 I work as technical officer in CD and I have been associated with the distance education activity of IIT Bombay right from its inception which started sometime in the early 2000. The activity in 2000 when we wanted to reach the people, the recipients outside the boundaries of IIT Bombay we started exploring the various technologies. My colleague Mr. Rahul Deshmukh covered those as a panorama but then certain aspects which I thought would be much relevant to share with the audience like yours is that in 2000 you could imagine the internet reach in India. So when we were exploring various technologies internet was available so to say but in a very limited way. But we were determined that we will reach outside people who are equally or more than that capable of receiving and getting benefited from the courses offered from IIT Bombay classroom. We had no option but to select a technology called V-SAT and if I could share with you that over a period of 3 years after we started this activity we had 15 what we call remote centers spread in 6 states of India which I could very confidently say that 3 or 4 out of these 15 were not able to receive our communication through internet. Today also the scene is not very different today also we find that internet is not as reliable but yes internet has become affordable. So what we have mandated we had taken in 2000 was that we will keep exploring the new technologies that we require to use in offering distance education and in that process we developed some of the technologies which as these are going are based on internet. But V-SAT technology had its place. So what I would be doing in the next 45 minutes or so is that tell you about how we operate our distance education activity. The technologies as a user perspective with some of you are users and some of you are going to be the users as I understand some of the institutions represented here have not become part of IIT Bombay distance education activity so far. But I am sure all of you will be part of this endeavor soon. So what you are seeing is the website of CD and this is the main communication channel we have with anybody inside or outside IIT Bombay. If you are interested to know what is the activity happening right now in distance education this is the place you will have to come. We offer courses through EduSAT as I mentioned and we also offer the same courses through web in addition we have developed classrooms where we could not expand our satellite transmission setup but there are four other classrooms on IIT Bombay campus where we could offer the courses live through web. As far as from the transmission end there are no issues IIT Bombay is having enough bandwidth we can offer the courses live through webcast but the issues are at the receiving end. So as explained by my colleague that you require certain bandwidth you require certain infrastructure at your place. Though it might be said also that this is available you need a PC with internet you need certain bandwidth but I have been getting response that people are still finding difficulties that is why we are exploring other technologies which are TV based in the DTH what has been told the IP TV which is coming. So all those technologies might help but there is one distinct feature of the satellite transmission that I would like to dwell upon for some time now. So in the live EduSAT courses what we offer the main feature at least till now is the live interactivity. Again I will go back to the time when we decided to start distance education activity at IIT Bombay we wanted a classroom at IIT Bombay to be extended to various places. So what I mean is that if people like you sitting here are listening to me and we are having interaction people anywhere within the limitations of the mapping of the satellite we use for transmission could feel that they are part of this classroom and could interact with the faculty even with the other participants the way you people can interact with me and we have been fairly successful at this. Obviously when we have a class size which is there are studies made that a class size of 30 students per faculty is the ideal size to have excellent interaction but as you know there are limitations there are shortage of good faculty now the technology is available so people also feel that they can comfortably watch the lecture from wherever they are. So we are finding that people are preferring alternate technologies to learn but still the most effective technology is the technology through which you could interact you may not get the same questions what probably you are getting now when I am talking to you something after the lecture is over when you see the video of this lecture maybe after you go from this place and see it from your place. So I will just try to give a flair of how do you interact with CD when you are receiving a HZ transmission so this might be something strange for those people who are not at operated SITs but those people who are using SITs I am sure you have some questions to ask on improving the quality of reception and other issues related to satellite transmission that I will take up later but how do we transmit courses through satellite from here. So we have an understanding with Indian Space Research Organization who have launched a satellite exclusively for education sector sometime in 2004 September and we were given certain bandwidth on this satellite from January 2008. So Yuzo had already distributed what is called satellite interactive terminals SITs to some 50 organizations good organizations in education sector almost spread across the boundaries of the country and when we received the mandate from Yuzo that we could use the Yuzo Sats bandwidth for transmission of IIT Bombay courses we got a list of 34 institutions. We still have contacts and connections with those but 34 covering 9 states of India was not sufficient for us and we