 Good morning everyone. My name is Mukta Atre. I'm the project manager for this trained 10,000 teacher program here at IIT Bombay. It is my privilege and great pleasure to invite to welcome you and invite you here to take part in this very unique workshop, which is the first of its kind amongst our series of teacher training workshops. We will be discussing why it is unique, as the workshop progresses. We have a tradition of starting exactly on time. So it's now my pleasure to invite Professor Kannan Maudgalyar to give the inaugural talk to all of us. Good morning. Thank you, Mukta, for this invitation. My name is Kannan Maudgalyar. I'm a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Systems and Control and Education Technology at IIT Bombay. I'm also the coordinator of the NME ICT projects at IIT Bombay. NME ICT stands for National Mission on Education through ICT. One of the flagship projects of this mission is the talk to 10,000 teacher or trained 10,000 teacher. We used to call it talk to a teacher, then that talk to a teacher has two components. One is trained 10,000 teachers, the other is spoken tutorial, so I got mixed up. So it is trained 10,000 teachers, and it is through you that will be done. So it's a unique methodology developed at IIT Bombay by my colleague Professor Fartek, who unfortunately could not be here. So I thought I would give a brief overview of some of the activities that we do here. NME ICT was started in the year 2009 to raise the levels of education in India, and it came with one billion dollar outlay. So it was 4512 crore. In those days, on the day it was announced, the dollar was changing at 45 rupees, approximately 45, 46 rupees. It had three components. One is to provide connectivity. When the mission was proposed, there were 400 universities. So it was proposed that all the 400 universities would get one GBPS connection, and out of that all the affiliating colleges would further get connected. About 60% of the money was used to set this up. In, by some estimates, the bandwidth was given at about 5% of the cost to the universities, and MHRD paid 75% of it. So as a result, people who acquired bandwidth in those days got it for roughly about 1% of the commercial prices. They had to pay, but it was very little. That was the major component of this mission. The second component was content generation. So T10KT comes under that. In fact, we, in the first phase of this mission, first phase of this project, the talk to a teacher project had trained 1,000 teachers as one of the components, trained 1,000 teachers and supercomputer. Now, trained 1,000 teachers did so well that the mission director, Mr. Sinha, requested Mr. Fartag to scale it up to make it 10,000 teachers. So that's how it became 10,000 teacher in the second phase of our project. So that is one of the examples of the content project, content generation projects supported by the mission. The mission has three components. One is the bandwidth connectivity. Second is the content generation. I'm talking about content generation now. So in fact, these projects have done so well. Let me show you this in MHRD website itself. So E-Calpha is a project, content generation project funded by the same mission. E-Antra is done by our colleague in computer science, Professor Kavi Arya, NPTEL, you already know. So I just wanted to say that these projects are done so well that MHRD decided to host them in their home page. There were also Spokane tutorial and T10KT on these pages. Not sure why they are not there right now. But it is an indication that these projects did very well. And MHRD said that we would actually host them on our home page. The third component of the mission is the low-cost, it's actually a connectivity access device, computing device. We started, we came up with Akash. And the Akash project completed what it was supposed to do. And then it went on to DGS and D for rate contract. And it got stuck because of some specification problem. Now it is going to come back again. But we were interested to improve it further. As a result, we came up with the laptop. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring it just now. So it's a complete laptop that we have come up with as a continuation of the Akash project. As a matter of fact, on Saturday at 4 o'clock here, we gave it on loan to 50 of our students, computer science students, who don't have their own laptop. It's for a CS 101 course, which is a compulsory course at IIT Bombay. It has a lot of programming exercises. And out of 450 students, 400 students have their own laptops, and 50 students don't have theirs. So we thought it was an unfair competition. We did this last semester also. We are repeating it now. So we believe that it is an unequal competition. I always give this example. If somebody gets a bright idea at 10 o'clock in the night, it'll take only five minutes to try it out. He or she has to check it out to has to go all the way to the computer center or department, get the lab opened, assuming that they have the permission, then try it out, come back. And then of course, if it rains, it's going to be a lot more difficult. So I claim that these five minute ideas never get tested, never get tried out. If this is the case at IIT Bombay, you can imagine how it is in other institutions. The institutions where there are many day scholars who don't have computers at home and who have to leave the colleges at 5 o'clock in the evening because the college bus is leaving. They don't get time to try it at all. And these children actually mug up the programs because they don't have computers. They never get a chance to try out. So by the way, this is available for those of you who are interested. There are colleges that have said that they would buy a few hundred of these and then use them as a computer lab because it has a good battery backup four to eight hours. And so one can actually do a computer lab using that so that the computer labs can be given to the training and