 Welcome back, this is a series of talks on Open and Distance Learning. In this episode, we will talk about technology and platforms related to ODR. Now, what I am trying to do in this part is basically look at, when I want to deploy an online course, what kind of technology platforms do I need and how do I stack up, that is the objective. We will require open educational resources, that is basically a place where you can put your educational content. We will require learning management systems, which consists of content delivery and its management. You will require e portfolio systems, which talk about, which track a student and the kind of courses he has done, assignments he has done, his performance in the test, his portfolio. I should be able to manage the portfolio of the student. So, I need e portfolio systems. I need to author the content. I require testing systems. I am calling them systems, but you can call them components. So, essentially an online course will have these kinds of subsystems. I have used these terms, because these are already prevalent in the literature in the industry. You will encounter e portfolio systems if you go and try to buy some systems. They stack up like this. Now, let us look at this. So, what we have is to start with an open educational resource OER platform. This is I started with this, because it is a well known concept. People have been building OER for a decade now. The best known is MIT open course where Khan Academy, Carnegie Mellon Stanford, Harvard. Everybody, all these universities have their own open educational resources. India has something called NPTEL. China has its own big open educational resource. So, you will have an open educational resource component, which basically does content management for you. It has metadata. Each one of the content is tagged appropriately, and then it has it is organized as learning objects. These are the kind of concepts that go into building the open educational resource. Once you have an open educational resource, on top of it, you build an identity management system. So, that somebody comes to register for the course, you know who she is, and you can track the person. So, that is identity management. That will also help you bring a build a portfolio of that person. Then you talk about learning analytics. We will see what are learning analytics in another episode, but quickly speaking, this is the place where we can keep track of who is accessing what kind of content, and how the person is performing in the quizzes and tests that we are conducting, how much time the person is spending on the content and so on. So, it will help me do two things. Find out how effective my teaching is, and how responses of the student is to the content. So, we need a learning analytics module sitting on top of the open educational resource. And then we need a connect and collaborate module as we seen in the earlier episode. One of the big takeaways is connections and content that is produced through collaboration. So, I need to put together a place, a component in my platform, where people can collaborate and work together and produce content. Once I have this, then I have this assessment module. The assessment module will talk about evaluation, what kind of tests I will do, and how do I execute them, how do I take care of cheating, how do I prevent people from masquerading and copying, and how do I make sure that the question I gave is not easily answered by searching on Wikipedia and so on. So, assessment module is what I need. Module and issues related to assessment have to be packed in properly. It is already moving towards content to process, I will explain that in a minute. Then I need a delivery system. All this has to sit on some platform, which can take connections from students and then scream in the content that I have, not just lectures, but with exams and quizzes in between. Finally, I also have to figure out certification issues. As I have said in the earlier episode, who is going to give the certificate, what kind of certificate it is. So, I need to decide that part. So, if you want to put together an ODL, an online course, you need to have resolved the certification issues. And finally, you might have something what we call a do-it-yourself component. The student may pick and choose a set of learning objects or a set of courses and want to do it at our own pace, basically construct a program for herself. We eat a degree program, we eat a course, we eat a set of learnings or whatever, a do-it-yourself component. And then there is an event management. Typically, online courses start at a certain time, run for a while and they are over. So, there is an event associated with the course. So, I need to say I am, advertise that my course is going to start on 1st of September, it will run into 30th October, there will be quizzes at this point of time, registration has to be done before this and so on. There is an event management. So, you require technology support to run an event. And of course, there are large number of decisions to be made on how to run the event management. So, all this together with the reputation of the organization delivering this course, but instructor or teacher delivering the course and the business model, is it for free, is it some supported by some organization, is there some cost attached to it, that is the what I call the business model. So, all this put together will allow you to run an online course, that is what I call the ODL components stack. Some of it, some of the components are technology components, some of them are process decision, how you will do certain things. So, this is what I call the ODL stack. Thank you.