easy to do it. If you have one mentor, one mentor, one student whom you mentor and that person got a goal certificate, you do get recognized as a mentor. So we kept the bar quite low. We didn't want to make it completely free that anybody who becomes a mentor gets a certificate automatically. We wanted to keep a little bit of a bar. And even with this, quite a few people are qualifying for the September exams. 353 mentors are being recognized. So the October exams, 42 mentors are being recognized. So those who did not qualify in this category, I mean, we had to, I mean, we had to have some criteria because there were people who are not participating. So we had to filter out people who are participating. So this is the criteria that we came up with. Once again, if you have any questions, we'll be happy to add this over the break. This is the formula. So this certificate for the mentor looks like that. This is again for a particular time. So that's just one anecdotal evidence I want to point out for one student who did four courses in the September-October time frame. So if you remember, there are only four exam dates. So you can write a maximum of four exams. And this student has written a little bit of a thank you note. You can maybe read it. She's talking about all the nice things about NPTEL online courses, why she's doing it, what is the great thing about it, et cetera. And she's done four different courses. Maybe not all of them are equally intense, but still she's done all four. She's written exams and she's got 90 plus in all the courses. So that is something which is quite nice to see that somebody really, really, really believes in this. So I think this brings to the end the first part of the meeting where we wanted to report on items, which we report on the exams and numbers, and then give away some of the ratings and recognition. The second part is about the exams. So we do have a little bit of time. So we'll carry on with some reporting items and numbers for the exams and how to happen. Good morning. Of course, we're all here because all of our students have taken these exams. And so you have actually direct experience with some of these numbers that I'm going to show you and some of the details that I'm going to discuss with you. So if you see here, the most recent exams is what we are highlighting, this current run that we just completed. So we had exams on 18th and 25th of September. So this existing run that we just completed, we were still going with this model of two consecutive weekends, having exams on two consecutive weekends. And so that's what we have done. And the large number of centers, 78 and 87 centers across India that we had the 18th and 25th exams respectively. And then in October where the other set of courses came to conclusion, we had 43 centers on both dates, again, spread across India. And we had specific instances where we had few candidates in Srinagar, Manipur, Agartala and Port Blair, where the numbers were small. But of course, our intention is to ensure that students are interested in taking it. We have to find a way to enable it. So we requested the NITs in those areas and other faculty whom we could access. And so these were run in somewhat different mode than what your students have experienced. So a faculty who was willing to work with us on this and interested in contributing in it actually proctored the exam for us. And so specific small numbers of students in these areas could take it. We didn't, yeah, yeah, yeah, all four he has managed for us. So we have to thank him for this effort. And that's really something that was very useful because the numbers were too small for us to have an exam center, the way where we were oriented through TCSI on in all the other locations. And at the same time, it was important for us to be able to support it. This run, we have also done this initiative where, you know, just the way we do for other exams of importance, which we have been doing for GATE and GE and many of your institutions are the host institutions for those exams. Because of the seriousness of those exams, we have been sending Institute representatives to all of those exams and the same process we have adopted for our NPTEL exams. Our Institute representatives have so every center individually had representatives from NPTEL on behalf of NPTEL, typically faculty, staff of NPTEL have come there. And the primary purpose is to ensure that the exam experience is uniform and correct for all of our students who are taking it across the country. And so that is something that we wanted to ensure. Because I mean, there are a wide range of exams out there. And at least what we have seen is that the NPTEL process is pushing the boundaries of what exams are run in large scale. I mean, indeed all sorts of interesting exams are run in small scale, but if you want to run a large scale exam across the country and still have all the features that you would like to use in an examination to really test the student in that particular field, then most of the large scale processes that are there are not actually ready to handle the exams at that scale. So like basic multiple choice questions they can handle. Many exam partners who can support exams can handle multiple choice questions quite comfortably. You give them a question paper, they can get it uploaded in their system and so on. But we are not just doing that. For every course our purpose is to ensure that the student learns and that the evaluation process really gauges whether the student has learned and how much he or she has learned. And therefore we are not willing to restrict ourselves to just multiple choice questions. We allow the faculty full freedom to select the form of question paper that they would like to use and then we try to work with our exam partner which is the TCSI on at this point in time. We work with them to try and ensure that the exam is delivered using all those features that the faculty has asked for. This basically means we are pushing limits and therefore we need to take extra steps to ensure that the process works correctly all the way to the end. Because we may say something here in the office and we may discuss something with the exam partner. It may or may not come out exactly the same way in the examination hall. So a lot of detail is there in every examination. I am sure you are all aware because we all conduct exams. So a lot of detail and we have to follow up to ensure that those details are adhered to across all exam sectors across the entire country. And so we found the best way we could do it was to send our institute representatives because otherwise invariably we found that after the exam we had a lot of comments from various students saying that in some specific center it didn't go off them. And if it happens much if we get to know this much after the exam I mean there is very little we can do. So we wanted to ensure that if there is any problem that we get to know of it live as soon as it happens so that we can address it immediately. And so our exam representatives went to all the centers for the first time this semester. So representatives from all the institutes involved in NPTEL and we also had IIT Tirupati, IIT Palga at various centers. So you may have seen them and this is something that we intend to continue to do. We still had issues so which is again associated with the whole process that we are using. On September 18th there was a significant delay in some centers and the delay was anywhere between 10 minutes and 2 hours. So clearly that is not something that any of us would like and certainly not an experience that the students would appreciate. And it is part of you know again this process that we are working with an exam partner they have their constraints they are also doing upgrades in their system and sometimes it all doesn't fall together smoothly. So in fact for example we sent our institute representatives to the exam centers to run a mock exam the previous day to ensure that the actual exam runs smoothly. This is the same process that Gaten and Jay used we have you know adopted similar processes. So they have gone there actually the previous day to run it and in all these centers it ran perfectly fine on the mock test. And so therefore it was a great surprise to all of us that you know everything went fine till the previous evening and the next next day the exam still didn't run correctly. And the primary reason is listed there a root cause is listed there. The exam partner as I said you know is also upgrading their system. So they had upgraded their exam software but unfortunately they ran their mock exam using the older software. So the mock exam ran fine because it ran off the older software on the on the hardware that was available in all those centers and the actual exam ran on a new software on the same hardware and that didn't work. And it was for a very odd reason because they had enabled on feature which we were not using. We were actually not using that feature but it was enabled in that upgraded version of their software. And simply because that enabled that feature we were not using had been enabled. They needed the that the Internet Explorer 9 be installed in all their systems. And it so turned out that the hardware that was sitting there did did not have Internet Explorer 9 installed in many of those cases. So centers and so this they got to know only in the morning. So they started installation in the morning. They told all the their staff to start installing and some centers they were not able to do it. So at the end of it it was not a very pleasant experience in some some of the institution. And naturally many places the candidates were you know quite upset and we completely you know understand that. And so they had a poor exam experience in some number of centers. Not all but certainly some of them it was bad. I was myself the representative in one of the centers where it was often a significant way. I mean exams started like two and a half hours late. It was even cancelled in one of the centers. And the exam was conducted on September 25th. So whenever I mean of course our intention is to ensure that the experience is smooth altogether. We are not interested in really doing you know patch up the job afterwards. But we do understand that once in a way this is happening and we have to first of all try to make sure it doesn't happen again. But also that if it does happen we are taking some measures to ensure that the final experience for the student is still unaffected. So for example we have conducted this exam on 25th of September. So that was done. And we are also we have also done some more things. So in the 10 most affected centers we have offered all our candidates the option that if they register for another course in March the upcoming run and they take and and they register for an exam in that run. Then they will get a waiver equivalent to the fees that they have paid. So essentially if they continue with this process we will give them a waiver and so it will be like one exam free. Okay so there has not been announced. So this is what we are announcing we will be telling our candidates this option. Okay so so this is something that we are going to do for the candidates. So they will have one examination free for the centers where they have had a significant problem. And we even identified the centers where the maximum amount of trouble was there where you know they had close to two hours off from the exam start. So in fact in many places yeah in these places it was kind of bad because you know some in some cases students have come with their parents and they're sitting there waiting for the exam to start and they're just asking us when it will start when it will start and we also don't have an answer because they're still trying to set the system right. But that's what was done. And where we conducted the re-exam for those who could not attend the re-exam the fee is being refunded. So these options we are doing but again this is what we feel is necessary to you know make the students comfortable with the fact that we are also serious about conducting it and we take any laps on our side seriously and that we address it. Of course I mean this is when I say laps on our side it's a complete system here we are using an exam partner and I mean the exam experience is our you know what we are offering but we have to work with exam partner where there is a problem we have to address it even if the source is from the exam partner. Okay so we will have representatives from TCSI on data here today feel free to interact with them. So we are actually I mean we have worked with them as I said you know I mean I must also tell you that you know they have worked with us to introduce all these features. Lot of features have come so it's a mutually beneficial process so they are working with us even though you know this is a problem that stands out because that's the thing that the students experience many of the things that go right also happens because they work with us on it. Lot of new features have been introduced which they didn't have in their system they are also eager to work with us to get those features into their system and they have done that. So yes this is something that we are not also happy about they are also not happy about because they also don't want to you know have an experience of this nature but many good things are also there in the interaction so that's something I want to highlight. So that is one part of it we also had other issues on 25th of September there were floods in Hyderabad section 144 was in had been enforced in Coimbatore and at least it was little bit unclear like the previous day it was there section 144 had been imposed and we were not sure if it was going to be on on that exam day but again you know exam partner was also giving us lot of feedback because they are running many exams so they know the their the staff are able to give us no information from from the ground so in fact they told us that another exam it was running in the morning was on schedule banking exam was going to be on so that was on so we actually decided that you know we didn't want students to be risking themselves to come to the exam so we again offered them again thanks to the services from our exam partner they sent an SMS to all the students who were in those areas so in Coimbatore and Hyderabad that if they do not if they are unable to attend the exam the exam day will be refunded so blanket you know I mean option like this was given to them so if they have a problem and they are unable to attend the exam it's not an issue from outside so and so fees has been refunded to the students who could not have appear for the exam in those two places so this was it and incidentally the exams did run the exams ran quite a few students did come to the centers and right so as such it was possible it was not impossible but still to play it safe for the students safety of the student is important so yeah thanks we would like to acknowledge a lot of people who have worked with us and are part of this whole process and the experience that the students get to see mh rd of course for funding I mean they are the primary source from where this whole project has started and it's still the backbone of our complete activity that we do here Google has been working with us extensively again and they are in fact doing it for free we are not even paying them anything formally for this activity through you know YouTube where all our videos are hosted the online courses portal so again portal is something where we are once again asking for a lot of features new new features are being enabled a lot of analytics is possible with it and they have specific engineers who are listed here Ashwani Sharma Abhinav Tej and Rishabh who work extensively with us and who are always available for us I mean it makes a big difference trust when you know students raise an issue and we are able to reach these people and they immediately act on it I mean it's a pretty bad experience if you know the issue comes and like two weeks later only we are able to attend it they work with us you know as quickly as possible they give it high priority and this is not even their main activity for them this is like one of their side activities that they are doing for these engineers in their spare time they do it for us I mean officially Google allows them to work with us but still it's not their main activity and they still put in their heart and soul to get it up and running for us. Arecent has been very generous and gracious in assisting us with sponsorship primarily used for scholarships so all the students across all colleges who have received scholarships have received it primarily through this Arecent funding and quite significant three growths spread across the last few runs has been given to us from them as part of their CSR funding we're of course looking for more companies to assist us in this process but they have been the four four runners in it they have taken a lot of initiative in supporting them TCS our exam partner again I know many things that we are able to do in the examination hall finally is thanks to them to their support and whatever they are also like I said you know going above and beyond their normal run which is a standard kind of a question paper run which