 So the next person who is on stage, we all know this person very well. For our queries, for our concern, we reach this person day in, day out and she's there to help us out. Day in, day out, even in exams also, in terms of coordination also, in terms of you can say course contents also. She's the lady here who is standing here. She's one person who is the most reachable person for us and she help us day in, day out, our various teams of ITs to grow faster and make the exam smooth. So next, Ms. Bahati ma'am will talk about more about operations and how we work with local chapters. Before that, as we said, we'll show you a small video. Actually, the video is available on the website, but not sure how many of you have seen it. So this is a video that has been consolidated from the feedback that we received from various centers as candidates were coming out of it. So in many of the cities, we deploy our crew and we have them stationed outside exam centers, and we capture the feedback from them. We just put it together as some highlights of what we do. NPTEL is today one of the biggest repositories of technical courses in engineering and sciences in the world. I enrolled for Embedded Systems. Introduction to Data Analytics and Machine Learning. Introduction to Modern Application Development. Project Planning and Control. Introduction to Programming in Sikyatha. Quite the Health Research Fundamentals. Building Science. Introduction to Airplane Performance. I enrolled for English Language for Competitive Exams. This is my 11th exam. I'm an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Pachaiyapas College, Chennai. I'm working as an Assistant Professor. I'm working as an Associate Professor. I'm a Scholar. I'm a Scientist in DRDO. I'm a Rameshwar Engineering Sensa Transfusion Manufacturing Company. I'm a TVS Group. I'm a Pediatrician. I'm working in Chennai Port. I'm a third year in Electrical Engineering. I'm working as an Engineering Manager. I'm 17 years old now. I completed my course. I'm an Expiring Entrepreneur. I have my own start-ups. I'm a Doctor actually. I'm working at Yamamoto's R&D. I'm working in the RDR Cancer Institute in Chennai. I feel much happy to attend this exam. I feel much happy to attend this exam. The videos were extraordinary and marvelous. Whatever the questions posted in the forum, it's immediately been answered. That is an amazing work, what they are doing it really. With respect to NPTEL, the quality of lectures and delivery, the contents to the students, no doubt unquestionable. It's too good. The examination today I really enjoy. I've been travelling more than two hours daily. I'm just hearing the entire video conversation throughout my journey. Not sitting at home. We've done some research. We've done some numerical analysis. It's going well. The lectures are going well too. The students are getting some benefits. I was working in a different domain totally like mainframes. So the course which I took was Introduction to Modern Application Development. So this course was very helpful because I've learnt new technologies. Each and every day we learnt new topics and assignments are also something which I want to apply, search further. So I'm looking forward for more courses in the future. The course content was very extraordinary to be precise. Even if you compare to other websites, they don't offer certification like MIT or any Carnegie Mellon open course. But this is a very good initiative by the IITs and IACs which can improve the standard of education. It has taken our Indian education to other level. I was expecting to get gold medal by IIT, but I don't know if it will be there or not. The forum was useful. I posted many questions. I got immediate response also. It helped me a lot. The exam for acoustics is related to noise and vibration. Being well organized, now I'm looking for more courses relating to my subject. I see this particular exam as a self-exploration of knowledge among the faculty members as well as it helps students to enrich their subject domain to a greater extent. We're all placed in telecom domain. So we thought taking up a course later to telecom would help us. So we took up the course principles of MIMO, OFTM and CDMA wireless communication. Health research fundamentals. Very useful, actually. The course is very useful. We're basically from the CDC department, even though we were not so fluent in this programming. But while watching those videos, we got to know the nook and corners about that. I have taken project planning and control. This was really effective and useful. I think this will help me in my career and in my placements. And this is a very useful and a new experience for me. I got a lot of steps from these three months. I have learned more in these three months than taking some papers in the college. It's a nice opportunity for people outside of IIT to be able to take an exam that is conducted by IIT. So the standards are pretty good, obviously. It's a great opportunity for every student in many other colleges to get a certificate from IIT. The way they teach, the way they represent the subject is awesome. They come up with the recent trends and they talk about the application. In our celebration, they just focus on marks. This NPT helps me to focus on what is hard, what we can do, what we can apply from this. It's very useful to me because I am from the Bitech side. I heard from the college seniors that you should do the course from the NPTL. And I found it very useful and very, very productive. Even at the age of 50-plus, we are getting some enthusiasm to go through all these lectures and all those things. I think the course was really informative and it has helped me a lot. So I think now I can become a good project developer or something. The entire site was responsive. So whatever I asked, they answered it very, very clearly. I think I will definitely take up one more course. So I have done my online course on biostatistics and design of experiments. It would be useful for my career. For a youngster, definitely it is useful. But this type of courses, if you find in other places, it is very, very costly. But here it is, for landing purpose, it is cheap. For obtaining a certificate, it is only a nominal fees. Till now, I couldn't learn anything in my college. I was able to learn through this course. Many basic concepts that were not cleared, were also cleared. And all the exams that were assigned to me, such as mesh problems and many more problems, it was fun to solve them. Today I took enhancing soft skills and personality. Nowadays, most of the courses are supported with text material that we like. Certification in my profession, it is very helpful. I think it is good from a regime point of view. Plus, it is a kind of a testament that you have this basic knowledge and then you can go to an advanced course. It's fantastic. I never experienced such a coordination. It's a very good experience. Another person from my college has taken it in another centre. Both of us feel that the teaching was absolutely brilliant through the course. And not only theory, even practice was there. They actually showed us through the flight lab and they actually had very, very practical examples. I appreciate the initiative of MHRD and the stonious efforts taken by the IIT groups for providing the latest and technically sound education on online mode. This is the first time I felt that some course for working professionals and it is well-organised as such. I must