 Four or five people to come, in the meanwhile let me invite my colleague Professor Kannan Maudgaly on this side of the table, said I don't feel lonely, Varadha you all can come and sit here, come from that side, come from that side, alright so once again a warm welcome, I am particularly delighted to welcome you here because this building, unlike most other buildings, was constructed solely by the contributions from alumni, it is not a single paisa of government money in this, it was essentially Nandan Nilekhani and Kanwal Rekhi who contributed to the setting up of the school of IT then and a whole lot of initiatives which have stemmed from this building through the academic entity, today we had planned just two things, a brief presentation and discussion on what we are doing on use of technology in education and visit to some of the labs for those who are interested, after we finish the discussion session I request you to go out and have a quick cup of tea which is being arranged outside and then you can sort of move down or labs are on the ground floor which is almost like basement for this building because as you know in IIT there are multiple ground floors so this is the lowest ground floor that and from there itself you can move out either the way you came back or in the front, alright so we have divided our discussions in two parts although there's a whole lot that is happening mostly supported by the government through the national mission on education through ICT but quite independently a lot of activities that have been going on it usually takes two full days to visit various labs and various activities we are trying to give you a very short glimpse of whatever is being attempted here, as you are all aware IIT is committed to solve the national problem of providing quality I mean scale and diversity which is extraordinary and to provide skills knowledge and livelihood which is a more holistic definition of education as we understand it but in many educational institutions that does not happen currently. We believe that education technology holds an extremely important promise to reach out to this large scale of masses. Learning resources such as Wikipedia and many others are still mainly available in English and not in Indian languages that is another dimension which we are perpetually addressing and it will take far more efforts than just one issue suffered in it. So content delivery and access and then finally teaching learning and assimilation are the steps we started of a forage by trying to develop clicker devices which you would have seen in India they are not very popular but these are the devices which were used for example by Amitabh Bachchan in Kon Manega Karoorpati to get the opinions of the audience. We felt that if we could get the opinion and the knowledge of the students tested live during a classroom then it will give a teacher a chance to immediately address in the Lakuna. So if I observe that 70 percent students are answering wrongly I can immediately give a new example and explain that which is not possible if I depend on the conventional test which will tell me two weeks later how weak the students are. Since the foreign devices were costly we decided to design them here. This first device was designed and developed and built in about 673 rupees here in the affordable solutions lab then we provided a small screen here in the second device cost us about 1000s by far the cheapest devices. Subsequently when we worked on the Aakash tablet project we actually migrated the clicker application on to Aakash and the Aakash tablets are routinely being used not only here but in many other colleges where we have distributed those tablets for conducting live quizzes in the classroom. Professor Kanan Prali is the best expert of using these devices for last five years he has been running flipped classrooms for his class ensuring a much greater engagement and he uses these to ensure that the students are actually attentive. As you all know if you just tell IIT students or any other students that this is very important knowledge and you should seek it hardly five percent will actually pay attention but if you say there is a half mark quiz associated with it probably 100 percent will pay attention. So we do that in most of our classes which use flipped classroom we have this half mark quiz every day on the material that is discussed during that class itself and that proves to be useful. This is the Aakash tablet as you know this is not exactly an innovation in technology but this was an innovation in affordability it was an innovation in providing large amount of useful educational content and applications. So we charged with the responsibility of procuring one lakh tablets for which we gave the specifications we procured them and distributed them to 300 colleges more than 12,000 students were trained across the country more than 10,000 teachers were trained and in these colleges finally a students did variety of projects for implementing new applications new content all of them are made available as a policy in open source released under Creative Commons license and they are all available on Aakash labs.in which is the portal you can easily search for it any student not only in India but anywhere in the world can download those apps all of them work well on Android and all of them work well on Linux as well. In fact one of the objectives was that we will not limit ourselves to only one operating system and this was a condensed idea to provide not only Linux on the device but also to provide engineering experimentation using additional attachments to it. So this is one such experiment where his team had designed a small circuit called Anu Dino Anu for small is based on the Arduino which is a open source well established platform you can see that a temperature curve is being drawn here there is a small temperature sensor here and this whole additional device including the cable cost 90 