they are more comfortable with they are working with us their top most management works with us interacts with us to ensure that the exams go off smoothly they sit with us in the you know command centers to ensure that you know as that as any indication of trouble comes that they attend to it and so on so they may have their pluses and minuses and some limitations but still they are working with us very hard to give us you give all of our students a very good experience on the exam day and a lot of other software partners of course NASCOM and ICMR who have been collaborating with us on specific courses where they are either supporting it or you know encouraging people to take it or even providing equity for the course I think these are all people we would really we are really grateful to them in completely different fields they are assisting us and we are very happy that they are sharing our enthusiasm for this activity I think I'll leave this here so the agenda for the rest of the session will be we'll just have a quick feedback session from the colleges that we recognized initially so we'd like to invite representatives from UEM to come and share any feedback that they'd like to a very good morning to all of you it really feels great when your students do some good activities and you are addressing an august gathering my fast and foremost thanks to all the students who took it very seriously see let me introduce you very briefly in this forum this UEM is a private university that has come up it has been set up by the very prestigious IEM group we themselves stood also fourth here and the university started its journey in the year 2015 and in two years of time we have about 2,600 students and when we were interacting with Mr Bass from IT he came to us I think we took about two weeks time to decide upon that yes we should encourage our students I would prefer to encourage instead of enforcing we should encourage our students so that they take up these courses because we always want them to be excellent and we are very thankful that we had got a good involvement and we ensure that those who take up the courses say maybe within 1200 students about 450 enrollments were there so we ensure that those who take the courses they take it seriously and we attend the exam so we put in efforts on our side also we made the computer facilities available we made everything downloaded so that there is no point of concern regarding their accessibility and everything we try to facilitate it on our part and we are very happy that they have done well and we are also planning that from this time onwards every semester the students will be incurring more and more courses they should participate and we are thankful to that these courses I need not mention they are one of the top and I'd just like to add that in addition to these courses we have also developed a learning resource in which we have tried to gather materials questions top online lectures from various universities who have assembled and we have also introduced lectures by our Indian faculty members because we also have a strong pool of faculty members who are at par with any good place and very proud of that being the dean of that university so we have also developed a learning resource so that students can have all their courses in that learning resource so that is out of the class driving so we are trying to involve more and more students so that when they come out in coming years they should be good professionals and the most important thing that we stress upon there that in spite of this all these resources of course and for those things we stress is that they must be a good human being so that is also a very important point we are stressing so with all these things and with all this support I hope we will be doing very good in future and we expect much more number of courses and new ideas will be coming and we are sure for our constant participation more importantly we have introduced this in our academic system those who are participating in these programs they get an extra credit in their sessions so that we have already involved by passing through our governing board and academic council who have made this formal I want to make this formal thing a formal announcement here there will be sending letters for that and thank you everybody for allowing us a chance giving us a chance to participate here and discuss our views thank you thank you sir for your feedback could we have Professor Parthiban to say a few words for Madanapalli good morning good morning I am Dr. Parthiban from Madanapalli Institute of Technology and Science actually I am coming here our college is located in a very rural area called Madanapalli in Chittor district when we started to implement the new schools in our college our management and our administration told the two things we need to go for international resources at that time we found lot of things would actually would have mean a lot of things a lot of things we had but the problem is we are not able to afford those courses the main issue is the cost of every courses our students are coming from the very economical background is a poor economic background so at that time we decided that what is the course available within India at that time our administration suggested that we go for impeachment so at the time we don't know about impeachment anything but our management is very strong we go for impeachment only we don't go for anything because we had an MOE with an international moose resource but they told that we will offer a course for 6500 rupees so our students say that sorry we can't offer we cannot afford those things so we went for NPTEL at the beginning we have some problem with NPTEL courses to reach the students and staff but later that all of the students all stamps very much accommodated with the NPTEL we can say that even though our management correspondence says that the NPTEL is the only thing we are having in our India with international quality even though we made a comparison with the MATO, ZW and NPTEL he will say that often he says that when we are comparing with any resources over international resources like MATO, ZW or audacity we can say that we are having a good resource from India that is called NPTEL so all of our students are encouraged to do that NPTEL courses mandatory but initially we did that MOOCs is a mandatory course so all the students want to take because we are having credit transfer course for MOOCs but basically initially they told that sir it is very difficult to take MOOCs course don't put that MOOCs courses in mandatory only like that but later part when they enjoy the courses from NPTEL they told that sir we thought opposing of the staff and mentors they taken the course they even they asked I will take one or two courses sir even though our students have taken more than three courses or five courses from NPTEL they are very much interested in NPTEL not because of that cost and other things they are very much interested with that presentation of the NPTEL video lessons and examination per terms and how they are interacting with the faculties and other things basically I can say that assignments our students generally they will say the assignments are very good we are able to present whatever we are learning from that video lessons we can able to implement in that assignments so that is very practical one as far as a monopoly in stuff technology science and consult I am very much thankful to that NPTEL authorities and M. H. R. D. and Harrison to award that Harrison's scholarship for our students in our college so I am very thankful to the NPTEL authorities thank you very much. Thank you sir next we have Professor Shanta Selva Kumari of Mabkosh Lank college Shivagasi. Good morning I am SPOC of Mabkosh Lank engineering college and my names are Shanta Selva Kumari first of all I have to thank the NPTEL team for their wonderful contribution to the engineering society then I have to thank all the NPTEL coordinators even I can salute them because they are spreading the quality of quality engineering within the students so I am very happy and I am proud to be the SPOC of NPTEL. Second I have to thank our management our principal and our Hachoris and in our college we have a quality improvement cell that quality improvement cell faculty really helped me a lot to spread this NPTEL team among our students and also I thank all my students this is not one way it is a two way really we received a very good contribution from faculty from IIT and also our students also take it as little bit serious still we have to encourage lot this is not up to our course mark we have to secure little bit so I'll take this message because you as per resort told even IIT you are allowing your students to take this course mark into a credit so I pass this message to my principal I think that will encourage more students and I want two more requests from NPTEL one why can't you select our college as exam center a previous semester also I'm requesting and I couldn't get okay so that's that is my kind request if possible we'll be happy okay thank you for the opportunity thank you ma'am we'll get back to the centers and stuff after like well next week like to have professor Rathnagar who'd want to give us some feedback on IEN good morning first of all I want to give thanks to the entire NPTEL team to the professors teachers who delivered actually the good lectures and from this platform I learned so much so many things that will inspire us in future and hope I can do better in future so thank you very much good morning I'm AK Naik I'm principal of institute of and engineering management and another thing is I am alumni of this institute so I feel very nostalgic here our institute way back in 1989 it was started 27 years back around 27 years back and our institute in West Bengal to third third means after IIT Kharipur and NIT Durgapur our institute become the third as far as NIRF ranking is concerned and we have while looking for different online course book courses and all we have seen MIT courses course era different type of thing including NPTEL of course and we have seen that type of courses and the type of content the pronunciation and everything is there in NPTEL that is actually really good for our Indian student I have seen actually I have done lot of courses on MIT courses and course era and this time I have registered myself registered for three courses of course I have not given any exam three courses so all those three courses I have seen those things how nicely they have actually they have made them understand the students so from the very basic concept and gone to different level so I will request all the faculties also we just please have a look into that how those things are really written actually and moreover in our college to encourage the student what we have said that you appear for exam once you pass will give you the money the order of the money you are giving will be giving the money remember we are private engineering college and to encourage the student we have given the money to the students thank you thank you sir no we have two representatives from TCS ION Sintya Nimidja and Ram Kumar I wanted to request them to say a few words about NPTEL and their experience and so these are all members of a local chapter they are also colleges many of them might be TCS so very good morning I'm Sintya and I'm with TCS for the past 19 years and so thank you so much thanks professor thanks professor and thanks to the NPTEL team for giving us an opportunity to address this nice gathering and first of all NPTEL is one of our you know strategic customer because you've been doing a lot of high-stake exams so the gate exam the cat exam for aims drip mode CMC a lot of exams that we are doing but these exams are high-stake in their own ways but it's all in a same type of exam but with NPTEL we have learned lots from an exam perspective elsewhere because we deploy a lot of things new for NPTEL for example the programming test itself was developed mainly for NPTEL and we have been delivering programming tests and we have also done the audio test where we do the audio recording the capture and evaluation of audio test which has also been done first time for NPTEL so NPTEL has been a kind of you know we we learn lots from them we try to work with them very closely we deliver new things so thanks to NPTEL team for giving us that opportunity and I'm sure all of you either your students would be giving those exams or we would have partnered with your institutions to conduct exams as a test center so I'm sorry that we missed the morning session but definitely during the break or other time we will connect with you we will take your feedback as well and we will work closely with you and in delivering more different types of tests and you know in case it's a test center we will try and see how we can improve on the exam giving experience as well so any questions that you want to specifically ask the TCS team which is a technical partner with NPTEL? No exam center being far I can't tell anything because you are owning the center so it's I have to come and ask you as why you opened it there so so what we do is when we select an exam center we would first go and do a physical audit of the center because we look at how big is the infrastructure the harmony systems do you have and those things so the basic things about having very neat labs and having good washroom facility the physical side of it then we do a detailed network audit where we come and see and test the systems and then we enter into an agreement for leveraging your institution as one of the test center so that's the idea but from an ion perspective just a quick overview is I'm sorry sir we are aging from last one and half years TCS ion so I'll any I'll restrict my question only to this exam part not other part okay there are some issues like if not that much responsive probably nowadays there is a new technology and all it should be little bit more responsive you're talking about the system has to be more responsive yeah system means that I mean I'm not talking the system you're working I'm talking that the system of the exam system the website okay and the website you have designed it should be little bit more responsive number one that is number one and two is I mean while you are taking some exam in U.M. actually I mean that time how many students were there approximately 1200 students were there so some of our students could not give an exam quite a good number of students because it was maybe that Windows 9 expert issue could be we do not know that those things I mean because those informations are not there with us otherwise TCS ion is really an evaluation sure thank you sir and I will just take these I'll quickly answer these two questions so a couple of questions one is we talked about the user interface we want to tell that the same user interface we do not design an exam platform separately for NPTEL separately for gate or separately for cat or a law exam or a leading bank recruitment the same platform is being used by all the candidates so even if a Gipma super speciality exam is being conducted it's the same user interface and we have done exam as to some class eight students coming and taking exams it's the same interface so we want to keep the user interface so simple because we are not testing the candidate on the system perspective we are testing the candidate on the domain what they are trying to give answer so so that's why we're keeping it very simple we are trying to make it more helpful but definitely I take your points sir we will connect and see what needs to be improved coming on to the next point on whether some systems were not usable and also we have something called minimum system configurations we do that part of testing in the network testing and it's part of the infrastructure testing and then we select we have gone one step higher now where we have developed our own OS so that there is no dependency some colleges will have IE 9 some colleges will have IE 10 so we cannot standardize all of them bring them together and say all these test centers should have IE 9 all of you should have we cannot do that so what we have done is we have developed something called netboot so that is an image the OS image relies on our server which we bring a laptop server and all the candidate machines will start using that image of OS from the laptop server so whatever you have becomes more of we don't use it and when we do an exam it starts so going forward that part of it will be addressed so we have started using it for the past nine months but before the day before the exam date we have the mock test but your thesis iron people told that we have we are ready to provide students for the mock test system but they told that there is no need within on now this tested all the two systems and they said that the system is okay but actually I'm not blaming the thesis process but actually what happened on the next day the actual exam day there is a lot of problem first to one hour we faced a lot of problem they told that there are problems with the Bombay server or any IE 9 or there's no update like that but what we request now on that mock test result we will provide the students I will give all the infrastructure all the facilities we need a real