congratulate IITs for taking this initiative to take education and the contents that they have as part of NPTEL to all the people, particularly the student community, who can benefit a great deal. It was hosted by a professor from IIT Kharagpur and it was, honestly, it was recommended by my faculty just so we could gain more insight into the working of the systems, as per se. The question paper was pretty good. I expected it to be a lot tougher than it was but I guess the practice which was given on the site was pretty useful for me. Nowadays doctors are expected to do a lot of research also apart from seeing patients. So this course helped me to learn a lot. Giving all those information in an open source manner, being a technical person, congratulating them and thanking them. It was a nice experience. It's wonderful in sitting along with the students and solving the problems makes us to be more concentrated with the course to have a better deliverability of the content to the recent trends are in par with the reputed institutions. Our colleges, they don't take at this high level of programming and found the videos very useful because it made me think out of the box. It was a very useful both from urban area and from rural area and for rural area students would be able to pull the students. Most of the students are benefited. Most of them are appeared and got certificates. Since we had a certificate exam, we prepared even better and this MCQ based online exam was a very good experience. We would love if there were more such courses coming up and on various other topics because under health this was the only one available. I was looking for such a course for a long time. This course was really like bringing a bridge across what we are doing now and what we are going to do in the future. I learned more concepts in C++ in depth and PTL exam was very good. He taught each and every line in depth so we can understand very well. Definitely once you get hooked on to this particular process of learning you will find that you can learn at your own pace and time and you will also be benefited with a certification which is also what a case stamped by industry and therefore you will find it is employment facilitated. This program will be the harbinger of a big intervention in India in the area of online education so that we can address the grand challenge of providing high quality and useful education to a very very large number, probably the largest number of youngsters in the world. Thank you. At the bottom we have a link called feedback and in that we have all the detailed videos so you can if you have the patience and time you can actually go through and see what people have said in detail about our courses. So getting back to the presentation yeah this is the NOC portal where we showcase all the toppers so there are two places where we showcase toppers if you have seen it one is a course wise topper showcasing that we do which is for every course we say who are the toppers in this particular course and here we can also see the variety of people who are there in every course. What we talk about say today we have about 70% students who declare themselves to be college students 15% to 20% is faculty members and about 10 to 15% is from the industry. The split we can see directly from the toppers you have Tata consultancy services somebody is stopping there is a centre of a railway information system somebody is there faculty members there are people from colleges here also who are becoming toppers so that is the spread of audience that we have the other place where we showcase toppers is inside a local chapters so every local chapter also for every run we showcase who are the toppers from that particular local chapter in that particular semester we showcase it if you have seen your pages you will see that that data is also available. So for people who are familiar with it who have been with us for a year or more yes you do know all this but I would like to go through this again for people who are new this is what we do for rating all the local chapters so we calculate the score there is a way in which we apply a formula and calculate the score based on the performance of the candidates from your college across all courses in a particular semester or run as we call it so candidates can be students faculty members whoever says I belong to this XYZ local chapter everybody score we calculate here so what we do it not too much weightage for the numbers if you see so it is not that a college who gives us 2000 students will become the top rated not going to be that we cap that at 10 points so we do a 0.1 into number of students capital 10 so beyond 100 if you have also actually it is not going to matter it is not going to contribute to that factor then we have successfully completed a weightage of 1, number of elite we have a weightage of 2, number of gold we have a weightage of 10, number of toppers we have weightage of 20 so we do this calculation across all the candidates then we put them in descending order we get the top 100 to become what we call as rated we rate them as AAA, AA and A we give them that grading so the top 100 get that so that is what we put up in our website every semester so 1 to 10 will be AAA they get the rating of AAA 11 to 50 will be AA 51 to 100 will be getting a rating of A so this is what we use this formula is not set in stone based on how you know performances change how you know the courses change whatever we think is more suited to the performance we might keep changing it we will inform you ahead too of that ok so for the local chapters who get it there is felicitations that happens on the website anyway it comes up but in these kind of functions is there we want to recognize the contribution of the SPOC's and the management of that particular institute so you will see it happening at may be 12451 after our presentations and our interaction so these are the kind of certificates that go out that goes out to the college so this is for the AA this is for the ok what happens to the other colleges who have participated who have had students in the Iran there are a lot of SPOC's who are working continuously yes but have not gotten into the top 100 so don't we do anything for them definitely not we know a lot of people that we are working continuously at least I think as of date out of the 1400 that we have 900 of them are pretty active we are with them on you know in modes of communication so we'd like to definitely recognize a few of them too so this time we have used two criteria till last time it was only that if you had 25 or more candidates present for either of the exams we were recognizing them as an active local chapter but this time we said ok what if suppose somebody does not have 25 but they have a gold medalist or a topper why not recognize them because some effort has gone into that too so that was another factor we have put in here and this is what we have done so we have another 376 so the top 100 definitely are recognized as active but apart from that 376 local chapters also we are recognizing as active local chapters based on this criteria so either you had 25 candidates participate in the September October exams both put together or you had a topper or a gold medalist amongst your candidates even if you didn't have 25 yeah so the SPOC's also get certificates and this is the kind of certificate that we are giving out this is for the triple rated colleges there is the A that is SPOC as well as the