rupees only. So we have been committed to provide inexpensive experimental tools for large number of people not necessarily to college students but even for the school students. As I told you many applications are ported on to Aakash so SILab which is the equivalent of the commercial product MATLAB works perfectly well on Aakash and therefore on any Android and on any Linux machine. We have a great initiative across the country called virtual labs to provide experimentation through remote labs. This is being coordinated by IIT Delhi but a large number of people across all IITs are participating including IIT Bombay. If I'm not mistaken about eight or ten people can then who are working on 14 faculty members in different disciplines are working on these virtual labs here. There are open source content being created by NCRT which are being made available to all students. NCRT as you know is the institution meant for R&D in school education. Now this is about content but content alone does not translate into knowledge. My favorite axiom is that if access to quality content meant knowledgeable people then librarians would have been the most knowledgeable people in the world and there is no evidence to show that. So knowledge acquisition is actually the act of an individual mind when the mind is applied, when discussions happen, when activities happen then people learn. Towards that we said that teachers are important and we should concentrate on training teachers in engaging students. So we started a T10KT project which stands for training 10,000 teachers at a time. It is built on the scaling up of a model of QIP programs where we typically train 35 to 40 teachers in a two-week intensive course. The cost of that program used to be about 14,000 rupees per participant because you have to assemble students, I mean teachers from all over the place and the local experts, three or four of them, their cost, their honorarium, et cetera, et cetera will be amortized only over 40 people. In 2000 when we were building our distance education program using vSATs earlier and then using internet, we decided that we will extend and extensively use this distance education program primarily concentrating on teacher training. So we made a proposal first to TYFAC and then to ministry that will train teachers in large numbers and we will do so by establishing remote centers across the country. We have established more than 300 remote centers, over 500 more applications are available. These are all engineering colleges. Our model of training is very interesting. In the morning, these 10,000 teachers who assemble at these remote centers listen to interactive lectures delivered from IIT Bombay or from IIT Kharagpur which is another hub like us and partner here. These interactive lectures are actually two-way interactive. So anybody in Coimbatore asking a question to our faculty here can be seen and heard by somebody in Kolkata and it effectively makes an enlarged classroom for the whole body. In the afternoon, these participating teachers at their respective centers are taken through tutorials and discussion sessions and lab sessions under the supervision of a local workshop coordinator. One of the worries that we had was will these tutorials and labs be conducted in exactly the same rigorous fashion as we do them in IIT. When teachers are trained here, they have to undergo that rigor. To ensure that what we started doing is we would get these workshop coordinators from all these 300 places to IIT Bombay for a one-week intensive program two months ahead of the main training workshop and we will make them go through the same labs and same tutorials with the same rigor and also understand from them the peculiarities of their own teaching of that subject in their respective places. Then they go back, set up those labs, etc. While the labs are being conducted, they are in constant touch with us through the same two-way communication and the queries and answers can be given even during the afternoon session. This program has turned out to be very effective. We had promised to train 1,50,000 teachers in three years, two years of the project are over and we have actually trained 1,00,000 teachers of engineering college. This is by far the largest number of engagement with teachers anywhere in the world that we know. This is a glimpse of the coordinators workshop where all the coordinators come here. They are taken through the same steps in the morning. They have interactive sessions and in the afternoon they have to do the labs and other things. This is one of the remote centers. This is again my favorite because you will see a lot of ladies in this remote center. There are a few men who are sitting sheepishly behind. We have constantly got mails from a large number of lady teachers across the country thanking us for organizing such training programs at remote centers because they say it would have been impossible for us to leave our families for two weeks and come to IIT Bombay to undergo this training. In fact, Professor Kandan proudly says that we are empowering 50% of the nation's population by these mechanics. The participation by lady teachers in our programs varies between 39% to 52% depending upon the nature of the subject which again is I think an important contribution IIT Bombay is making. You must have heard of massive open online courses. We started working on these three years ago. So these are the courses that are being offered from IIT Bombay X which is nothing but the extended online education services of IIT Bombay. Our center for distance engineering education program is the administrative unit in charge of this just like continuing education program runs face to face workshops. We have we learned by offering these courses in partnership with EDX globally. We had some 85-90,000 students in three subjects. We learned from it, bettered the courses and then offered them for Indian students and those were offered last