mock test that is related to that main test or the actual test happening on that corresponding date okay so it is happening as a very good one okay it was happening before but from security perspective we wanted to discontinue with the process and hence we brought in the new process of just testing the systems because there are some things which we cannot disclose here but from our security perspective we have consciously taken that decision but definitely we will try and see how to improve on that process no no not the configuration part of it there was one issue but now what we are doing is except for programming test where we ask the candidates to type in the code for the regular objective type we have removed the concept of mock test so only for programming test they'll have to type and test it the others the sample question paper will be tried out in different environments in some center windows linux netboat everything we will test it but from your side we will only test the system readiness and I think you should also be happy because what we used to take longer time we are now reducing and testing it in one hour's time which will actually help you but anyway thanks for volunteering and providing the students thank you another thing actually the program paper actually one of the students had that program paper called Programming C when he debugging that actual thing now even though technical person doesn't know that what's happening they call that person in the back end then they clarify that all those doubts in that how to debug and how to get the results from that because the debing tool is actually different from that actual interface you are having so what I ask is if you're given a virtual test before the in the mock test how the interface will look like how the students want to go through that it will be very easy for the students because they don't know about that only interest and other things okay sure I we understand that the course is being run on another platform where you have some particular type of mock test or the practice test so definitely we'll take your point right now we have given a test which is in the mock test it's most static you click on it and you just get a message the system will compile and show but we will try to give you a kind of simulating environment on that the same instructions are passed on to the students before the examination so the students can get an idea of related but and say one next clear response correct because I am the inviolator for so many times they use or an exam every time I used to get the results from the students the same instructions they have read before the commencement of the exam one day before so they can get experience the students are in this to read the exam they won't concentrate much on the instructions about the button at the exam during the examination the students getting both okay how to clear the response they don't see the button because they are thinking about the question like that so couple of things here because we provide a candidate mock test or a practice test which is available on the internet so what we need to do is maybe we need to redirect the candidates to go and look at it do some kind of practice before they come in number one number two when they during exam whenever a candidate asks any doubt we would recommend you not to actually explain everything but just to tell them here are the instructions button click on it they will read it so the same candidates appear from multiple exams so once they are redirected to reading the instructions instead of we explaining the instructions then every time the expectation is somebody is going to explain to me we point at them to say go and read the instructions that is enough and thank you for being our inviolator as well so maybe I'm from a want of time perspective so I would like to thank NPTEL team for giving us this opportunity and we will connect during the break and we'll take other questions thank you thank you Cynthia so as we finished with this slide we sort of stopped with this slide again I want to emphasize that these are all people who work with us and of course the TCS Ion have come here to join us today Cynthia and Ramkumar and the exam part is a very important part of the experience that the student has in the overall course process so we give it a lot of importance we we work with them extensively they work with us extensively to ensure that the process is smooth the experience is uniform across the country and so no I think I don't know whether you mentioned this but if I remember the examination of our English professor what's his name? Srinish Chaudhary he had a very special request one day when he said you didn't mention this right behind okay one day he just walked into the office and said I want to conduct a slightly different examination but I don't know how it is possible I asked him what was the exam then I want everybody who is registered for the exam in the center to record about 10 to 15 seconds in English in a recording machine and then we will analyze this and give some grades for their pronunciation but I think it is too difficult for me I said basically for all of us I mean I'm not an engineer I'm a scientist I'm a chemist but I think working in the engineering institution I think all of us only need a clearly defined problem solution follows right away so his clearly defined problem was every student has to take 10 to 15 seconds of audio in the examination hall I think TCS enabled it I remember 200 videos arrived audio tapes arrived and we had an evaluation on Srinish Chaudhary even today says something that MPTEL cannot do I still have to find out that's what he said I think thanks to TCS so we are also pushing TCS to find out something that TCS cannot do so that process will be on we will keep them on their toes and I'm happy that they are also happy that they are learning something in the process because we are also learning something in the process and so on and as Prasamangal mentioned and also as Cynthia mentioned you know these are exams which are very different but have to run in a very similar fashion across the country so they take a lot of effort they sit with us in person in the command center and when there's trouble they attend to it in a personal capacity of course it still means I mean we would like it to be completely flawless we don't want to see a problem in the exam center so that's the ultimate goal rather than to troubleshoot it as it happens so we work with them very closely to ensure that that happens of course even the recent exam run there was an issue but it's something that we would keep working on with them so that's something that we I want to share and again they are going to be here even later today so please feel free to interact and also as Bharti mentioned and Andrew also mentioned you know everything from location of the exam center how what is the experience of the students going there and coming back these are all things you can share with them they also know but I mean I think it makes a big difference if it comes directly from you because your students are taking it taking the exam so and we also pass on whatever feedback we get we pass on to them and they are also I mean they work with us enough that they can tolerate all the things that we throw at them and we throw quite a bit at them so it could be anything that the center is you know very far from the main road and you get the bus stop somewhere and then from there you are in the mercy of charotos to travel like three kilometers inside to reach the center and so on and some centers we visited are like that I mean they are quite far from the last stop but once you get to the center facilities are very good so it's a quite a transformation you really have to go some remote place and then suddenly there's a very nice center sitting there so I think I understand that they also have a lot of you know constraints that they face because they are running multiple exams they're trying to schedule multiple exams across various cities and centers and so they are looking at numbers how many students are taking which exam where and they're trying to optimize this in some form so they have some constraints but also our operation is growing you can and to show you the numbers the numbers are all the time increasing I mean it's a source of happiness to us it's also a source of concern to us because you could easily hit hundred thousand students writing an exam you know even in our next run or the run after that and we have to have the you know ability to handle that in a smooth flawless manner and of course as our numbers go up our you know our ability to bargain with TCS to give us the centers that we want goes up drastically because they they also have the numbers they can you know give us the greater priority in the center allocation once that happens so this is an ongoing process they are here please feel free to talk to them about it I would also like to acknowledge the desi crew we have one yeah we have people from desi crew here they are our partners they do the transcription for many of our videos you see you know subtitles that have started that have been already there in our NPTEL site and they have been working with us on it they have been associated with this process for quite some time with us desi crew has been involved in it so we take the transcript transcript is available as available as a download for the students to use and we are using it for subtitling it in English in fact now currently we have a tender to continue the trans transcription process and we are going to do translation so even in the upcoming run you are going to see at least we'll start off with one course where you will see translation in multiple Indian languages as the subtitle so that's coming up and increasingly you will see that in many of our courses so that's something you can mention we will move quickly in that direction it's just that since it's an online course sometimes you also saw the spread of courses in terms of whether they are reruns or repurposed or new and interestingly we see a lot of new courses in fact I would say about two-thirds of the courses are new and so there there's a lot of challenge in getting the transcription done and translation done and subtitling done all in the first run in fact we are not able to do it we will not be able to do it in the original run of that course in the rerun is where we have a greater chance of being able to pull it off so we will move in that direction but that's something you see okay so moving forward what are our future plans again this is a growing operation in terms of both numbers the scope variety of things that we do and so we have some ideas we would like to share with you discuss with you and also get your input on it so this is again to give you some idea of what sort of courses we have again as you can see there 101 courses are going to be new out of the 130 that are coming up and this is the spread of courses in terms of the duration there are a few different challenges here first of all that we are offering courses of differing levels of difficulty so some are high end courses which you know maybe advanced postgraduate student can take and such courses sometimes it doesn't make sense to have full 40-hour lectures if the content is like that it's much more intense but it's a little bit more contained in terms of quantity so we do have all these durations of 4 weeks 8 weeks and 12 weeks which we think is logical from perspective of content but increasingly the students are going to take it up for credit transfer this is something that you will have to sensitize your management too about the availability of this variety of duration so credit transfer again is something which I mean you will talk about in I will talk about these courses in a moment it's something that is really you know in the hands of the college that is accepting the credit we run the course we give you the ROS course so that is how it is going to be so these durations in our view correspond to one credit two credit and three credit courses and also we would now in fact increasingly more actively highlight the fact that the number of hours that the student has to put in to handle all the assignments is an important part of the course in fact here in IIT Madras we have now done that we have changed our credit system from simply being one two and three credits to numbers which look more like you know nine credits and twelve credits and so on because we are also adding the number of hours that we expect the student to spend outside the class to continue that course process and give that term even the past they were supposed to do it but there was no quantification of it there was no actual place where we indicated what was being expected now we are doing that in a formal sense so I think even in these courses if you actually count the exact number of hours and then say it's only so many hours I think that may not be a fair reflection of the amount of hours to the student has to put in because they every week they are doing an assignment and every week they are being rated on the assignment and those assignments usually require some type so maybe I think we will formally also introduce that number of hours and indicate it so if you want to do a calculation you can pick the number that most appropriately reflects how you count those hours in your college and then see if then that makes sense with respect to credit transfer so that's something that you can do okay list of courses I think you have all received a hard copy of the courses and for Subhash Ramu you also touched upon them there's a long list here about 130 courses which follow that trend that you saw there these are all tentative is what we are told but soon you will know what's coming up we will know because we are also you know from our own sense perspective we are also sort of re-looking our processes in terms of how the course is put up on the site so that the run is smooth so to speak for all everyone involved and therefore when we finally announce the course in our on our site we expect actually a fair bit of the course already to be available to us to upload so those things we are bringing in so therefore this list is a bit tentative only when we have the content in we will know which course is ready to run we are making that process a little tighter so that there is no possibility of error because students across the country are taking it and we may not have much flexibility once the course runs start so that's why whatever this we are showing you now it's tentative and you can see the for all courses of different duration across all streams from different institutes and I mean maybe we look at the list later if you have any specific comments on courses that you are interested in or you think are not here that you feel are of interest to your students or some other course which was a which was run previously is not showing up here again you're interested in we can certainly that's some feedback that we would really appreciate having from you if there are courses that you feel your students require that may already be there as part of NPTEL content but not as an online course offering we can certainly contact the faculty to ask them if they would be willing to offer because it's much easier to do that because the content is already ready they can quickly move into a mode of online course offering as long as you know time wise they are having that time to commit to it for the july right yes for this this one this is sort of the upper limit of courses that we have but you can look at it and certainly give us some feedback maybe a little later we can even discuss something more about these courses so going forward so these are things that we would like to discuss with you what we are looking at right now is that the courses are coming the course list that you see here for example is based on the faculty who responded to our invitation asking them to offer courses and whatever content they already had with NPTEL etc so we have not put a structure in terms of what courses will be there and in this particular run it is more what faculty were willing to offer and that's how it has come about and in general that is also how it is going to remain because ultimately the faculty should have the time to offer the course to the students if they don't have the time then there's no point you know just listing it and somehow forcing them to get involved so we may not go completely away from it but at the same time we are looking at what is it that we would like that we would that we feel would be desirable to have in this process because we want it to be a complete offering so one of the things we are looking at is that we would like to repeat what are considered as core courses in all major disciplines across the two semesters so that's one goal that we would like to accomplish we have the content for most of these courses we don't we may not have for everything but for several of the courses in most major disciplines NPTEL content is available in the core course area most because that's sort of how the process even started they were asked to I mean each discipline there were coordinators who listed out the important courses in those areas and they try to ensure that they