started working from January 2008 when we were trying to offer more variety of courses from here through Yuzo Sats we also wanted that more recipients should be there to get our courses as I mentioned sometime back still the reach of internet is limited I am hopeful that still Yuzo Sats transmission will be used at least for next 5 years if we want to cover most of the India's map for spreading education quality education. So when you want to receive a satellite transmission from IIT Bombay you need to have this SIT. So Yuzo is having an understanding with vendor Bharat Electronics Limited and order has to be placed by the institution with Bharat Electronics Limited. So there is a bunch of equipment which covers the PC with hardware and software required it also covers the audio component of the equipment there is a camera there microphone amplifier projection facilities UPS and the satellite communication facility like the dish and its components. So once you have these facilities at your place they are taken care for next 3 years by BEL Bharat Electronics Limited. So it is a one time investment for any institution to go for satellite receiving facility and that is almost except operating cost there is no other cost required for 3 years. So once institution becomes an SIT any time 24 by 7 whenever there is some transmission happening from IIT Bombay you can receive that transmission. You can receive it irrespective whether you are having that area of interest or not but theoretically you can receive all the courses that are transmitted from here. But we know that at your institution you might not be interested in more than 4 or 5 branches of engineering. So at IIT Bombay we have 25 disciplines from where courses are taught. So and also the limitation we have is that we have gone up to maximum 15 courses taught from this classroom in a semester. So keeping that limitation in mind we try to give as many courses to each of the our SITs as possible. So you switch on your this terminal and you will start receiving the course. We have also started using Moodle as a communication with all SITs. So I just had opened a site. So we have this Moodle page we have to log in and there is a CDIP RC forum. So those of you who are SITs you can have access to the CDIP RC forum just like you can have interaction on a course with the faculty and other participant of the course through Moodle. So you will get only that course related communication open to you. Moodle is a very versatile open source browser. So you can put even small video clips, you can have text communication, you can have postings like wiki and you can have the answers posted by somebody else all that if you practice you will know. But we sort of extended this Moodle for improvement of our communication with the SITs. So you can see we have started giving news forum is there but what I would like to see is that guidelines for remote centers just a click out button and you know what you need to have at your place. So you could go through this whenever you have time. So everything what do you want to know how to become remote center of IIT Bombay all that is given here. Many other things are here we give the what are the different modes of participation which is again available on the CDIP website. The fee structure for different as you said mode participants. We want you to have maximum questions getting answered through this Moodle web. Just like on the course Moodle page you get almost all the questions that you get answered through the course Moodle page interface which is the offline interactive medium for getting your questions answered. So we have many things related to becoming a center put here. So in addition you getting a facility to receive whatever is being transmitted from this classroom you also have certain things like you want to have certification by the faculty who taught you from IIT Bombay. So we call it credit mode participation. You want to have certification by your institution taking the help of the course transmission that happened from IIT Bombay what you call credit mode certified by the RC. You can have free mode through this transmission as I said you could receive any course without even telling us who is attending at your place. But we for different reason we want to know that how many people are benefited by our transmission. So for that we have started what is called enrolment procedure. So there is a enrolment form. So there is a student registration form which is available right here. So even if somebody is joining in free mode at your place please provide that information to us and as of now in free mode participation even the Moodle interaction is not there but we are considering whether we could open it for even free participants. So for anything which requires some efforts on the faculty or the setup at IIT Bombay we do charge some fee. So that is the reason probably at present Moodle access is not given to free participants. So all these details if are provided and database will get generated at our place and then that could be useful to all we would know which courses are more in demand which courses could be offered in the next semester as my colleague said earlier that we are offering more than 500 courses from IIT Bombay in a semester and what we are offering through CD is a fraction even not even 10% of those. If you could add more channels on satellite probably we will be able to have more classrooms enabled for satellite transmission from here and we will offer those courses. So we also have what is available right now what is happening in this classroom is going on web. Similarly when a lecture is happening from this place it is available on web at that time and it is free. So how do you get the how do you see that just I will try to show. So it is a webcast so in live webcast you will have to select free and from seminar hall again you will