semester. This semester again they are being offered in a further extended mode which I'll describe. There are online courses being offered by NPTEL as you know this is one of the largest programs of creating course content like open course fair of MIT. There are more than 1000 courses now available. These are essentially web courses or video courses but recorded lectures and some examples. These are not MOOCs but based on those MOOCs are being prepared and MOOCs are being offered by NPTEL. There is an interesting and important effort from IIT Kanpur who where Prabhakar runs MOOCs on MOOCs and they also offer courses. Now they are empowered to, they have been asked to run courses on agriculture. You must have heard of SWAM. The work on SWAM is progressing. CDAC is the organization which has been interested with building SWAM and it will probably happen in next few months or within a year. The effort is that we must use these technology to reach out to largest number of people effectively scaling the quality as well. IIT Bombay suggested a blended MOOCs approach because all over the world the MOOCs which are offered, they are offered by the best known teachers from the best known institutions whether it is Harvard or Stanford or MIT or Oxford or whatever but these are not part of the mainstream. Some honor course certificate is given and people do not find too much value for that certificate because the universities do not accept those grades. We said that we need to complement face-to-face education by the MOOCs like education so we defined a blended MOOCs approach where we combine the face-to-face education and learning through MOOCs. The idea is very simple. A teacher in Coimbatore decides that his students will learn from the MOOCs on that subject from IIT Bombay. Students are advised to register for that MOOCs. Classes are held regularly in Coimbatore but the students are also required to pass exams online. Most important their final grade for that subject for their university will come from the combination of their marks in their own evaluation and marks obtained through MOOCs. Now this is for the first time that is happening. There are institutions and universities which have adopted MOOCs for regular teaching in the university but these are located these are isolated for individual universities only. There is no example where multiple institutions across the country come together to accept these grades from the MOOCs as part of their own grades. The flipped classroom where students study these online lectures and come to the class only for discussion and problem-solving session. This has been attempted and perfected over the last several years led by Prashant Karnan and many other teachers and there are scientific evidence gathered by our E.T. Faculty Professor Professor Sanamurthy and Professor Sridhar saying that the students' engagement enhances from average 40 percent to average 80 percent and that is because in every lecture students are forced to actually discuss and solve problems and basically learning is much more effective. We know that we want to spread this message to all others. Others cannot do it because they don't have recorded lectures MOOCs make those lectures available. An active learning where student participation is enhanced is also being attempted. All our teachers across the country will have to learn these new pedagogies just as we learned over the last four or five years but this we believe will be the next effective learning program. So as I mentioned we believe that it's a global first pilot. We are offering some same three courses now to all learners but these are now not six week or eight week courses but these are four month courses spanning the entire semester along with one lakh or two lakh students who will register for these courses from all over the country. We expect about 50,000 students of these 50 institutions will register and these students will benefit and for the first time in the country they will get grades which are a combination of MOOCs grades and their own grades. That's all I have to say. I will request Mr. Kannan to speak about his other initiatives. Good afternoon. My name is Kannan Modgalyan. I entered IIT ten years after you did. I joined in 1975. Yeah, I studied at IIT Madras. The first thing that I want to pass around is our laptop. This is the one that was mentioned just now. This is the improvement over Akash. Let me just just gone to sleep and just have a look at this pass it around. Yeah, I could have got one more. So, this is what has been advertised as less than 100 dollar laptop. We bought it at 4990 plus tax below 5000 plus tax. Now of course, the rupee has devalued further but still it is about 6500 of the order of. But base price was 4990 with taxes, excise and so on. It came to 5820 to us. We bought 1000 of them at 58 lakhs and we are doing experiments to see whether it's a good device. It turns out that CS 101 students of IIT Bombay used it because 50 of them didn't have their own machines. So, the TA of the course did a thorough study of this and found that this was good enough. And for a CS 101 course out of 450 students, 400 have their own computers, 50 don't have their computers. Then we thought it was an unequal competition and so we gave this machine and they used it. And interestingly, there were six students who had MacBook Air and one of the programs meant for the course didn't run in this. So, they came and complained to me that I was discriminating. I didn't give it to them because we gave it only to people who didn't have any computer. The project that I want to talk to you is Spokane tutorial. So, before I go to that, I just want to take you to our M H R D's home page. So, this is M H R D G O V dot I N. So, if you can see, just let's go to the second one, third one. So, starting from here, these are all projects. FOSSI is a project at IIT Bombay. By the way, we are on M H R D home page. And then design courses, E-Kalpa