certificates for the SPOC's who had of the active local chapter so Nietzsche we are just putting out the tag saying that how are we rated that local chapter as active whether it is based on participation or whether it is based on them having a topper or a gold medalist so this is it ok mentors so I hope all of you know that mentors has been one of the strong points that we have on our portal I don't think we see this kind of mentors across say a Coursera Adex or something if you have gone there they do have something called community TAs and so on which is overall but it's not like a college specific that they have enabled so here the concept of mentor is that from a college if you have a group of students who are participating in a course and you want somebody to actively follow up on how are they doing the course are they going through it are they submitting assignments if they are submitting assignments what are the scores they are getting this will be especially important if you are getting the credit system into your college because you want to know that they are doing well in the course and they are following the videos right so there is a for those of you who know or I would like to just share with you the SPOC can nominate the mentors for every course so they would essentially be faculty members from your college if they know the subject very well and good if the subject is new but they still want to just motivate the students that's also fine with us it could be either ways so once you add the mentor from your login on the online courses portal and the mentor has to enroll to the course too assuming he or she has enrolled to the course the SPOC will see it inside their login then they say okay these people are the mentors for every course once that is done one thing which we do not do on a portal at some level we do respect privacy we say that we will not let you tell us okay now attach these students to the mentor so that does not happen so what the students of your particular local chapter will find is they will find a drop down with a mentor tab and whoever are mentors for that particular course they will find their names and email IDs there the students have to go and now click saying okay I want to be attached to this mentor once that happens the mentor will get a mentee's tab and you can see the assignments course of all the mentees attached to you so this is one sure short way of finding out what are they doing in that particular course so what do we do for mentors again based on performance so the mentor doing the course writing the exams submitting assignments is not a criteria at all only looking at his mentoring aspect of it and not his own capability in that so we are only checking what is the performance of the mentees there and this time we had yeah so this is the formula again we do one into number of mentees successfully complete all this is on the portal I am just putting it out here for your reference so more than 10 if you have a score we are recognizing those mentors so ideally how do you get a more than 10 any 10 of your mentees have at least appeared for the exam you get that if you have five mentees who have successfully completed two mentees who at least got a elite certification at least one who was a gold medalist so you get a certificate we recognize that that person did do something for their own students so this time we had a total of 4747 4,747 mentors who were nominated by the SPOC's across the various 159 courses out of that when we applied it 1174 have qualified to get the certificates that certificates will also be given for the local chapters who are here today they will be getting your thing and the remaining we have just put our statistics why didn't the other guys get it so 619 the mentees have not registered for the exam 69 the mentees are registered but they didn't attend the exam 2884 the mentees were present but we didn't get the 10 point criteria that we talked about and just as a off beat kind of a stat 879 mentors took up exams either in that course or some other course it could be there and 49 were gold medalist so these are essentially faculty member statistics that we are putting out here and we had 17 mentors who had more than 100 students that they were mentoring so normally we recommend that 50 is a good number beyond that you can't reach out to the students and actively work with them but sometimes the college says there's only one person and nobody has no subject and I want this so we say okay so they were like 17 mentors who had this okay so mentors also till last time we did not have any differentiation in how they mentored but this time we wanted to also showcase that so we have brought out three categories of mentor certificates that there's a stamp on your certificate so one will say a mentor with either a topper or a gold medalist one of your mentees was that mentors with total exam register mentees more than 100 who had registered and both of it together so those who get mentor certificates you will get one of these if you fall into it otherwise you'll just get a certificate without this stamp so these are the kind of certificates we have prepared for the mentors so there's a plain certificate with no badge and so on okay so based on last time's ratings this is how it has changed for those of you who know last semester this was a radical change for us with respect to at least a few local chapters so Valchand has come in as the top rated local chapter do we have the SPSC here today we have them in this time and Valchand was a surprising thing for those of you wonder how to scale up what to do maybe you should talk to him because this is September October right in March April was the first time I think they were participating in the courses big time and March April Solapur was not even in our map of India that we even had a centre there we've not even thought of it in that way and then we started seeing exam registrations one day we find we are looking at numbers 500 Solapur where is Solapur now we have not even seen it so then we find out okay this is there and we said who's this college so it is Valchand then we had to scramble like weeks or four weeks ahead we had to talk to TCS because we are not on plan for it work for it you know and then we saw 500 we had to work there's no TCS dedicated centre there those guys had to listen finally we were able to give them a centre and that was about 500 in March April I think this time you had more than 1400 1400 students somehow they brought in so we'll hear from him probably as to what they do with their students how they get it done and so on so this time we actually in Solapur we have probably six or seven centres and it's still growing so we are telling TCS you might want to look at you know putting a dedicated centre there the way the numbers are going so they were they are the top rated local chapter today so that is there again Charota is something which has been scaling up gradually last three times we have seen them come to Madras we have interacted with them we had workshops and today they are in the top ten of course there are others from the south that are also doing well so actually if you compare the lists are available on the website of the last times run the previous run and so on the shifts that are happening as newer local chapters come in and more of them adopted based on how you adopt it the numbers keep changing here so this is here and we have the other colleges and for those of you how