placement, the companies that come for recruitment. You all know that when the month of September comes, your students have difficulty accessing computer labs because these have been handed over to the recruiting companies like TCS Infosys and so on. I'm not blaming them. It is just that it is a logistical problem for about a month or two. And in fact, I know one college that is going to buy 300 of these laptops and use them as computer lab in the afternoon and give it as loan to the day scholars so that they can take it, come back in the morning. So this mission has done wonderful things. The successful story of this T10KT self is an example. Center for Distance Engineering Education Program. And I used to be the head of that about five years ago. Sorry, it was in 2008. In 2008, we were transmitting courses live. In fact, as it was the head of distance education program, we transmitted live 100 courses as they happened at IIT Bombay. The course means what you might call as a subject or a paper, 40 hours of instruction. So we actually transmitted about 5,000 hours. The classes would happen in our video studio and it would be transmitted live. So if a faculty member made a mistake, everybody would know. If a faculty member cracked a joke, everybody would know. So Mr. FC Coley, who founded TCS and who was also the chairman board of governors at the College of Engineering Pune, he said he wanted his students to get IIT experience. What is IIT experience? He said that when they see IIT faculty member making a mistake, they should realize that it is OK to make mistakes. They will realize. When IIT faculty member cracks a joke, they will feel that one doesn't have to be serious all the time. By the same token, they would see that every course, every lecture was delivered and delivered on time. And they would go and demand from their faculty members. If IIT faculty can deliver courses every lecture and on time, why can't you? And he wanted his faculty members to go and ask the students, IIT students do so much work. Why are you refusing to work? So he said that the live transmission is something quite different, not like recorded course. Recorded course is like a book. Whereas in a live transmission, the pedagogy also comes. In fact, in one year, one semester, the COEP wanted to receive 25 courses. And then I circulated that list to our heads. And 13 of them were ready to transmit. You see, some courses may not have been offered at that time. And some other courses, faculty members may not have been ready with the instructional material. You need live transmission to thousands of people is a completely different ball game. It requires a lot of preparation and so on. Still, we transmitted 13 courses. And it was very well received. During the time, I visited some colleges. I remember some interior college. And they said, can you please also transmit a course, make available a course on communication? Because they said the students, although they are pretty smart, have difficulty in performing well in interviews. And have difficulty in getting jobs. Will you please do that? We didn't do that because we didn't have a course at that time. It also requires a lot of effort. So that's why this course is extremely important, although it is technical communication, by the way, which is also very important for all the faculty members who are aspiring for higher degrees. And they have to write papers. They have to make presentations and progress reports, all kinds of things. And conference papers, even for conference papers, unless it is written properly, it won't get accepted. In fact, for a conference paper, because the time is very short, it will get rejected. There is no question of review. Unlike a journal paper, where you can always go back and say, let me improve it and try that. But conferences, it get rejected. So unless you write a good paper, it won't get accepted. So obviously, this is very good for learning how to communicate. That is something that we don't teach properly. Because it's not clearly formula-based. This is a formula 1, 2, 3, 4. You do this, it will definitely work. That guarantee nobody is able to give. But yet, an attempt is being made here. Probably we have something here which will say we will have more or less some formula. You try this, you will attempt, you will address most of the issues. Then last 20, 30% you add your personal touch and make it a lot better. If that comes out of this course, it will be fantastic. So this course is extremely important. And this course is going to be offered in life. As I told you earlier, live transmission has its benefits. It can be received by a lot of people. At one time, some people who are unhappy with this live transmission, they challenged us, saying that one of the biggest problems in the live transmission is that there will be too many questions. There will be too many questions. And if you really want to answer them, there won't be enough time. So you cannot really scale it up beyond some point. But after having delivered some courses through this method, we realized that the kind of questions that arises is mainly because of the way the lecture is delivered. So if one person here has a question, 100 others will also have the same question. So the number of questions is not too many. So if you answer one question, you answer all of them. Not only that, you get to address the same problem from many different perspectives, which often doesn't happen in a small classroom. So I would even go to the extent of saying that in some respects, this course with a lot of people, well-prepared people, people who come with preparation. For example, here we are going to have, I think we'll have the MOOCs approach also. One week, one week MOOCs, and then one week contact. So by the time you come to the contact program or the faculty members, when they come to the contact program, they'll be well-tuned. In fact, they will be already at some level. Because here, communication is, some of the