is done by my colleague Ravi Povaya in IDC. Spokane tutorial I talked to you about. E-Antra is done by Professor Kavi Arya. Once again, he is in this building, computer science faculty member. NPTEL, of course, you know about. T10KT is what Professor Fartek talked about. So, out of the six banners on M H R D website, home page, FIVAR offers. FIVAR being done at IIT Bombay. So, that shows that in a very short time, NPTEL, of course, is a huge affair. It has been going on for long time, but our projects in a very short time have reached that level. So, it is, so that is one thing I wanted to talk to you. So, let me just go there. I am a co-PA of this FOSSI project. By the way, the OS for that was put together by one of the staff members of the FOSSI project. In fact, we call it as FOSSI laptop. Now, let me, I can also click here. It will say that do you want to go there? If I say yes, it will take me to my home page. So, we get direct traffic from all over the country. All who go to M H R D home page will come to our pages. You can see that it is an initiative of NME ICT to promote IT literacy through open source software. That is what we do in this project. We called it spoken tutorial because in the year 2007, when I started doing this, there were many silent videos on YouTube, on using software and so on. We thought that spoken words were lot more important. And the other thing, other reason was you do not see the video of the person who is speaking. You only see the voice and of course, you see the screenshot. So, that is the second reason to call it as spoken tutorial. Third one, I will tell you shortly why it is the spoken word is extremely important in our project. These are all series of tutorials. So, let me take, so various topics. For example, C is the most popular one. Let me see where is C and C plus plus. This has been the most popular one. And we also dub this into various languages. Not sure whether audio will come. Let me just see. So, this is just an example. Thank you. And of course, what this does is, of course, we have it in English. We start in English and then dub it into all languages. We make this tutorial suitable for self-learning by creating the script first and then subjecting it to, through beginners. The beginner has to certify that they can reproduce all the steps. Then we record it. Then we run pilot workshops and so on. We put in a lot of effort for a 10 minute tutorial. And all the programs required, supposing for example, in this example, she says open some file. For example, my first C program, that file is also given here. If you see code files, it is all given here. So, in this, it is a complete environment. It tells you the outline of this assignment. It gives slides. It also gives us script. Script, of course, you heard. So, here is the script. So, we write it in English first. We subject it to novice check. We record it, freeze it and then we translate sentence by sentence and then ask a person to give the voice and then overlay this voice onto the original video. So, we have this in all languages. Let me show one other. Basically, what it says is that we can provide this technology even to linguistic minority groups, even if there is no expert in that language. And because it is created for self-learning, it is being used in a very big way. And I can show you some statistics here. We have trained a total of more than 8 lakh people until today. And the number of people trained this year is already 2.63 lakhs. And the details are all coming here. You can see that there is a workshop. So, I think that is all. You have a question? Translation, yeah. We are doing it manually. Translation mechanism created is also, it uses crowdsourcing. You identify good people like that and then they are given some honorarium. It is not very expensive. Yeah, there is a question on this. Yeah. So, these, as Mr. Kannan said, these spoken tutorials are meant for self-learning. Any person can learn, need not be a student, need not be a teacher. For example, some of the most popular spoken tutorials have been these productivity enhancement tools such that open office and so on, which are being learned by clerical staff across many organizations in the country. Oh, absolutely. Everything that we do is necessarily released under Creative Commons license, including the software that we create. It is absolutely free. There could be some services that some people might give. So, for example, if I arrange a one-day workshop or two-day workshop, people have to be given a cup of tea. See, as many of our American friends say, there is no free lunch. So, for the lunch, some money has to be paid. But we have found time and again that a large number of people do this as a voluntary work without charging. Tests. Typically, about 25 percent of the people take this, take undergo test. The reason is, one of the reasons why we could do this in big numbers. For example, there are days when 1000 people undergo training on a single day across the country in maybe 15 different locations. The reason why that happens is, we have come up with a method. If you look at this software training, there is something called create your own disk image. If you go there, you can select this FOSS category, you can select the level languages, and then you add the selected FOSS, and then create a zip file. It will give you this image. So, you need only one internet connection in a college. If a college does not have even that, we can send this zip file in a CD. Then they can copy this into every machine, unzip it, open it. It will open in Firefox or Chrome. It will give you the look and feel of the web page, but it will open from local file. Unfortunately, this cannot be done for online tests. For tests, we need to preserve our questions. So, we have tried various things, but that is one of the reasons why the number is small. But assuming that internet facility is there, connection is there, we have the thing in many