many of you are from ArtScience College here okay we have quite a few I mean out of 1400 I think about 300 to 350 ArtScience colleges that we have as local chapters today and we tell them that don't be scared of doing an IIT course it is quite fine it is very accessible it is very doable for your students and we are not primarily an engineering portal also we want also you know give access to them because there is always BSE computer science math science physics we all can take the courses management is there BC is there so all that is fine so that is there and in the top 100 I think we have quite a few local chapters that are also featured they are in the rating of between 1 to 100 which says that it is definitely doable it is not just the engineering colleges that you see there so this list is there I am just going to talk for you to see it is also available on the website okay again this is some data that we wanted to present for many people we already started seeing emails for those of you who know we have opened the exam form this time much ahead we said as you enroll you can start registering for the exams even before the course run we wanted to make it a little more flexible so it is going to be open till March 7 and the other change we have brought about this time is kind of consolidate our logistics was getting a little too much like you saw last time we had 103 centres 83 centres within a span of 4 weeks we are scrambling to do all that you know and twice we open the form twice we are doing hall tickets our reps are going twice everything is kind of getting too much across the country and as Professor Shavgonkar said the gate has been going on for probably 20 years now they have a well oil system the handover is so easy from institute to institute and any institute takes a load only once in 8 years as it comes so strict NPTEL currently we are coordinating it of course with help from all the other institutes but then the system is still not set like what we see suddenly Solapur comes up with 500 some other city comes up with 1000 we just don't know how to handle it and few of us are just doing it as we go so we wanted to consolidate operations system another feedback that we got from candidates was for me to travel twice to some cities difficult ones have to go in September ones have to go in October so can't you put it together was another you from people the third thing that we thought when we should consolidate numbers was this data which I want to definitely present to you so as you can see almost 95% of the total registrations register for one examination there is about a 5 or 6% varying so I am showing you the last 2 runs that we have which register for even 2 examinations and it's like 0.3, 0.6, 0.8% which do 3 or 4 examinations so we said if we are going to have the bulk of 95 doing one exam so even if we club it over a weekend or something it's not going to change things too much so unless again you know we get feedback and we are seeing colleges going across and they are saying no all our students will do 3 exams or something like that it's difficult we will look into it for this time we want to do this trial method to see is it going to work because it will help us we do everything only once and there is a consolidation happening at some point so this is how we have done it these are the numbers 3 exams 4 exams that we have ok these are some tidbits that I wanted to give you so sometimes we ourselves say you know somebody doing one course itself is difficult if you are sincere following up with assignments as we told you every week it's going to take you 8 hours apart from what you are doing you will be a professional you may be a student whatever you are going to spend like if you are sincere it is 6 to 8 hours of work every week that is one course 2 courses 16 hours 3 courses 24 hours every study are the people who have done it yes are the people who are doing well in it are they topping it yes again so this is some stats we wanted to show so there is a person who has done 4 courses this time topped one course there are people who have done 3 courses they have registered they are in the top 1% top 2% and so on so there are people who are also writing 2 courses 3 courses exams and topping those courses again another piece of information what we found in I think March this September right last year September October 2016 when we had our exams there was a girl from Calcutta who had written 4 exams a topper in all 4 exams so we said oh wow you know this is something like maybe she was an employed professional and she had done some soft skill courses but she had topped all 4 we thought it was a one time we came down to March to March April 2017 there was another engineer from Samsung who did 4 electrical engineering courses topper in all 4 courses then we said this is second time now ok are we going to see a repeat we did see a repeat so there is another person this time a working professional topper in 4 courses again he has written 4 exams he has topped all 4 exams so it is not impossible very doable people have been doing it but yes the numbers are small so that is something that we wanted to show also that we have as you know we do exams only in India currently we do not do exams outside of India we are seeing a lot of people outside so they are asking us for that so we said first we want to stabilise here we are not in stable in India we want to stabilise our operations here then we will get to you guys so that is where but people who are really keen on getting a certificate from us in March April we had a faculty member from Saudi Arabia who flew into India she came on saturday night gave an exam from 9 to 12pm was a flight out straight from the exam centre went to the madras airport she came to madras wrote and she flew out she got some 85% some course we thought again a one off this time we had an engineer from Turkey who flew in because he wanted to do some noise control vibration course he wrote an exam again just one day he did not know anything you know his payment was not going through he was not so we said you just come first you write the exam so where do I come we said madras we are here we will help you so he came and he actually did the exam and he went out so he was like quite happy because that is close to what he works in so that again happened we also to say the local chapters that Ria was talking about saying that we have about 1300 today we have international local chapters as of today I do not know the news item came in the Bombay thing we had a press release also so we have local chapters in Afghanistan and two in Ethiopia so we are slowly getting there also that we will step ok so these are some more people in the other side across run that we are seeing people take up exams even now I had one faculty member here who said who has done five exams last year and so on so there are people who have done 17 courses 15 courses 10 so every time we go to centre we go to exam centres every time to monitor so we look out for familiar faces ok I know this faculty member is going to come has he come has he come we just go there talk chat up with them and so on so we do have a lot of regulars who are doing exams and taking courses semester after semester with us ok there was a recent survey that we had done because MHRD wanted some data from us saying how our colleges and institutions adopting your NPTEL courses in various aspects so about maybe 3-4 weeks back and we had some results