were faculty available who would cover each of those courses so therefore in general content is available some courses may be missing but by and large content is available and so we would like to do that so that there's a predictable you know schedule we would like to have a predictable schedule of what courses are going to be available ahead of time so this is particularly important from the perspective of any you know credit transfer process that any any institution may be interested in and we would like to balance it against electives so so there's already an offer quite a few of these courses that you see here the list are electives interesting electives that are there so we would like to balance that that will continue we are not going to stop that we are going to have a lot of electives and I think that's a very important part of the education process I think which is recognized across all our institutions so so this is something that we would like to do to keep the core courses we have actually made a table already of around eight core courses which we feel are from the respective faculty we have asked you know for example civil engineering faculty to list the most important eight courses and eight is just a number four four for each semester kind of things what you're looking at so that that becomes available and if you get into this mode you may even have the possibility that you have more than one faculty offering these courses so students will have a choice they can select you know core course fundamental course they want in mathematics they prefer one some of them prefer one they can do the style of teaching they can take it from that difficulty and somebody else can take some of the so that would be something that we are looking at and if you have any suggestions in that regard we would be happy to look at it of course I would also point out that you know one of the issues again which you would have discussed with your respective approval processes is that we look at when I say eight core courses the titles may not necessarily match that's that's the other thing that you know it's always an issue from at least a procedural perspective so in many institutions they may have a specific title for you know eight courses listed and they'll say that you know our students have to finish these four courses here it will be more like topic wise there will be some specific topics which are covered maybe the title is not exactly the same so that may be an activity that that is necessary to be looked at for you know credit transfer to occur successfully in that respective institution where you agree that there's a particular your your institution or the management agrees that a particular course is equivalent to a course that you are you feel your students need to take so so for example in 80 meters we do that the our students who are allowed to take courses for as electives we are actually allowing them to get the approval process in exactly the same way that they would get it if they went on a semester exchange program so some of our students can go abroad for a semester exchange program or to other institutions and for an exchange program their students can come to our place we have some selection process for it and so on so when do when they do that we transfer credit from those courses the courses that they do for that one semester in the rather university are transferred with some there's some restrictions or so for example a faculty here has to say that the following three courses that the student is going to do in that university are equivalent to three courses of similar nature in our institution so if we are able to certify that then that is considered acceptable then they finish that course and those credits are transferred we also understand that you know in many institutions including 90 meters there is a lot of internal competition for various awards students they get awards of different kinds or academic performance in a semester for the entire year maybe for the entire course so there will always be students who will feel uncomfortable that you know three of my classmates went to some other university you are giving them the same points that I'm caught here etc so to avoid issues like that we only transfer credit we don't include the same credit for CGPA calculation so that with I think those two approaches those two aspects to the approach included most of our students are quite comfortable with this process so they can get the credit so they can learn what they want they are not restricted in learning what they want so they are not take the course that they want they get the credit that they want so learning is not affected in any way and competition is not affected in any way in the in the sense that I mean the correct kind of metrics are being used same metrics are being used for all students that's it I think maybe we'll take a I will hold for a moment here and I request you know your feedback and sort of a small poll on the requirement for core courses how many would I mean how many of you would be interested in us offering these you know core courses as something that's a regular thing that we would we can offer in the NPTEL process we have we can have a show of hands of interest in core courses yeah or maybe I think I'll hold for a moment maybe you can come and tell us what kind of courses I am Srinath from my electrical engineering department actually if you see in electrical engineering people are more concerned nowadays regarding the power electronics applications are for electronics the power system and as I think a mail also seriously so if those type of courses are included it will be much more better for the students so I'm also from electrical department and I found the same course that was also suggesting there are power electronics so power electronics and wind energy conversion system the power wind energy conversion system IIT Kharagpur when these people are included video which material is excellent I use that material only to prepare for my classes these two subjects I would like to say wind energy conversion system and power for both video lectures are available period material is available new technology with Angular 2 that is number one and number two the latest IoT I am also from electrical department I would like to I like very much about electrical machines control systems I am from biology I would like to have that program its course as a repeat while seeing this all the courses are based on electrical and all the things but not in electronics engineering what I suggest or I request is the based on micro process or embedded C and also the IOT this is the first thing I request the IOT that is the recent friends no ma'am it is embedded C programming here it is embedded system design actually we are having in the seventh semester thank you I am from Curator department and I would like to suggest database design it was previously there but then after it was not offered so if it will be offered in fact I have cleared that exam so I am from automobile engineering so vehicle dynamics course available because videos are available in the NPTEL site but it is not there in the course but it is there it will be very much useful vehicle dynamics stem cell biology there is a nano technology nano science and all in corporate means it will be very useful and our college is also arts and science college most of the courses are offered under the engineering department so if more courses are to be benefit for the arts and science also I am from computer science department can you please include that digital foreign this is computer foreign this is a network foreign this is for this I am from Kenny medical college and research center that of courses are being conducted in engineering division and other but there is only one course is conducted for the medical thing medical thing there's a lot of doctors have a very much interest in enrolling and learning in the new courses of medicine so we can give importance for communicable and non-communicable how to control it so only one course out of 100 and 100 courses of engineering only one course at the health research fundamental is conducted by IIT I am from Kenny medical college arts and research center Tucci analysis course you can make because everyone will tell one course is from each department yeah I should also put it on the portal so that it shows up in some way we'll work on we have there's too much to process we have putting it out it's very off-road faculty but the one thing to remember is you come up with a course list we have to ask faculty and then somebody has to come up with so it's a lot of what I'm doing is I have seen your name and talking another chance to the entity a lot of today because I met my friend father here after night so his son and me were the classmates in the class at the end of the hour so thanks for that and next thing sir I'm working because I have a student a minor so we are new to NPTF so my little point is you're not we are updated to some of the units like BTU and other so it's little difficult to incorporate new subjects into our curriculum so as Professor said we can have a photo sort of thing where everyone can upload their same subject and we can pick the most common subject which is there in the university so we are doing that so we one of the process they've done when you mentioned we look at NTU syllabus and we try to match believe me it's complicated I think in one course in an university they do probably 10 times of what I would so our approach to things are very different we also have faculty who would deliver the content so it's harder to make a course which would exactly fit your syllabus so that's the point that we'll discuss a little bit later okay so I think let's let's stop we will build a portal we have we'll try to build a portal where this request can be processed in a reasonable fashion yeah and I also wanted to add about this comment on you know medical courses and so on so as Andrew mentioned I mean under NPTEL the you know institutions primarily involved in the current NPTEL process are all core engineering and technology kind of institutes science engineering technology so our strength is that and that therefore that's our mandate also we are assisting other institutes who are interested in offering the same kind of a process in their respective domains and so that's also something that's going on at the national level I think Mangal Sundar if he's left now he has been involved in it and so there are you know doctors from AIMS who are involved and so on they will set up a process where they do this something similar where they identify what they feel are you know courses that they would like to offer who would be offering those courses things like that are going on in parallel we are also I mean with partner institutes we are offering the occasional course that you know people are willing to offer and so on so that's something that's going on so that's what we wanted to point out okay so one one other activity that we wanted to care with you or discuss with you is faculty development programs so actually this slide in fact courtesy of professor GVK Sharma is here so he had put this together so it's entirely his all the information you see here is from him so I think I would link this to one of the earlier slides that we showed we have a few thousand faculty writing our courses you know but I think almost four thousand faculty have written our exams recently so already a significant number of faculty are interested in taking these courses find value in taking these courses and are willing to take it to completion they're not just taking it and listening to the lectures they are interested in attending those exams and completing the process they're coming up as stoppers in many of our courses they finish the process completely so already that effort is anyway on and so there is some interest to look at whether or not you know something along similar lines can be extended and also be looked at as a faculty development program process so we are I mean of course ready to offer it here in addition to you know just the coursework I mean here there's you know benefit analysis of what happens if you actually go for FTPs the way they're currently organized versus what would happen if you did it on an online certification basis of course there may be a lot of preferences for one or the other but this is an option that is possible if there is interest and what we would do what we feel is another value that we can add to this process which maybe doesn't immediately show up in our existing courses the way they are is that here in IIT Madras we have something called the Teaching Learning Center TLC it is called Teaching Learning Center so many of our faculty I have myself attended a course there as a student there and there they basically bring in experts who are involved in this teaching process and they share with us different ways in which you work with students and a lot of detail is given in terms of things that we don't normally think about I mean we just go to class we lecture we have we focus on the content we focus on you know we have some specific ideas that we want to convey to the student that's what we focus on we want to see if they did the assignment that's the kind of approach we take but they show us in this kind of you know Teaching Learning Center activity what are other aspects of the whole classroom interaction people are sitting there you know students are sitting there for 50 minutes with you and what kind of attention spans they have what you can do to keep them really involved through the class and things that are not you know very disruptive it's not drastically different from what you won't feel very uncomfortable doing those things it's very we are all sort of naturally do some of those things we don't formally think about them but these they they show us you know you can formally include this as part of the class process how do you get the students to tell you what they are learning in the in the class something you know they give you something called a minute paper or something like that so about half an hour after you I mean you finish teaching our concept you hand off a small sheet of paper to all the students they write the one point that they understood most what you taught and the one point that they didn't understand so things like that which you can get back as an immediate feedback which you can know in the next class you come you can if you see one common point across several students saying they didn't understand something you can explain that so many ideas like that including things like how classroom seating has to be done okay so in all our classes simply due to historical reasons we have a certain standard way of a seating student everybody sits facing forward there's a blackboard you sit and right there we don't it is not naturally set up for interaction in fact most of the time is frowned on interaction we say keep quiet keep quiet don't talk and so on this is the basic way we go about it but they show us you know you can set it up differently the way the seating is done differently is set up so that ever so often you stop the class to enable the students to do interaction you just stop the class you don't keep you ask them to do something and then they get back to you up and you give a specific time it's not just random you know go on and on and on you set a one minute time for it they do something get back so there are a lot of such ideas a lot of such ideas which are not which are very useful for us in our classroom greatly improves the student experience of your class but are not things that we tend to focus on and as part of this process they expose us to all of that so we can easily include we have a faculty here who's in charge of the TLC and there are some set of core faculty who participate in that process and they keep offering every year they offer these workshops which faculty with an IIT attend we can definitely include modules of that as part of any course or in that is relevant and then offer that entire thing as a physical development program so that's something that we are seriously looking at in addition to you know the kind of analysis that you see here and so this is again it's open to your input on how how much value you see in it what what you know benefit you feel there is in it but AICT whether it is AICT they accept or not that is the main question we are going to do we are already doing we are looking at the others there you know see what we have seen especially when see if somebody goes into school they have to go to some kind of training in college universities teachers have passed and see they are coming to school so there are a lot of teachers there they put good potential but the problems that they face they have not to be they do not know maybe after 4-5 years they learn but what happens when they go through these lectures and all these things the way they can finally copy one IIT professor whatever he has seen he does kindly he will develop his own education I am talking in a very good way but even if they just follow whatever has been taught that means the popular students they are trying to see the way how to conduct themselves we are going to do it we will approach AICT hopefully I think