methods are being taught or shared, and the participants already know most of the things. So they are already at a very high level. So you will see that in a large gathering of this sort, you will have questions from different perspectives being addressed, answered. There will be a lot of time spent for discussion. And that way, I would say that this course may turn out to be better than even small courses, small contact programs. Because in a small contact program, you may not get to analyze all the perspectives. The other reason, I mean, some people complained about this course being large, 10,000 people. But we found that when it was made from 1,000 to 10,000, the average age of the participants came down dramatically. Because otherwise, if you have, of course, if you know about QIP programs, unless you reach 55 years, you won't get to go to a QIP. Not because of the age limit. It's just that you have to be senior most, or should have served enough number of times. Whereas somebody who is just starting their career, 25 years old, 30 year old, they are the people who will benefit the most. And they get stopped. So we found that phenomenon even in 1,000 teachers. When we went to 10,000 teachers, almost any college could send any number of their faculty members that allowed everybody to come. The other thing that it really benefited is I'm happy to see a large number of lady participants. In fact, we found that in some courses, we reached even something like 45 in excess of 45% participants being females, which is never the case in the QIP courses that we conduct. When we conduct a QIP course here for 30 people, hardly one or two will be ladies. How many people can leave their homes, families, and then come over here? So this method allows that. So from many, many aspects, I can go on talking about the benefits of this. But I'm really happy that you could all come to this orientation program and take this message back. And then you have an important role to play because this is the coordinators program. The program is effective because every coordinator learns the processes, not necessarily the subject matter. Subject matter you all know. But what is involved so that these whatever in this course, 5 to 10,000 people, I don't know the exact number, that number will in fact maybe registration will start and people will start registering. I'm pretty sure that there will be anywhere from 5 to 10,000 participants. And the success of this program will depend on how well it is organized at every center. How well it is organized at every center. And that can happen only if you do it well. You have the right team to take care of things, make sure. In fact, I would say that it has to be like armed forces. It has to go on schedule. It has to happen. It has to be a clockwork. And people have to listen to you. You may even have to be dictatorial just to get things done. Make sure things happen at the right time. And if people have to do some homework, you have to enforce that. So there are many things involved. You will learn the method here. And then you will go back and help deliver this program. So I think I will not take too much of this time. I think there are many faculty members here. I don't think I will take up my time to introduce them. It will be done later. So I want to wish you all the best once again. And when you have time, please walk around the campus. It's a beautiful place. It rains once in a while. As a result, it is reasonably cool, but luckily not flooded. And apparently leopards come during monsoon time. But snakes, of course, leopards come because apparently dogs are a delicacy. And we have lots of dogs in the campus. And they won't bite you, don't worry. And just be careful when you walk around in the dark areas, take a torchlight or a stick or something. I'm just joking. Just enjoy and then get to interact with the faculty members. If there is a question, please do ask them, because that may be an important question. Because if you do that, if that question is answered properly, maybe it will help a lot of people. So wish you all the best. And once again, this project is funded by National Mission on Education through ICT. It's an initiative of MHRD, Government of India. We are really grateful to the mission directors and the ministry itself. The first mission director was Mr. N.K. Sinha. Then it was Praveen Prakash. Mr. Praveen Prakash, now it is S.P. Goyal. They have been very enthusiastically supporting it. And we have a standing committee. We have a project approval board. There are many aspects, many governing bodies. And all of them have been supporting this quite well. And so I want to thank all of them. And I hope that you would get the maximum benefit out of this. And you will also help all the participants. I told you 5,000 to 10,000 participants get the best out of this. This is taxpayers' money. So let us use it wisely. Let us use this. It's a great opportunity. Let us use it wisely. So with that, I wish you all the best. Goodbye. Thank you, Prof. Madhgalya. Thank you very much. I would now like to invite Professor Sundar. This particular course in IIT has been developed about five years ago. And it has been developed by about a team of 10 people across various disciplines in IIT. I'd like to ask Professor Sundar to introduce all of them to you here, Professor Sundar. OK, hi. I'm Sundar from Chemical Engineering. I'll just introduce to you some of them who have come here, but others I'll introduce to you when they take their lectures. So this course will be connected by a large team. And just as you will be coordinating in your centers, I'm just coordinating this course here. But the content is provided by several faculty. I'll just introduce Sahana Murti. Sahana is from the Education Technology Department. Parthasarathi is from the Humanities. Virendra Sethi is from Environmental Sciences. And Ashish Pandey is from School of Management. Lina also is there from School of Management. Is there anybody else? OK.