consolidated we got 229 responses so this is what we have gotten so university affiliated we have 174, 48 or autonomous 7 deemed so that is all ok does your institution provide course credit 42 has said yes currently and 187 have said no currently so we expect that numbers to go up once we start adopting it then anything else from which here onwards our students encourage many of them are saying which is a good thing I will ask professor Prathap to talk about how these can be adopted for the gate exam somebody is asking saying can you start it for the gate also so I will ask him to talk about how they can start using these courses for as preparation for the gate exams then which type does your college course duration it seems to be equally placed then online courses which do you want core elective very surprisingly we are seeing a lot of them taking core courses we thought elective might be the preference but looks like a lot of them are taking core courses then CBCS seems to be implemented but not this level then there was one question which said are you allowed to take a course credits in combo what we meant here was suppose the academic council you know approves three credit course can the student take a two credit and one credit can you club it and give it to them so some of them said yes but most of them said no there and student activity points I do not know how many of you are aware of this are you aware of this concept called student activity points no ok so at least for the engineering colleges I do not know that science engineering colleges I think every student to graduate along with the credits he gets from passing courses has to get some 100 or 200 student activity points and this points are based on the activities he does outside of the curriculum whether he is a student leader is in the student council does he attend conferences is he doing the project something like that they have some weightage so some universities have approved that online courses can be taken for student activity points GTO for instance has that how many points is it 100 for online itself no 20 points right for online courses 6 points ok the Kerala Technical University for instance has the whole 100 points that can be taken so they take two courses they have 50 plus 50 so a lot of students from Kerala take it for just completion of that so GTO has it I do not know about the Maharashtra but maybe you want to check out whether there are any points for taking an online course which will be contributing towards the student activity points if so even if your college is not taking for credit it will at least you know help them in that so that is something that you can try ok that's here so we also have published the list of colleges who have said yes that credit transfer is already happening many SBOC is right to us can you give us some names of colleges we would like to talk to those SBOCC how they have done it and so on so we put up this list and from this list you can find out the SBOC right to them so that should be possible these are the colleges that have already implemented online courses for credit transfer within the system many of them are autonomous or private or deemed yes but some of them are also in the government system ok so these are colleges these are the universities that have currently approved so it's not yet moved to the college level probably but the academy councils have approved these are the universities that have approved that online courses can be taken for credit so this list is also available you might want to check out on that check out what are the guidelines there any meeting minutes have come out and so on ok I'll quickly run through operations so operations we have a set of 226 courses coming up this semester there are that well we courses start on Jan 22nd 4 and 8 weeks start on February 5th again this was a shift we did because many of the we are trying to time our calendar across India and as we know some states start in December some states as late as mid February and it's not possible for us to satisfy everybody and keep everybody happy so kind of we're trying to hit a midline there so Jan 22nd for the 12 weeks we thought at least the colleges that start by February the 4 and 8 weeks will be accessible to them so February 5th we started that and with the single exam run this seems to kind of work the other feedback we kind of kept getting was that as soon as you complete the course you're asking us to write an exam we don't get preparation time we thought it was better that he doesn't forget I did I just goes write the exam but looks like people want some time for preparation so in this model I think all the courses get at least 2-3 weeks time before they come in for the examination so that's something that we are trying to do so the exam dates are April 28th and 29th exam form is open currently the way the exams have been split I hope you all are aware we are not doing 226 courses exams in the morning and afternoon but on 28th we will have the exams for 226 courses on 29th we will have exams for 226 courses morning session has exams for 111 courses afternoon for 115 so that is how we have done the 226 split we have kind of worked around and done a logic to say if python is in the morning season afternoon algorithm is there something else is here if there are 2 soft skill courses there is one there one here whatever we have tried to see how the scheduling works but of course we will have to keep learning and see the feedback as we receive it 7th march is the last date for the exam form currently that we will be closing a quick run through for those who are not familiar with the thing so all the SPACs have logins on 2 places one is the online courses portal that you have a login on on the local chapter website that you have a login on online courses portal what all can you do you can see the candidates who are enrolled from your college in all the courses you can put in mentors there you can just say and if we have the money for fee waiver and we are opening up that category we can also nominate people for fee waivers so these 3 things you can do on the online courses portal currently on the local chapter what can you do you can say yes no to whether you will be paying by bulk in the form you can see the candidates who are registering for the examination when the hall tickets come you will see it there when the results come you will see it there e-certificates will be given there so that is the portal where you will have the other login any surveys or something we do will be coming up there so these are 2 logins that the SPOC currently uses so SPOC admin you have a thing you click on it you will see something like this where in course wise you will see all the numbers how many are enrolled and so on once you click on the course ID you will see whether they are student faculty and this only the faculty members can be nominated as mentors for then the boxes will be active you can put in the mentors there for scholarship the last column will be made active when we have the money for that I will talk about that but otherwise this is the thing okay one frequent mail that we get from SPOC is that there are many people enrolled from my college I don't see them inside my login the primary reason for that will be there are 2 questions they have to answer correctly when they are enrolled one is do you belong to an NPTEL local chapter they have to say yes and after saying yes if they say they will not have the