but do you do you I mean when these FTPs are conducted they are usually conducted in some NIT or IIT or some place people have to go there and then do you have to pay AICT some money for it or not AICT so AICT is not making money or do they might approve I mean they are spending money on it okay okay so then I think that should be okay I think we know the chairman of AICT we know quite well we can approach him so that's what so the FTP program also will be online the pedagogical aspects that Pratap mentioned just now so we'll make videos of that we make how to evaluate that is a tricky aspect we might have to put in some additional things and that might involve I don't know what may be maybe TCS will come up with a way of evaluating that also so we'll come up with something like that so we'll put together a program and I will approach AICT okay so we also wanted to share what has been going on with respect to credit transfer so again it is something that is definitely of interest and a lot of a lot of institutions have approached us for it and there are I mean no there's still quite some room to go on this for example we already have for with respect to say deemed universities and autonomous institutions a certain process which is this is a very generic process but it seems to apply to many of them it works very well with them so they are board of studies has to approve specific NPTEL online courses as something that they will accept and if they do if they do so we simply share the raw scores with them so that's basically what we do so in that sense when we say credit transfer it is more that the courage takes the credit I mean or gives the credit for the students we are not actually separately handing off anything we just give the raw score we tell the student performed in this course this is how all the other students in that course perform these are the raw scores and so the institution can use individual judgment I mean they can use judgment based on their way of looking at the marking and decide what grade they want to give to that particular course so they can they may have you know maybe absolute grading or they may do relative grading whatever it is that they feel is appropriate is totally left to them so for the exact same course two different institutions may give different kinds of grading to their students which they feel is relevant to their institution so this is what we have done and the number of credits is also to be decided by the college only we give all the raw data this is their number of hours that the course ran and this is what the activity was and only thing like I said we would like to include here our estimate of what is the number of hours that the student has to spend on the assignment because that is not very clear in the videos video simply has the video of the class and in our opinion specific assignments especially since we are having such a regular assignment schedule of one every week we know that it takes time so that time is also something that we will budget and make it clear that this is what we believe is the time associated with it so that complete overall duration that you will have there can then be assessed by the institution to decide how much credit to give for it because I think again specific institutions have very hard lines saying that at least this many hours it has to be before it can be considered a four credit course or a three credit course and so on so we would like to give them a realistic view of what is the hours that the student is spending on the course and then the institution can decide what they want to do except that like I said we are having this equivalent of one two and three credit courses in our set of courses we offer so again there also the institution can decide that you know if the student if they are going only on a four credit basis they can say you can treat this as part one and treat that as part two and taken together it is three credits we will treat it as a three credit course so that is all totally up to the institution for affiliated colleges is again something that we don't have a clear path yet so we would need to work with you know the respective board who are involved in it and see those specific universities will accept it and so on and this is again something of course as Prasabastha Rammuth also mentioned at the national level there's something called Swayam that is coming up and NPTEL with as the way it has been designed is NPTEL will be the core for the engineering aspect of a technical studies so to speak and so much of what we do if as and when that comes up we will transfer on to that platform it will be the same experience but in a different branding on a national level and so at that point I mean I think there's a much greater chance that the government may have a more standard framework which will be more readily accepted across universities on how the credit transfers to be done but in the meantime nothing stops us from doing it right now I mean and many institutions are doing it so we will continue to do this process so we wanted some input on this also a couple of things I want to ask before we get started how many of you from deemed universities or autonomous colleges okay so wow that's a huge number so so this process does that make sense I mean as in that makes sense so this process yeah maybe if you have some feedback on this process we'll do that and then move on to the affiliated colleges yeah good afternoon sir myself Dr. Shekhar from a major college of engineering and here the credit transfer actually we are implementing the cbcs we are in the second year already we are factored in the one of the election that removes so automatically here the it fit for the 8B italics course most probably here because most probably we are encouraging we are in the plan also so how is the approval process that's why I would like to share basically I request you suppose if you send the detailed pamphlet out there course each course okay because in the BOS we have to discuss because we have designed some BOS is border studies okay so in the border studies that is the main body to discuss and all so every six months most probably we are handling one BOS so see what I want to understand is this is January 23rd our courses are starting but when will your BOS meet will it be before the fourth semester it is already over already over actually at least one year before it is okay and that's why here of course because the one year before the most probably we can change some modifications okay most of the cases after fourth semester we are going to finalize the syllabus for all 8 series because we should not write but but any modification in the form of directives and all we can do it we design the flexibility okay but at least if you discuss one year before then we can check with the content and all we will discuss in the BOS meeting okay and accordingly the same butcher suggested with small modifications are maybe so is it possible for instance that we give you a larger list of courses from which a smaller set will be offered we can do one thing sir we can ask us which courses we are going to offer okay so but you see the problem is we cannot also be very sure of what courses will come sometimes you know the faculty have to commit except for one year otherwise you will make a difference whatever there is a possibility yeah okay so what is what would be nice what request I would make is when you go for your board of studies for approval don't get approval for one specific course in one semester that will not work for us so you have to get a basket of courses approved and say any one of these courses can be taken by our students in this discipline for that that is what is what will work in this area yes a lot of people want to talk we'll try to go one after the other yes we also included mooks course but it will be decided at the time of offering that course it is open it is open we don't fix it at the time of BOS we have that one industry related course as well as one mooks course but these courses will be offered before commencement of that semester only so anyhow you give the list in advance no in general the course will be commenced in the month of December the second semester then for a particular say civil engineering one course like this is approved without any content yes and then how will you give credit later no no we don't design any content any course title nothing okay just we keep it as a mooks course okay just mooks course and it will be the course will be announced at the time of commencement the problem is some board of studies might like that some board of studies may not like they'll say we need to know this content that kind of they'll depends on the people who are there they are open enough solution even they'll maybe accept it or not yeah so yeah but the thing is for example if you're taking a four week course that is only for we are kind of we are having that mooks course for four critics four critics if we put actually we put it in the board of studies the person's objected that you are having only four weeks course how we can convert the four weeks course for the four critics we argued many things but the board of studies objected that this is not the way you are to go to implement that so another thing we cannot conduct that board of studies for twice or thrice only once or six months when we need to conduct that at that time we put the mooks course we conduct one mooks course on that semester but they will ask which course you are going to take what is the credit what is the content you want to say that all the things you want to put in the records then only they will agree that so I'll I'll I'll describe how it works in IIT for instance you know I mean we also don't fix the syllabus but the way it works is when the student has done the course he comes and says that you know this is the course I've done this is the technical content of the course and there is a faculty member in the department who first approves it and then it goes to the dean dean also looks at it and he approves it once the faculty member and the dean approve that is considered as an okay course book so it's not approved beforehand by the board of studies it's approved in an open fashion like but then there is an approval process after the course has been taken so the faculty member in the department first has to look at the technical content and say yes this is okay and then the dean has to look at it and say yes this is okay and then the student gets need a list of courses at all so this is an interesting model also if your board of studies can be convinced that this is the model being followed in IIT Madras we can also follow this process then it's something that's actually I heard another decoder because mooks course they say massive open online courses there's no constraints it want to be a 10-minute course or a 10-minute course or a 14-minute course that is not a constraint so I am the Christian administrator so ICT or IIT NPTEL can take a decision and put in recommendation for the AECT saying that mooks course any course they can take it may be a 10-minute course it may be a 1-hour course in the 4-hour course they want to take a mooks course and they want to get the certificate and that want to be attached with that credit transfer if it is done means it is easy for us so we have to mention how much credit to give yes sir yes sir mooks providers want to take a decision and you have to give how many credits that's what I'm saying sir don't go further because some mooks course if you take any course and I say they are conducting the course only for two hours they are giving certificate for that also what I'm mentioning is any mooks course they want to take they want to get the certification from that mooks providers but two hours for one credit is too less sir I know that sir I know that about I'm saying that's for NPTEL I'm requesting that you want to conduct these three weeks of mooks course so see the only problem with that is there is one university I remember they said actually an eight week course for them is three credits they said the amount of work involved is equivalent to when compared to some other course and say their own university the amount of work involved in the NPTEL course is so much higher that they are ready to give three credits sir actually speaking if you go further to auditing and academic suppose other things they will take the 60 hours the theory paper consists 60 hours so what is the transfer of that we are conducting only 10 hours or 12 hours how we'll convert that when it comes to board of study there is a general guidelines where the UGC which every deemed university has to follow likewise this time it was a guidelines that yoga and meditation and disaster management and mitigation has to be added in the curriculum so they followed this guidelines and yoga and meditation was added as a one credit lab in all the mostly all the curriculums this is what deemed university has to so if you see suggest then it will you see has a guess at notification I can give you the guess at notification they've already told that 20% of credits can be done using books that's a guess at order from UGC that has come already we can you can ask our office they'll share it with you it has come already that will be useful that is already come that's not a problem but then your board of studies has to look at it and say thank you for the opportunity it was the suggestion regarding this credit transfer I'm also belongs to one deemed university just university in our university how we are awarding credits for the NPTEL courses is in the way there there are two different kind of courses one is the core courses and the some other courses relate not related to the actual subjects the courses which are already in the curriculum for that they will be awarding course audit like that certification and the courses which are not in the curriculum they will be giving credits that too it is not transfer of credits it is an extra credits the students those who undergone 10 hours course will be given one credit one credit extra similarly 20 hours two credits like that our board of studies as well as the academic council has approved the content as well as the courses so so you have to ask so I think maybe we should do this a lot of things are there I think different board of studies different academic councils are using different rules maybe again in the SPOC group you can start a thread in which everybody can respond to and add how what process they're following yeah post lunch we can have a discussion on this in more detail the last point I mean I think I'm supposed to stop but the big unknown is affiliated colleges we have no clue for that but we have I know a lot of people want to say things but we don't have time we'll try to do it after lunch they want to know whether from the placement perspective whether I can have time with companies so that normally they take a place they have to go for a training program like if they get to these years they have to do some Java courses or some other programming languages so whether you can enter into a type with these companies so that they can finish these training programs through NP10 courses and then they can apply for this is one key factor and another three factors many of the students are interested in research so whether they can have to choose a particular field in which they can have a type with a professor in these IITs yeah and then I mean the integrated program of doing the R&D and the DPSP my my my nephew got his MS admission after doing the finite level program lectures of Krishna Kumar from an engineering college that he studied and he finished his MS now and he is employed in the cities in Bangalore whatever we wanted to discuss say the brainier stuff but I want to get into the more mundane stuff but which is important for us for the next four months so that you know we know that we're all working together in the same flow and it's very hard to get all of you on the group make y'all read mails respond to us we respond to you know so I am going to take the next 15 minutes to run through whatever we have to say and we'll get some inputs from you after which will be the plaque distribution we'll have lunch probably at 2 to 15 we'll break for that and post lunch those of you who can stay we are all available here we'll come back here to the same auditorium to get your participation certificates for the workshops any other student certificates you have to collect and we'll continue some more discussions here the faculty will be available here coordinators will be here we'll just continue again okay so operations wise these are the timelines the most important thing we are doing this time we are making it one exam date we are not going to have two exam dates at all it is going to be morning shift afternoon shift on one exam date a strong case in point for this was out of 23,000 registered candidates for the septum exams only 1,500 are opted for even two exams and we got feedback from many students twice I have to go to the center why didn't you make it one exam date based on this feedback we have come down to this it's going to be just 26 march 23rd april morning shift 9 to 12 afternoon shift 2 to 5 so that is going to be the big change that we are bringing in this