have to give your email ID valid email ID. One time we need to register here once you do that so whatever was whatever I was talking whatever was open on that the control room person has the option to show what is most relevant at that time by experience they have got it that whether they want to show me to the distant participant or they want to show the content. So right now he is showing this to the remote participant. So anything that is so you can see that whatever is the live transmission is available through webcast in addition to satellite. So many times we get feedback from SIT saying that there is some audio quality improvement required. So we just request that you have one terminal which is on webcast the same lecture the same contents are coming to you as webcast. So please see if your participant there can see through webcast. So that we also alternate technologies come to the rescue of receiving our endeavor is that the recipient should not lose time and also whatever he wants to learn. So for getting those value added services I was talking you want to have credit certification from IIT Bombay or even you want to give credit certificate forget from your institution or you want to offer this course to a batch of particular students at your institution as a whole. So there are those modes available we call it extended live classroom what I just mentioned the initial concept of starting distance education here the different modes of participation I was talking so that the enrollment form can be filled and given to us all that could be received and communicated through that Moodle interface that I showed sometime back. We are trying to avoid as much as possible paper communication but there are certain things which we still cannot help one is we have to sign an MOU with the institution that there are some additional obligations on either side that we have to meet. So there is a 8 page MOU that will be signed with the institution who is interested to become our remote center and I am the person coordinating on that so and otherwise we have a generic email ID CDEP at the rate IITB.AC.IN we just send a mail on that and we will respond on that mail about signing of MOU there is some signing amount that is required to be paid one time. So that is just to ensure that the institution interested in participating in the distance education activity of IIT Bombay is sufficiently serious about it and our experience is that today we have 76 SITs and majority I would say 50 plus are active in receiving our courses the benefit reached for the last one and half years we really not been able to quantify but we guess that we are on the growing path that means we had at one time in 2006 600 participants taking the benefit of satellite transmission the number is certainly larger the webcast participation for receiving courses after it is recorded that is the VOD service we have some limitations in offering it to more people. So that is why we limit one by the period in which you can register for receiving a course on VOD and second by the number so last semester for the 27 courses that we offered we could only accommodate 108 participants to receive VODs we will try to increase that number substantially this time but sometime in the second week of July we will open registration for VOD reception and may be August 20th or so we will close it. So during that period whosoever wishes to receive courses on VOD we will try to give that is one way of participation on this thing for all these value added services receiving if you are an institution and you are offering courses and you are offering certification you are offering even free mode to your participants many institutions so far feel that they are receiving the courses free when it is happening from here either through webcast or through as you said SIT they are still finding it to be useful to them we are no issues on that if you can take the benefit without paying any money to IIT Bombay we have no issues on that but we know that by becoming a remote center and by taking more value added services from IIT Bombay you will still stand benefited more so that is why now we say that once you take an SIT of IIT Bombay you should become a remote center of IIT Bombay and take the all value added services of IIT Bombay let me tell you one case where necessarily every center has asked help from our faculty whenever a course is offered in extended live classroom mode the IIT Bombay faculty practically has no role except to teach in the live class for 40 hours in a semester but invariably every center coordinator has asked our faculty to provide with question for mid-same and questions for end-same examination not only that many times the request had come for even the answers for these questions from the coordinators of remote centers so we will consider such are the issues where it is always good for any institution to become our remote center so that we are also do not have any inhibition in extending our help and this center also have no they can demand it actually from us just few issues what the SITs are facing one is that we do religiously follow the timings for our lectures transmissions so if a lecture has to start at 8.30 it has to start at 8.30 the class at the remote place if the whole class is attending or whosoever is attending must be in place not later than 15 minutes before the class if you are there 15 minutes before we do get a chance to see you joining us on the interface that I showed if you have issue which probably was not resolved then that you could not see our video you could not hear our video or we could not see or your video or we could not hear you if there is any issue it takes less than a minute to get connected and check that your video and audio will be heard if you ask a question during the lecture and that will save lot of time for others participating in that lecture. So if