patience to ideally search for your particular college so they will not find it they will say others and manually enter a name there if there is a spelling mistake a space thing something in between it will not match from the drop down once they go to your city they check that college and select it then it will be seen inside so they can also do post enrollment even today you find that say already 300 have enrolled you are seeing 50 right back to the 250 saying edit profile there is an option go there and just change this you will immediately see them here so one of the things that is there so basically they have to do we can't do anything from our part so this is something that you will have to tell them same thing faculty if you don't see them as mentors option that you are seeing them faculty also have to do some courses if they want to be mentors they have to say they are faculty they have to choose your college in the same way then only you can nominate them as mentors ok so suggestion for new SPOCs who are here I don't know how many of you are how many of your new SPOCs have never been in a run with us ok some are there definitely so what are the next steps a quick run through that we would say is enroll to an NPTEL online course yourself I mean it's not for the writing exam that's beyond the point but you know what is the experience of a MOOC if a student comes and tell you ma'am I can't see this tab I don't know this content some announcement you want to know where those things are so be in a course to at least find out weekly how do you put content how is the forum being there and so on it will help you do that go to the end process also just see that how it works and if you want an exam day you can just go and see how the exams happen that is all possible then ok SPOC task currently you can add mentors you can request for an exam city because currently we are also consolidating those numbers so as I was talking outside and I was saying I think in Maharashtra we have about 17 exam centers as of today Gujarat also I think we have about 4 currently and the other states we have but Maharashtra out of the 17 I think in maybe about 8 or 9 we have opened only on Sunday we have not opened on Saturday if you go to the forum and see this is because we have done this from the previous exam runs numbers so if you had only about 100 or 120 registering in the previous exam run even extrapolating it we expect say 200 or something the Sunday should suffice for us to run the exams that day and assuming that one course exam works which is a 95% guys we are thinking that that should suffice but if any of your college now in those 7 or 10 cities feel suddenly no we have implemented this you are going to get 500 students from our college write to us today we will open it for both these but then we will have to see those numbers because sometimes SPOC is right to us saying we will give you 500 we get 50 at the end of it we will do all arrangements then we have to cancel we have to reallocate we have to remove them we have to do that because for financial logistics we have to do that exam representatives going there and so on so if you think that Sunday is not sufficient and your college is going to suddenly increase numbers tell us today we will facilitate otherwise in those 9 or 10 cities we are going to have just on Sunday the exams if you want to write 4 exams suppose you are from say Amravati we have opened only on Sunday but your maybe 3 people your college want to write 4 exams maybe you can choose Pune Bombay or something like that and go there to write the exam that is the possibility that is there SPOC will also do more things we want from you we need a 6 month preparation time for offering any course that you would like to see on the NPTEL portal so if you tell us some course list today and say offer it next week in January we cannot do it we can definitely do it for July though so if you think that some courses which have been offered previously are good if it is there if you are on the NPTEL repository already and you wanted for certification tell us new courses send us request then we can work on it across institutes and see whether we can offer in July so that is another thing that you can give us feedback on and also feedback a generic feedback about the whole program which we will come to as a live session now we will get to you as an interactive thing so that is the most important we want from you what are the you know problems you face in your college what are the blockstones that you have how receptive is the portal in the offices that we work right we might have our own drawbacks what are the problems you face in working with us anything with related to the course to the this one suggestions improvements all that we would like to definitely hear from you so this can be through emails, phone calls, local offices, contact and address office it is all fine ok issues we are aware of and trying to correct many common things that we get is that the exam centers are far away they are not there as I was telling outside NPTEL does not decide on the exam centers what we do is we say in Latur in Solapur we need 1000 people we need 200 people we need 500 people then they decide on where they have to put based on their partnership with colleges or whether they have a dedicated center or whatever so sometimes we recommend colleges saying that if they say I do not have a center in this particular city we say we have local chapters there you want to work with them but that is all we say we put the SPOC in touch with TCSI that you work with them now because there is money involved we do not get into that part of it whether the management wants to do it does not want to do because TCS when they also get into partnership they will ask you for allowing them to conduct exams throughout the year they will not do partnership just for the NPTEL exam so they have say railway recruitment board exams, SBI exams coming bank exams, gate exam they will expect for all the work that they put in for all the exams they can use your college they have some of their own operations we do not get into all that we do not tell them we say if you do not have anything you want contact I can give a contact beyond that it is between you and them whether it works out or does not work out so that is all we do at this point in time so getting a center in your college no guarantees getting a center in that city definitely yes but the other challenges again as we keep saying this gate exams book their center 6 months in advance they know which college they are going to how many numbers and all that they are able to many exams like the banking exams do 9 months ahead we do it 1 month ahead March 7th if you are closing the form April 28th is their exam by March 12th or 13th we will give them the list that is when they can actually finalize centers so we block centers we can finalize only then which means that if some customers guaranteeing them a center he will give it off to them then we lose our thing but he tells me saying that give me numbers will you guarantee that you will get 1000 here I do not know whether we will get 1000 there or registration and so on so that is something they are not able to do currently we are working for the best whatever we can and whatever we are trying some kind of you know predictions that we do we do work but this is the thing so far away means one thing we tell colleges can you arrange for college buses to take a student there