semester otherwise the timelines are very similar to what we did last time we have shared the timelines with you it'll be available on our local chapter portal I'm speaking quite fast tell me if I have to slow down because I don't want to take too much time on this it'll be available on the local chapter we will be sharing it inside your spoc logins a page send you mails we'll do all that stuff but basically broadly this is going to be there by 23rd december which is next friday we hope that all the courses that are going to be available for the january semester will be open for enrollment so please look into the course list most of them should be available barring a few which probably might get pushed by a month or maybe to the next semester we are working on the faculty with that and enrollment closes on january 23rd the day that the courses start on january 23rd so please ensure that your students enroll before that another small change we are bringing in now there was a request for eight week courses in a second shift also something like just like we are doing a second offering of four weeks they asked us whether we can do eight weeks because some states start late we are doing that this time not too many courses in that bouquet but yes we are going to have that so you will see that on the top you can see a 10 hours 2 and a 20 hours 2 so we'll be getting another set of eight week courses that are starting in february so we'll have the four week and eight week courses going for exams in march four week eight week 12 week going for exams in april there are going to be two sets all these dates are with you I hope you're familiar with them and suggestions for spocs this is what we said last time too for the new people in here enroll to an NPTEL online course will help you understand the whole process of how a student sees the course and what are the hitches in that the problems faced and so on if you can please do go through and write the exam a case in point again professor G.V.K. Sharma he has written the exam for three courses in computer science he's a topper in all three courses so he's the SPOC of geetham university the next steps okay for lc's who are wondering what we should do next january run is going to start so please there were some people who came and said we didn't add mentors last time certificate so on so we will open enrollment first publicize these courses in your college brochures will come to you please put them up at prominent places so the students are aware that these courses are on ask them to enroll and the most important point please ask them to select the local chapter correctly so that we can track the numbers from your college okay if they are not going to select the local chapter or they select something else the numbers will go to them we will not be able to tag them and track them so please ask them to select that and the next task that the SPOC has asked that you'll be doing is add your mentors inside your logins for the particular courses you want to do request for exam city along with the student numbers that you think that your college is going to give upload request for scholarship when we open the scholarship process please do that upload the list for bulk payment in case your college is going in for bulk payment yes as said earlier for july 2017 we'll get another button which says request for courses please put in we have noted it here we'll see how best to work all these around but start putting a request for july 2017 right now so that we can work on it for the next six months feedback about courses and process we do have a feedback inside the SPOC logins please keep giving it we are following it though we may not be responding to it immediately issues we are aware of and we are trying to correct on our part we'd like to own up to all of this before you all get up and start saying it yes exam centers are very far away from the city this is something that we all know our representatives have been there to many of these actually each and every center this time in the september and october but we'd like to make a point here saying that uh with tcs ion which is our partner the other customers who do exams for them do booking six months in advance they give them the numbers they give them candidate details they do center mapping six months in advance we give them 20 days in advance our list to tcs goes on march first for a march 26th exam and that is all they have though we start tracking we give them tentative numbers if they tell us in Chennai will you get 1000 or 1500 I have no clue because till the colleges come in till registrations come in we have no clue to do that so that is a major major problem with tcs it is not a problem with allocation but the timelines that we work with hence as SPOC since you saw that we are getting 75 percent from local chapter colleges please put in request for exam cities along with numbers right away if you know surely from your college so many are going to be writing exams for the march or april run we can ensure that we get better centers which are in the city better transport better proximity for you so that is something that we will try to work with and in big cities like say Chennai we've had this problem that we've had three centers and a person whoever knows the Chennai layout somewhere in say OMR gets a center in Aavadi Aavadi go somewhere else and so on we are going to try to split them zone wise so probably Delhi Bombay and Chennai big cities we might try to even mention the center so that your students can select the center where they want to go and write the thing and maybe the tcs employees will be around so if any of you wants to work with them and have centers at your college please contact them or write an email to us we'll copy them and we'll put you in touch with them so that you can work further with them just to clarify we NPTEL does not allocate choose or get a choice in the centers we only give them cities with numbers we say Shivagasi so many numbers with the nagar so many numbers that's all we do we do not have a choice in saying please take this college that call it because we don't know how the scheduling works so that is not something that is in our hands the next one mismatch a photon signature after registration yes there was a big miss on our part because the form that we had designed had some lapses and we took a huge hit of about 4,000 people registering in a span of 24 hours over the last three days which is not something we have seen over the previous runs so there are a lot of things we don't anticipate as we are growing so this was a major miss and yes multiple times you've gone on we have handled thousands of males over the last few months just correcting it there might still be problems when you get back certificates get back to us we'll redo certificates we have a much better equipped and experienced IT team in place now with us people who have joined us new will introduce you to the entire team at the end of this and we have kind of corrected it hopefully it should work fine now delay and dispatch I've already talked about it certificates will be coming to you by next week the things we would like to point out with respect to local chapters that we'd like you know handling better missing imported males on NOC SPOC group many people report that you know I have missed these males we have been putting a repeated request saying that please create email IDs called say NPTEL SPOC hyphen your college name at gmail.com and use that as the SPOC email ID do not use your personal email ID do not use an institute email ID because they'll get flooded we are seeing 100 plus males on some days in the NOC SPOC group no point complaining because people do write on that group we keep telling them don't write many others write don't write unless it's not relevant to the whole group but it's happening so kindly refrain from using your personal or institute email ID create something even if the SPOC changes he can just take over the email ID and he can work with it missing important timelines when we send out males many people say oh I forgot that mail I didn't see that mail we have an announcements page where we are archiving all important announcements please see that we have a calendar page where the important dates are being marked with respect to each and every task being done then enrollment data from your college is not complete that's again another complaint that we get yes because they may not have tagged themselves to the local chapter accurately whatever is available that is what we share with you that's why we say it is an estimate and whatever we have we give you then our students unable to see mentors on portal this has been another thing the mentor has to first enroll to the course he has to be on the course he has to tag himself to the local chapter and then only we can do and when the SPOC puts in the list of mentors inside his SPOC login please put the email ID correctly if y'all do a mismatch when we put it on the portal it doesn't work for us then we do not know a dot may be missing dash may be missing a letter may be missing but it doesn't miss if there's a mismatch it will not accept him as a mentor there him I'm using in a generic sense it's a him or a her in every sentence I use so students unable to see mentors ensure that they enroll to the courses and select the correct LC and the SPOC's have to enter the correct email IDs the functionality will be open within a week that you can start entering data scholarship upload problem there are a lot of problems with respect to incorrect course names email IDs and so on yes we do work with you as much as we can we try to incorporate all your requests to the end this time we're trying to make the process easier let's see how it goes with that scholarship not approved the only reason it's not being approved is that the email ID that you have again entered is not correct we do not have any other criteria to approve scholarship because your principal or the head of the institution is guaranteeing that that person requires the financial assistance so we are not doing any checks or saying that we cannot approve only thing is the email ID does not match or that email ID to the course that link is not happening so please ensure that you put in the correct data there then extension of timelines as you see we are working with four weeks eight weeks and you know we are just struggling with the teams that we have we have not yet scaled up so please please adhere to whatever timelines we give you we can accommodate only so much and you know extend only so much for you people we try our best we are working 16-hour days many days during the current times but beyond that you know we also have our limitations so whatever we ask you to do kindly try to do it within the timelines required and make your you know do your homework much ahead so that it's easier for you guys also at that point of time then request for exam city in center yes the numbers are not matching for instance if you many colleges request are saying that okay my college will give 150 people 200 people based on that we work with tcs we get centers there we fix up locations and all finally we see 10 people from the college have registered and there's no other college in that particular city that we have to have to offer an exam for so then we have to cancel that particular city and reallocate them so please be sure about the numbers give us because for us also the logistics are huge when we have to work with exam partners numbers don't match then canceling reallocating be right and last time for about 140 candidates we called them up individually on a Saturday told them we are canceling the city that you have requested for do you want to take a refund do you want we did it manually you know in our office because we don't want to miss out on student they should not be affected after registering but then it's not easy for us when we are going to scale up and it's not going to be possible so give us numbers that are realistic and not just for the sake of requesting for a exam city then bulk payment options are still there the payment options we'll probably discuss post lunch whoever's there if you'll have any doubts on that let us know because we are also continuously revising our processes of how to make the payments easier for y'all to get information on who's paid who's not paid so that y'all also don't do too much of collection if y'all don't have a process in place so that's something we are working out probably post lunch we'll discuss that then instruct students to check emails please kindly ask your students we sent so many notifications to them hall tickets available results available any other checks they have to do photo check this check none of them you know at least most of them don't check it and at some later date we get it when we can't do much about it so kindly instruct your students to very check their emails at least once in few days to see whether they have any notifications from us and yes one more request that we continue to write on please do not write on the NOC SPOC forum unless it is applicable to all the 700 people who are on that group if it is only for the NPTEL office item address we have our local IDs write to us we will respond to you individually unless it doesn't affect everybody else otherwise people are getting a little upset that you know there are too many emails saying that which are not required for the others so kindly refrain from this and yes this was an issue that we wanted to bring up here in this forum so this fee waivers is something that arison is giving from its CSR funds they we approach them saying that when we had done a survey that many students could not write exam because they didn't have funds they were on loans and so on and this company came forward to give us CSR funds to extend some kind of a scholarship or fee waiver for the students in need and we implemented the process but this particular september october and we found that from colleges that avail these scholarships there were even colleges that had 50 percent attendance from these students who had availed the fee waivers it is not a very nice thing because we answer arison we send them at least you know quarterly reports on what's happened who are the students and all colleges and when they come back and ask us you know you asked us for it you've given it to them why and they're appearing for the exam we have no reason to say we do get reasons of placements we get some other reason and so on but i don't think we can tell this to arison which will say then why do you need the money you know but we want to enable and it's also a waste of the money we are giving to a student who's not appearing for the exam which we could use for somebody who actually requires it you know keep the funds for the next run so we checked it for the september and october we do have some statistics on colleges which had this kind of attendances one thing we are thinking of putting in place which we will confirm in the coming week we will send out mails individually to spocs as well as on the group is that number of scholarships that are going to get approved for your college will be based on the number of candidates who are going to be present in the exam previous exam run who have availed scholarship so we are going to put as a criteria so 80 percent if you've had an attendance overall attendance at least your college who the students avail scholarships right they we must have an 80 percent attendance from them then you will get the same number or whatever we'll be approving but if you're not going to have that i think we're going to cut down on scholarships abarthi was mentioning it's from CSR funds of a company there are two things that the principal certifies when they say the approved scholarship one is economic need please please convey this to the principal if you're not here principal himself is here himself is here please listen to this very seriously when you're signing off you're saying that this person has an economic need number one number two this person is since here he's gone through the course properly and he is going to appear for the exam so both of these things are being certified by the principal please convey this to the principal in very strong terms please pre-select your students if you think there is some person who does not need the money please don't put them in this list we are not making the decision we're letting you make the decision please make the decision judiciously the second part is also very very important you have to approve people who have been sincere who are submitting assignments who are going to come for the exam these two things are extremely important please take it very seriously because we are answerable to the company for if you don't show up and we have to enforce some rules for this please be understanding yeah the next one is just the photos that the students are submitting for certificates from the local chapter colleges it is there on a A4 size sheet of paper a photo pasted and the entire A4 comes to us we put the photo automatically generated onto the certificate so in the photo space you're going to see a full A4 with probably a 2 millimeter by 2 millimeter his photo then we have to manually again do it drag it do all the so please instruct