you could please pass on this to the concerned person at your institute that you must join 15 minutes before the actual session sometimes we might not be able to interact with you for more than 5 minutes before the actual lecture start the reason is that our lectures have a gap of 5 minutes between 2 lectures not more than 5 minutes. So even we would like to utilize our staff is always available here continually and they will answer any such queries even if it takes 1 minute it takes as I said 10 seconds to establish connectivity with any SIT and you can imagine that in 5 minutes we could have probably 2025 SIT is connected and getting their video audio communication tested with us this is not happening religiously. So that is one reason sometimes then when this SID wants to ask a question and lot of time is wasted finally we say that we will take it some other time. So this is one issue on the quality of audio and video that comes from satellite and that comes through web if you have a good internet connectivity probably you will get a good video and audio through webcast but if you want to use the minimum that is permitting the webcasting possible that is 100 kbps probably will not get very good video but audio is fairly good but satellite transmission that is a quality probably you are seen that. So on the video part it is not that good because we still have 1 mbps connectivity from ISRO but on the audio side I think it is very good. But we do receive when a new center joins because of the settings and issues related to the hardware of that particular center that people say that audio quality needs improvement even the local acoustics of the room where you have this installation do matter even the lighting do matter in good reception because when somebody is asking a question from your center his audio should only be coming in the system and should reach us you know in the process the all the signal all the data packages that travel from your place to our place or our place to your place there is a technical activity that is happening of coding and decoding all that and there is that delay also comes because of that but still there is always possibility of improvement. We are quite happy with the way the quality of audio and video transmission through satellite happened in the recent past. Now we saw that Samir showed the lecture of Professor Fadak that happened a year back we have this lecture which happened just concluded in this semester and it was available on VOD almost from the next day the first lecture started. So, this is how the interface will be if you want you can have it as this is the exact quality of video and audio that you will get when you are receiving it on VOD where you are it is bandwidth specific but with 256 kbps bandwidth if it is available this quality is assured. The same lectures which are what we call the recorded lectures here we have some archived lectures which were previous to this semester which started in January 2009 and then the current semester courses the distinction is simply because the current semester courses VOD if you are registered for you might not be having the entire set of the course on VODs but archived courses the set will be full it is a full course that is available. So, that is why we made this distinction otherwise the quality and other issues the same. So, we have a list of this archived courses here and we do offer them at a cost many of the institutions in fact this is the most popular or most revenue giving activity today's CDP is having we have so many orders with us on supplying VCDs and DVD sets of the courses. So, this list goes to some 90 courses we have categorized them department wise we also put whether VCD is available or DVD also is available we have put some cost to it and we find that this is this has been found to be very useful. I have very recently received some suggestions from one of the SITs or RCs that we could still try a different format of the course. So, that it could be put on your local server in that format and it could be used on internet institute wide we are seriously considering that and we could make this courses available directly on hard disk in the format it could be directly used from the server there. Right now we find that many of the institutions even are not able to take the DVD sets because they say that they still have only VCD players in their places. So, we still are keeping the option of offering VCD sets open very soon maybe we will only have DVD sets available on this recorded courses NPTEL was one activity which happened from CD the phase one we had offered 13 video courses which will exclusively recorded for offering in this national program on technology enhanced learning and those courses also are available in our courses on the recorded courses. But you would notice that the facilities for creating any video course whether it is offered in distance mode or not was from the premises of CD you would have probably noticed that the courses which were short term courses like this course now or the full semester courses all that the facilities the services of CD were used including the NPTEL project now NPTEL we will be doing more work some of you might have probably seen the NPTEL website and there are those video courses available you would notice that IIT Bombay courses available there are also available to you at different locations including on VCDs and DVDs from us they are also available by the way on YouTube. So I think I have covered most of the aspects on the activities of CD from the operation perspective from the transmitter's perspective and I do expect that there could be some benefit to the recipient's perspective in the center recipient's perspective if you still have some questions I am here to answer. So if there are no questions and we probably could close our session thank you very much for your patience listening.