to the exam and come back many colleges do that seems to work fine that might be one possibility that you can try so that is there then delayed dispatch of hard copies of certificates this time I think we were better job last year last year it was I mean March April was a little bad this time we had a fire in our office for those of you don't know our entire office got burned down in Madras along with the studio too and we had some recovery to do there so there was a delay in the certificate dispatch this time I think we have done a better job I would say a little faster we did from the so all the dispatch of certificates hard copies certificates everything comes centralized from IIT Madras currently so that is why we have the same staff of 40 to deal so that we deal with the 70,000 is the same so almost we are improving processes but that's the kind of manpower we work with so we will definitely try to improve the processes that is there we've automated the certificate generation process currently and the QR code is also on it delay and fee waiver for those of you who know fee waiver process we have changed this time so till last time in March April 2017 fee waiver was that you would approve for candidates to get the fee waiver on the form itself you would say pay 500 rupees right and they would only do that the fee waiver would go across but the problem we faced there was there was at least a 10 to 15% absenteeism in the people who availed the fee waiver which translated into something like about 15 lakhs which was not being used because these guys didn't come to the exam we had to pay TCS and do all the logistics and we were wasting the arisen money so when we presented reports to arisen they came back and asked as you told me I want the waiver I've given you the money and you're wasting my money so we didn't have an answer at that point so we changed the process in September October we said you pay the money ahead we'll approve you for the fee waiver but then you have to appear for the exam and at least pass it so that was the criteria that we have implemented this time in September October in spite of that we had about 18,000 students who are availing the fee waiver this time so they have appeared and passed the exam and we are pushing it so those of you who applied it is getting a little delayed we had a wrong estimation of the way the accounts processes work so it's kind of taking time there September fee waivers have already been pushed October's will happen very soon so in March, April we are again trying to see what is the fastest way in which we can release the money but process will essentially remain the same one feedback when I open the session again I would request for is we did a survey with a closed group of SPOC's so one thing we found that for faculty members we need fee waivers that's a question that keeps coming up again and again for faculty members should be up the criteria of when they get a fee waiver should it be 40, should it be 60, should it be 70 so we got some mixed response when we did our closed group survey and any other way in which you think we should implement this whole scheme because with increasing numbers the money we have is not sufficient so we want to see that it also reaches the right people so we appreciate feedback on that also okay on the SPOC group for those who have seen there's nothing suddenly happening on the group no mails, no this one people are not complaining what happened we moderated the group so we stopped all emails to the group we are reading emails we are responding individually and what was relevant to everybody we are pushing onto the group but the problem there is I don't know I feel it's like suddenly got dead you know because it looks like nobody knows what the other person is writing or whatever yeah it was a pain when people were saying see brochures you didn't send me this for everybody 1000 people to know but suddenly it's gone quiet so we are getting the mails we are responding to individually what was relevant we are putting it out there so that is happening and this is all fine okay one thing we want SPOC's to definitely tell your students is ask them to check emails from our office once they register for the exam suppose we are reallocating centers we are changing we put it in the form saying in this date we will send you this in SMS we send an email we try when making calls we inform the local SPOC also that your college students we are doing this because we don't have but somehow they are totally unaware and when the hall ticket comes they are suddenly why didn't you tell me this I don't know this at all you didn't ask me and all and we say we have sent you an SMS we have sent you an email you have just not checked so one thing we would like you to request your students is please ask them to check their mailbox for mails from us whatever we send so that they are aware it's their exam at the end of the day so that's the information we are giving them that is one thing we wanted to say and changes in the after the deadline we are not going to encourage this time so all that is going to be finalized we are frozen we are not going to take any photo and this changes and another thing with respect to students we wanted to say one thing we are still working on is we are not seeing too many students on the course discussion forums for those of you who have been on the courses I don't know how your course is some courses like python course e-course everyday questions very nice but some courses are totally quiet they ask like one question and that will also be can you extend the deadline you know and we like can't you ask for something which is related to the lessons you know this is your time to ask the instructor for questions ask doubts get clarifications you know ask for anything that you want they are available there for that three months to just answer you make use of it so one thing we want to tell students is saying that get on to the forum check the forum you know ask questions some I am attempting an assignment can I ask a question regarding the assignment yes please do that's the main point of the thing ask and don't tell them give me the answer I'll plug it in that we won't do but you know is can you give a hint is this way okay something else there please ask faculty members we encourage you to ask technical doubts whatever you want relating to the subject maybe the recent research trends something else our faculty will be really happy if they get that kind of feedback from you all saying that these people are another feedback we get is students are not too sure about English we've had students who write Tamil in English Hindi in English and we don't understand it we do respond also so don't worry about English you write the way it is there grammatically correct we don't know who you are at the end of the day right it's anonymous at some level we are not going to judge you we don't have anything so encourage them to come there ask questions learn more about the topics you know support each other there also answer others questions one thing why not something called an industry associate program like Prasap Pratap was saying we are getting industry people into it and we are seeing how are they going to start recruiting one of the things industries might do which we've had in a few courses they put their HR people on the forum they see who are the people who are you know they're communicating how are they communicating because it's a soft skin