your students to actually upload proper passport size photographs for the certificates which they would like to see selfies we've seen group photos coming in three people coming in being submitted for a certificate photo then we have to cut out that person see who that is and put full size full length photo with Taj Mahal in the background and then we have blurred photos like this i mean then certificates are going to go out without photographs on them we give them some time we have written to about so many students saying your photos are not good send it to us we've given a dateline if they do not give it within that the certificates will go without photos the addresses the addresses that they fill up there's a student who's written Dinesh Tripoliti Delhi i don't know how to get delivered to that student as such if we send it to him so we are holding these back and writing to that student saying send us proper again if they just write a student name with a college name i'm not too sure whether it gets delivered but this is the kind of addresses sometimes we get from local chapters if it's a local chapter we hold it so that we can give it to the SPOC but otherwise we again have to work on just you know we spend a lot of time on these instances where it's this kind of error okay request to SPOC again again we are coming back to you for this please report success stories to us from your college for NOC courses if somebody got a job somebody got an internship how they use these courses credit transfer we need some letters from you because every workshop we go to every time we meet say MHR is something they ask where is your course being used do you have any statistics which other college is using it and we give them vague answers yes we know but we don't know we don't know some names you know but it'll be nice to have some letters from y'all on your letterhead saying that this is how we use our courses how many faculty members have done it that we have but how have they benefited have they floated that course learning something new from us inside your institute say as an elective or something that kind of information will be nice to have for us to share also report the news of courses for credit transfer yes and some feedback on how Erescent has helped you we are collecting the feedback because we didn't have anything on video purpose if you can give us some feedback our team is also waiting for feedback for anything else that you may want to say as SPOC's because we couldn't capture it during the center time when y'all hadn't come there during the exam run i guess um okay points of discussion this we had can we do away with hard copies of certificates this is the question that we wanted to ask as we are growing in numbers what do colleges say is the e-certificate copy on the NOC portal enough for y'all can you just because current is it okay good enough no they can't just download print it and laminate it they need a hard copy okay okay then we'll take that away and yes request for courses uh post lunch maybe yeah we'll have the sharing or maybe a separate portal we'll create where best practices of SPOC's in colleges that are really doing well i mean local chapters that are really doing well what are the processes you'll implement you'll can share there then any problem points faced i won't do it now because uh we'll have the distribution now but probably post lunch we'll all be here we would definitely like to hear what all problems you'll have with respect to our local chapter portal NOC portal online courses portal our courses the faculty maybe some irregularities i had something over uh tea break lunch also i've listened to you but post also we can have that and yeah that's all we have for now i guess so with this we'll stop we'll go on to the recognition of colleges for the doubly rated in the colleges that got a rating of a so this is a professor Arun Tangirala actually i think both during the break and some other time also we had number of faculty mentioned his course so i just wanted to introduce to you in person some chemical engineering we'll just start off with a college from Gujarat then i'll go with the order that we have first we'd like to call upon charotary university of science and technology the SPOC prosaneerabh Bhattis here along with the principle of the college request them to come on stage so they've come all the way from Gujarat though we kept telling them saying iit Bombay might have they said no we are coming to the medras workshop we'll do it here so thank you for coming here next we'd like to call upon valyamma engineering college professor Anbhacharyan the next is techno india salt lake west bangal they're not here they'll be attending the workshop at iit kharagpur next we call upon psr polytechnic college professor Shankara Subramanyam so all the three psr institutions actually in the top hundred local chapters next would be kc college of engineering and management studies and research professor hari rajai next would be a ssm institute of engineering and technology professor lingeshwari so they have been a really active partner with us working with us a lot exam centers have been there please ma'am next we'd call upon shree buddha college of engineering professor arun m so buddha college i think had about 700 students in a technical english course and what they were doing is downloading the videos getting students to an auditorium and beaming it every day for the students to learn and they had a huge number of them actually give the exams next is ms ramaya institute of technology professor parkavi not here okay next would be hallya institute of technology and professor siraj dutta as the spoc they will be going to the iit kharagpur workshop next is kalsalingam university professor murga boopati so i think kalsalingam was one of the earlier institutes to adopt credits for the courses even as far as september 2015 they were doing it i guess next we call upon dwaragdas jay sangvi college of engineering professor vishakash keelkar i don't think they're here they belong to the western region army institute of technology vishal ingley that's from punay again not here panimalar engineering college professor winmati after her we'd like to have shree vishnu engineering college for women professor pokulary kiran shree this is shree vishnu engineering college for women professor kiran shree next we'd like to have kamaraj college of engineering in technology perza muttulakshmi they were one of the earlier local chapters that had a lot of toppers i think faculty toppers student toppers coast toppers from september 2015 next we'd like to call upon chennai medical college hospital and research center trichy tamil nadu professor ishwai so probably this is the only local chapter that we have from the medical side they came in for the health research fundamentals course is somebody from nie here they were supposed to come today national institute of epidemiology we don't see that next we'd like to call upon mm ct mm college of engineering in technology trichy tamil nadu professor ajee venkateshwaran the new spfc will be receiving on her behalf next we have maharana prathap engineering college from kanpur from the mohit kumashiva stava's spoc this will be handled by the kanpur institute velamal engineering college professor shree nap the principal is also here to receive the black the next two would be from the maharashtra zone kj somaya institute of engineering and information technology sayon jyoti ganesh vadmare is the spoc modern college of engineering poone again these will be handled by the western zone next we call upon psr rangasamy college of engineering for women the spoc is professor balasubramaniam next would be lovely professional university from panjab they are not here with us today next we call upon v it university chennai professor pradeep kumar ts so there was a mr samuel johnson from v it who introduced us to a lot of colleges madhan apalli was introduced by him then amal jyoti college women jyoti college quite a few next we'd like to call upon satibhama university professor sashi prabha okay they've not attended next we call upon ks rangasamy college of technology professor prem kumar ks r college yes so that's where we are going for the workshop on january 11th next is indra prastha institute of information technology tripli t deli they're not here with us next we call upon githam institute of technology professor jivikesh arma this is the one at vizag andhra pradesh next is prasad b portlury siddhartha institute of college professor vanamal kumar from vijay vada andhra pradesh they also had quite a few toppers in the programming courses so when we went to the college for a workshop they had these huge banners with the toppers being printed all over the campus and so on next would be sis graduate school of technology mumbai uh they're not here today government college of engineering bergur tamilladu professor rahmatullah next we'd like to call upon rajiv kandhi college of engineering and technology pondicherry professor shanta kumari next would be bp podar institute of management and technology this will be handled by iat kharagpur office next would be maharaj vijay ram gajapati raj college of engineering are they here today professor kona umesh umya mahesh yadav and team are here to receive the plaque next would be poone institute of computer technology poone they're not here with us next would be psgr krishnamal college for women professor gita lakshmi or anyone from that college okay next we have sona college of technology professor sendil kumar after him we'd like to call mahar athenius college of engineering kotham mongalam kerala professor jisha kurvilla he's not there with us today yeah the next would be brainwave group of institutions uh kolkata vesbengal which iit kharagpur will handle and we'd like to call upon vardaman college of engineering dr madhu of hyderabad telangana so this completes the local chapters that have a rating of double a we'll go on to the local chapters that have a rating of a along with the spoc certificates we have also given the mentor certificates the criteria in case you're missing some mentors you think some should have gotten and so on we'll share the actual calculation list that we have done with you by monday or tuesday so that it'll help you explain to them saying what happened and if there are any problems again write back to us okay we go on to the local chapters that are rated uh given an a rating uh di t university deradun utra kan they're not here with us chatrapati shivaji institute of technology dur dur kshatisgarh iit kharagpur will handle rmk engineering college professor ke vijya thirvallur tamiladu okay they're not here with us uh kumara guru college of technology koimbatu tamiladu professor afiq okay he's not here with us psr engineering college dr arun sanmugam shivagasi tamiladu next we'd like to have rajalakshmi engineering college professor prasanna kumari is the spoc but there's somebody on the behalf of two next we'll have a vila institute of technology dur iit kharagpur will handle it next should be pragati engineering college professor mb rajesh they're not here today after that would be vidya pratishthans kamal naen bhajaj institute of engineering and technology poone shishankaracharya technical campus dur kshatisgarh kharagpur will handle it prince shri venkadeshwara padmavati engineering college professor ashok is here not here okay ishwari engineering college professor prasanna anybody from ishwari engineering college srm campus oh right next would be rmk college of engineering and technology chennai tamiladu professor selva kumaran next would be kalyani government engineering college kalyani west bangal kharagpur will handle it college of engineering patanapuram kolam kerala professor biji we're not here today next we have turnah engineering college mumbai marashtra then we have national institute of technology trichy the spsc is not here it is uh engineering college that is greater noida krishna engineering college ghaziabad up then we have she shankaracharya institute of professional management and technology raipu kshatisgarh then we have she rmk engineering college koimbatu tamiladu professor sundar raj i'm reading out all the names so that there is some completeness and you know we have the whole list on video which will be hosting on website shortly so next we shall have s and r suns college koimbatu tamiladu professor annasaro vijayimbran next would be mirat institute of technology mirat up iit kanpur will handle it then would be school of engineering kochi kerala we are not here today next we shall have panimalar institute of technology chennai is anybody from panimalar institute okay next we call upon ksr institute for engineering and technology trichyam kodith tamiladu professor umas here next would be vaghdevi institute of technology and science kadappa prosa venkata veera prasad and team will be coming to receive it next would be pc institute university of technology chandigar panjab they're not here next we'd call upon laki reddy bali reddy college of engineering prosa sheen vasarao this is in maila varam andhra pradesh next we call upon she madhva vadiraja institute of technology and management udupi karnataka provzamanoj is here to collect the plot next we call upon rb college of engineering banglo karnataka provzashinath okay he's not here today next would be dronacharya college of engineering gurgaon hariyana they are not here today then we have sain gits college of engineering kerala provzacherian is the spoc someone is collecting on the behalf then we have kings engineering college chennai tamiladu professor sudhakar next we'd like to call upon ns's college of engineering palakad kerala professor priya then we'd like to call upon tkm institute of technology kolam kerala professor saji kunjumol is the other tkm available would they want to collect it would somebody want to collect on behalf of tkm institute of technology yeah so next uh i'd like to announce bn college of engineering and technology lakhnau up iit kankur will handle it dronacharya group of institutions great anoida they are not here today gharda institute of technology rathnagiri marashtra they are not here today mit academy of engineering pune marashtra shan anchor kachi engineering college mumbai marashtra kanpur institute of technology kanpur up vishwakarma institute of information technology pune marashtra they're all not here with us today yeah this would be tkm institute of technology kolam kerala next i'd like to call upon dhayanan sagar institute banglore karnataka okay they're not here today laila institute of technology and science kanya kumari tamil nadu they're not here today rajiv kandy university of knowledge and technologies adilabad telangana they're not here acharya college of engineering and technology puducheri okay a b s engineering college ghaziabad up kamlaineru institute of technology sultanpur up vishwajyoti college of engineering and technology anakulam kerala we have the spoc here rajesh sherry android so we'd like to introduce our team here to you because many of you may know our names talk to us on phone calls we also would have done the same with you so i would like to introduce and call upon the team here on stage uh can we get the entire team inside yes till the team is ready professor arun will address you on the courses to come very good afternoon andrew is asking me to entertain you i know only how to entertain in statistics and so on but i'm not going to if you wanted to leave for lunch quickly i can do that very good afternoon i know all of us are really hungry but it's a great pleasure i didn't expect the clp to be this i would say occupied it's always great to interact with people who are in education who want to seek knowledge i think mook really offers an excellent platform i would say firstly i don't know about uh the participants or the people who have registered but i myself have benefited a lot through mook firstly my knowledge of geography of indians improved okay but jokes apart i would say that one of the things that i have learned is that truly there are so many people in this country and across the globe we have had participants outside the country as well enrolling in this courses the truly these people who are seeking knowledge and probably they've been waiting for too long and mook is perhaps one answer to the mod in fact in pital itself so i just want to talk briefly about the courses that i have taught and i have uh kind of been a part of three courses two courses taught by me individually and one as a part of the larger group of a faculty who have taught the two courses that i have taught are introduction to time frequency analysis and vaguely transforms a kind of a branched course in signal processing and uh it has it has had its uh tournaments and the experience has been great in uh both runs of the course and then the other course that i have talked very recently is introduction to statistical hypothesis testing which is a 10 to 12 hour course normally if you tell me 10 hours then i will go for 12 hours so you have to plan ahead then you whenever if you plan to invite me and you have two hours you should tell me that you have only one hour i have only one hour then that's how you calibrate me so it's a 12 hour course it's a fundamental course for those