thing that you're going to get from the forum so that's very important so if they start doing that it might be good that your students actually okay photos this is the kind of photos we see selfies and small photos three people in a photo we get three people in one photo for the certificate we don't know who the guy is and we have to ask who are you in these three you know but that's the way we get photos for certificates certificates with Taj Mahal in the background it's an IIT certificate we actually tell them it's an IIT certificate why do you want Taj Mahal in the background can't you give us one thing but yeah that's how we get it I'll ask Pratap to probably take on from here Pratap so even during the break there were many questions so I think when we open for discussion lot of it we'll answer I did try to answer as they were asked but I think some of them are of general interest I think lot of you will have the same kind of question so one of the things we have been thinking about for a while and certainly as we get into credit transfer being routine activity is to ensure that you know what courses are going to come when all of us know what courses are going to come when so that is I think an important thing even during the break I think one of the one of you was asking saying that you need to know at least six months in advance so so that is something that we are trying to do as we see also that a lot of people are taking core courses and electives also to different degrees we are trying to set up a situation where you will know predictably ahead of time in the July semester what courses will come January semester what courses will come at least a fair fraction of them so some key courses we can tell you ahead of time that it will be available we are trying to move in that direction it is taken us some time because we have also grown in the number of courses you can still see that we have not reached any kind of stability it is still climbing but hopefully that we have got enough number of courses and enough number of course runs that both our faculty and our staff feel confident that we can start doing this in a predictable way so we will try to set up such that all core courses show up between January and July and then also have lots of new electives coming up all the time right now that is not yet there not all courses are available as MOOCs you may see lot more available in the NPTEL website as such but as a MOOC offering maybe not all the courses are yet there electives are getting offered to different degrees I mean there is no fixed list on electives this is literally an infinite list of electives that we can offer but it is getting done hopefully maybe by July 2018 when we come up we will start seeing something of a plan where we will be able to give you some indication of what the flow of courses is so you can plan credit transfer activities in your college accordingly hopefully at least 8 core courses per discipline we would like to make available through the semesters I do not know if either in every semester or at least between the two semesters we will have it fortunately for us because we have you know 7 IITs and IIC involved in this we have enough faculty that the same course may be offered by multiple faculty at different points in time so we do not load one faculty also up continuously I mean we cannot just expect the same person to keep on offering that course all the time with thousands of students enrolling for it so that is something that we are looking towards faculty development program so this is something that I briefly mentioned sometime back so already as I said as you already saw that you know 20% of the people taking those courses are faculty so just the way we talk of credit transfer for students we also wanted to make it you know professionally valuable I am sure they are already finding it valuable that is why they are taking it but also something that is on their record that they have done it in some way it becomes useful for them and naturally at their level the thing that makes sense is to get it incorporated in their faculty development program process so this is something that we are looking at what you see here is actually I mean it is just interesting to share this with you one of the SPOC's put this table together Professor G.V.K. Sharma who is from Vizag Geetam University in Vizag so he just made a comparison of you know what are various reasons why it would be worth doing this process so you can see here anything from cost the you know travel involved the amount of time that you have to take off of work off of from a place of stay etc the number of people who get exposed to it then what is the evaluation process interaction process after that the course is over or even during the course and also how often it is offered if you take any of these criteria you will find that you know doing it as in an online process the way we are doing it on NPTEL process it gives you a lot of advantages in almost every way it is advantageous to you so therefore I think there is a lot of value to look at this whole process in the context of a faculty development program and as I mentioned both in IIT Madras and maybe in many institutes it is there certainly in IIT Madras it is there in IIT Bombay it is there there is this you know faculty development process we ourselves take attend courses in our institute in our teaching learning center where they tell us a lot about how a course is taught so even you know in my own classes I am trying to incorporate a lot of new ideas on how the course is taught which I have not done before because many times we have not formally learnt the teaching process we have just learnt our subject and then we are conveying it to our students there are many things I mean if you attend one of these courses I mean if you get an opportunity please attend and of course certainly we will try to make it available through this online process itself everything from how students are seated in the class I mean we have all these traditional classes where everybody is seated facing the board and then you just have one board the teacher is one end of the classroom everybody is in the other side and then you talk then you know what we do in the class many times we do not give the students any chance to discuss we just cover one set of derivations or something that we want to do and then the end of the class if there are some doubts people ask something like that we do there are a lot of thought processes that are involved in how these classes can be made interactive how students can give an opinion on a topic even if they do not have knowledge on the topic and then you use that opinion to help them understand the process better even by pointing out how maybe their opinion is not fully formed maybe what aspect they have got right what aspect they have missed out there are a lot of things like that involved in this teaching learning process so that is already there we would like to incorporate that into our faculty development program so we are hoping that you will hear more about it AICT is formally interested in this and they are working towards releasing some you know notice to that effect that you can use NPTEL online courses for faculty development programs so we are actively working on that hopefully you will hear about it soon just the way we heard about currently transfer aspects so I think those were two things so we will now open it up for discussion is what we will do