of uh you who want to get into data sciences without knowing how to carry out hypothesis testing you would not be able to survive in data analysis and data sciences i think the response has been very good and the third course uh that i have been a part of really fortunate to be a part of is introduction to research uh we have Patap and Andrew who are the other members and then of course we have had and a few other faculty biology and as well uh that was uh a course and that's a course i keep recommending to my students and i would say that's the course actually you should all of you should recommend to your undergraduate students because if anything in India we have a depth of researchers and scholars and this 10 hour course and introduction to research gives uh some kind of an eye opener to students who want to get into research and we want students to get into research i keep recommending that to students who come from outside colleges and approach for projects and they've had very good things to say about the course the other course that's going to come up online which is uh i would say i mean it's a giant course it's only a 48 hour course it's uh titled applied time series analysis i can see already Bharati smiling and i mentioned the number of hours uh it is a course that is uh one of the most fundamental courses that you want to do next to hypothesis testing if you want to be in data analysis and it does require some discipline some patience so to test your patience what we have done is i've gone against the principles of two minute three minute introductory video i've gone to 21 minute introductory video if you can sit through the introductory video it's a test of your patience to sit through the 48 hour course obviously it has to be proportional how can an introductory video for the 48 hour course be just two minutes it's not possible so uh seriously that's the only way we're going to filter it people who are totally interested in the course uh the part that i want to uh there are just two points that i want to say one is the interaction with the participants we would love to have questions posted on the forum not asking phone numbers to be included in the website group of course that's not the one please desist from doing so we are both my and our peers and i say this for every faculty their eyes glow up their hearts light up when they see questions related to the subject on the forum so please do ask questions because that is a food for a teacher that's a food for the peers and we really thrive on such questions and uh that that's the only way you get to know and this is a wonderful opportunity it's it's a pity sometimes when we conduct hangout sessions there are only about five to six people participating in the hangout i know that some specialized courses have that kind of a problem but please do come online interact with the faculty interact with the team who is conducting this course and get to know them and the other thing that i want to mention is about the software so in the past few years matlab in one of the courses we used are at the moment we don't have a seamless way of integrating the software into the courses particularly when it comes to evaluation we're doing our best for example we are talking to mathworks who are the makers of matlab they have come up with matlab online i'm in close touch with matworks because i have a lot of connections with people who mathworks for good reasons and we're trying to improve your matlab experience i know some of you i mean lot of you do not have the officially licensed versions of matlab you have the unofficial free versions i don't want to use the technical term for it but please try to get away from that and use the matlab online version because then it makes things easy for us but i think things are going to improve when it comes to software and the next course that i'm going to put which is a time series analysis it's an equivalent of statistical signal processing we'll use our is an open source free software available in all platforms so you should have no issues in using it in fact if any we should have issues actually setting up questions in our for evaluation but we are working on it the empty tunnel team is in close touch with google team to see how seamlessly we can integrate our but please make best use of it and in all such courses that i have referred to practice is the most important thing just listening to the theory is absolutely not going to be enough at all and these subjects particularly statistical subjects are extremely volatile as volatile as chennai weather one day you'll have cyclone the next day will be bright and sunny so that's how bad it can be so if you don't practice no way the subject is actually going to stay with you please put in effort practice learning in my opinion in my perspective is a very sacred thing and every sacred thing requires discipline so please put in a lot of discipline i know you're doing it but please convey this to the students who take this course and give that best this is a wonderful opportunity i'm really glad that you're putting in the effort and you're doing your bit for the education of the community at large so congratulations to all of you for the efforts and the achievements and i hope this will continue for ages to come thank you i think we'll go on to introducing our team now most of the members are here we'll start with the it team as we said we got some senior people in so i'll start with them i'd like to call them upon stage as i call the names please come on stage mishri Vidya mr halid they both are the team heads that we've gotten just about two months back so they are the ones who'll be putting all the processes in place for us they are being assisted by Prem Kumar Jeffery Anto Satya Gayatri please come to the center on the front she with ya can you move this way yeah Mohana Sundari Gokul Liban Saravanan Venkatesh is the name y'all might have seen in some emails he's not here today but uh he's also moving to enforces in the next month so this is the team that'll be handling the it and Nagarajan is the one who takes care of our server systems and sees that the website is up and so on Nagarajan okay next i'd like to call upon the uh local chapter team it is headed by Kamala yeah everybody please be on stage do not move because we want a final group pick yeah Kamala assisted by Jitakar Punguly and Maria Neeta Gokul come in front online courses portal and the exam question paper creation and so on is handled by Lakshmi Priya and Jayanti both of them are unavailable today then we have the support staff of okay Nagarajan is coming okay he's a server man and if any website is done this is the person we go to then we are ably supported by Ramya Anita Jaishri Karthi Vinodini then we have the studio team without who the videos would not get created at least IIT Madras videos so can we have the team is headed by Mr. Kannan Krishnamurthy he's been with us for 16 years probably or 15 years now okay okay he's like the 16 year old always so it's always 10 every year I say 10 so that's like that but he heads the studios he's the studio expert for a lot of institutes which want to set up studios in there the equipment facilities and so on so he takes care of the entire team under him we have Karthik Karthikeyan Karthik is on the camera I don't know if he can leave that and come then we have Karthikeyan Gomati Ravi Chandran Shivajay Prakash Shri Balaji Benjamin Mohan is the other guy there Mohan can you come down would that be okay so that's the studio team then we have the accounts and admin team headed by Mr. Murli Krishnan he's assisted by Ganapati and Inveshekaran the other guys who'll give you your TA if it doesn't come into your bank accounts please write to them it should come in and the three people without which who do all the running around for us Madhu, Surya and Krishna okay then the design expert the website design that you see the posters that you see the banners that you saw today anything else that gets designed Anushri is a person the certificates that you see Anushri is the person so she's there and I'd like to call upon our coordinators too on stage for the group pic I'm of course Bharti Balaji from NPTEL office yeah we'd uh I'd like to call the coordinators Andrew Tangraj Pratap Haridas Professor Mangal and also the team from the other institutes IIT Kharagpur Mr. SS Das IIT Delhi Ritu and Mr. Chauhan IIT Kanpur Ms. Angana please we also have some support from the other institutes as we said IIT Tirupati and Palakkad we have Sandil here from IIT Tirupati who's representing that team there so this is the team that you see behind on emails and calls thank you so much for this yeah I'll just finish with announcements before I give it to Professor Mangal the workshop participation certificates will be handed over after lunch in this auditorium please do come in after lunch here we will give it back to you those have requested for student certificates to be handed over will also come here to this auditorium a list of active college that who did not get the certificates that certificates will also come to the auditorium back and anybody else who wants to discuss any of the points with us we'll also be back after lunch please do be here and we'll talk with you over there okay I wanted to introduce you to a program which has been going on in NPTEL for the last seven years we had a very senior IES officer from Gujarat Dr. Jayanti Ravi who was then the Gujarat Technical Education Commissioner who got to know about NPTEL and what she did was to take the NPTEL program at that point of time I'm talking about 2009 of somewhere around that period she took it to 800 or 900 students and teachers in the state of Gujarat and she generated a lot of data and correlation analysis and many other things which were important for us part of which led to her chapters for a thesis that she wrote under Vallabh Vidyan I think sir Gujarat Vallabh Vidyanagar isn't it the university she did her PhD with one chapter written on the NPTEL data and since then she has been one of the spokespersons and champions of NPTEL throughout the government in all circles and what she wants to do is to continue the feedback analysis of NPTEL with a fairly extensive question set Mr. Shailendra is now her PhD student he is an assistant professor in Mumbai University please Mr. Shailendra he has a few minutes to tell you a little bit about the questionnaire and also most importantly he would like to visit each one of you or a team of you in your colleges and take feedback from about 100 to 150 or even 200 students if we collect enough data up to the point of something like 50,000 to 70,000 clearly evaluated data points with a very detailed the set all kinds of analysis will tell us how this online education process will be useful and government of India why it should support this on a much larger scale and so on so in that sense the data points that he would collect are extremely important for us please help us he would tell you more about it about five seven minutes or eight minutes can you please so I'll not take much time basically the data is what we want to collect is from the student we are thinking this particular portal from the point of view from the student what actually the student want what are the requirements of the student what they said if they want to certificate or not if they want to go for a lectures how utilization of this particular site or maybe the portal they are using for so we have categorized our basic questionnaire in seven different sessions so first session talks about a personal a personal detail and an institute detail about the student basically what he is doing which courses enrolled for which institute which area which state he is from a second part talks about the awareness of his particular NPTEL so these are the different seven sessions where question is divided into the second part talks about the awareness of the NPTEL website portal now from where he does get the information about this particular portal are the basically the media he is going to use the maybe the internet maybe the telephone maybe the handset mobile or maybe the laptop what he is going to use maybe the first thing he has been heard about where the he got the news of this particular he got the idea of this particular NPTEL see there may be a student telling them very in my institute I am the person who is going to communicate about this NPTEL to the student maybe there are some issues areas when the student talks about this particular portal to the student so this is what we need to understand from the student part of view third session is about the quality content what are the qualities the videos are see now from today morning we have seen that we have been trying to focus everything from the teacher's point of view what we are trying to provide but now what we are trying here is to get the idea about the student what exactly the student want is that particular content what is provided definitely the content is good it is from the best of the professors we have but how the student are trying to get this content if this content is helpful for them see the student is not from the university or maybe not from the institute if the student is he says completed the course now if his student want to gain some knowledge from this particular videos he is able to gain that particular knowledge or not what are the delivery kind of thing what we have maybe the videos we have a different format of videos what format is preferred by the student a large because see in a laptop we can see in a different format in mobiles we can see in a different format of which is a format which is basically a student want from his side of view so and find a fourth part talks about the utility of this particular portal as of like how this particular portal majority of the content is for the engineering student how this particular content can be used by a student for a their personal growth or maybe the competitive exam they want to try for and a fourth talks about how academically this particular portal will help them out maybe a can be a classroom can be replaced by this particular portal if they can sit at home and study this particular thing now from morning we have seen that videos can be downloaded now can this video downloaded video can be shared to him he can see that at his own space and time and he can give the example it on this is something what we want to work on fifth topics talk about the possible improvement what are the things we need to improve in this particular full portal like the video quality hey maybe the content hey maybe the time limit hey whatever it is and six and six talks about the personality see this is a totally different area we are talking about every session talks about the course contain the syllabus what the student talks about but in this particular sixth section we want to know about the student interest in a different personality personality means like we want to talk about any person who is there for example any name Abdul Kalam like and he so he want to know more about that particular thing from this particular portal or not this is his likes in a different context altogether and the seventh session talks about how maybe he might want to get involved with us as a NPTEL portal maybe he might share the information to everybody maybe he want to be a part of it in some other manner so this is what we are talking about the NPTEL survey my request is like we have a web link NPTEL survey dot web lead dot com where in the all this particular question that is available I request you that you try this particular questionary first and if anything is there you just mail me across later on I'll get in touch with you my email id is there I'll get in touch with you wherein your college name can be added to the questionnaire and again you may take the feedback from the student part of this this will be a project this will be running on a project mode for one or two years we have professor Johnny who is a former professor and also vice chancellor in Gujarat who will be the project head Shailendra myself and a couple of others will try to collect data from all of you we will reach you please help us and please allow many of your students to answer the questions and feedback it's a long survey but it's very very important one long survey is sufficient for us to find the utility of the program for the last 12 years and also for the next few years so please help us this is an extremely important statistics we have to give it to the government yes please yeah go ahead actually I'm going to part given I have done the same work from in a national district of technical teacher services sorry this is a scholar of NAT care okay I have done the same work using the evaluation of e-learning resources okay in my case it is NPTEL before four years I have contacted you and I have evaluated the NPTEL course you had done part of it isn't it ah yes the whole thing is related to the NPTEL yeah done part of yeah this the data here collected is a much larger and much more extensive set so from that we will try to see actually my studies focus towards the Tamil Nadu only wonderful mapping national level okay when you help me even I can definitely yeah we will we'll contact you yeah thank you thank you very much thank you very much