topics. The IIT Bombay AX, which necessarily conducts evaluations online, that platform will now be used to conduct such tests as well. Although we are not very clear how valuable these certifications would be. So, it all depends upon the acceptance by society and the employers and so on. Well, for me, as I shared with you, after I leave IIT, I am committed to work for 10 years for school education. But the issue is not letting me go. Next year, when I actually retire the second time, I start working on that. There is already a primary school project in Madhya Pradesh to engage primary school students into active learning. Our industrial design center is participating in designing the curricula from a different point of view. We are giving 700 AKAs established to those schools to do that experiment. In using AKAs, we have actually done a school pilot, but for 9 standard students to teach them science and maths. But these efforts need to scale up. And scaling up, frankly, I don't believe that scaling up should happen entirely through government funding. There has to be an ecosystem which will evolve and that will only spread across the country. I am hoping that it should happen soon. I will also tell you something that for education technology interdisciplinary program, where we have been hiring faculty. The director Professor Devan Khakkar gave directions to me and Sridhar Ayer when we went to meet him. He said there is no need to restrict employing only those faculty members who work in higher education. You should employ education technology specialists who work in school education also, because education technology spans all boundaries. They are very wise. They are seen by the institute. And we will be looking forward to such faculty members now. Review done by midday on our laptop. And they have given, of course, they have not given any special concession because it is a low-cost laptop. They have reviewed it on an absolute basis. For example, when they talk about performance, they say, oh, it is not that good. But then what do you expect from this machine and so on? But when it comes to operating system and apps, which is what we developed, they have given 9 out of 10, if you can see. And connectivity, all the ports and so on, they have given 8 out of 10. And overall, rating is 7.1 out of 10. So now we are actually asking ourselves, if IIT Bombay students can benefit CS101 students of IIT Bombay can benefit by this machine, why not extend this to the CS101 students of other colleges? And then, in fact, I talked to somebody in Google today, whether they will be interested in supporting this. Because in IIT, presumably more wealthy students attend. There are other places where you have people who cannot afford rural areas and even science colleges and so on. All of them have to learn C programming. Actually, Professor Fartek said that the most popular one is office software. Actually, amongst the students, the most popular software is C programming. We have trained 1.6 lakh students out of, that is 20 percent of all students, I mean, we trained, is in C. The reason being, all IIT companies conduct a C test at the time of interview. So it is actually employment, employment, employment. That is what matters. So this is going to help these children enormously. Most Mumbai college students are day scholars. So if they get a doubt in the night, so they might have a computer in the lab, but they have to wait till the next day. So I just talked to the Google people whether they will be interested in sponsoring a project and where a college can buy a certain number and give it to the students at 3000 and then after one year they have to return. Because it also turns out that most colleges say in the first year do not bring a computer from the second year onwards, but then it will be nice to have a computer because some children may have computers at home. Some children do not have. So you can actually give this computer 3000 at the end of the first year. You can either pay the balance and take the machine or they have used up the 3000. Return it. Then within two years it will pay off. So it can actually be run on a self-sustaining mode. So I thought it will be a good activity and in that way at a very low cost we can actually empower all our children. And those children and there might be some people who will say well actually I do not want to keep it for more than one year. Next year I want to buy a better machine. You are not tied to that. The expenditure is only 3000. But you have got to use a computer for whole year for 3000. That you are not going to get in any other way. There is also an urgent need to build an ecosystem across the country for most of these efforts because sadly the government budgets for the education are getting pruned. For last almost eight months we have not received any release of funds for any of these projects. In fact last month itself in desperation I said I will put back my fundraising hat once again and go around collecting donations from alumni and through CSR funding. But we are desperately looking at a mechanism to speed up setting up of this ecosystem which will be self-sustaining. As it is as I said I do not believe that government funding should perpetuate in supporting these activities. So some of these efforts are on those lines. So I will request you there is a cup of tea just outside. You can of course exit from either of the doors. Please do have a cup of tea and on the ground floor there are two labs the video lab video editing lab and our Akash lab the affordable solutions lab which the Canon heads now are open. Those of you are interested can go down on the 0th floor on the lift and as you walk towards that other door of entry just around them those are the labs there. You are most welcome. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. This one is the T10-80 is like what the teacher trained 10,000 teachers and partners talked about when he said that 1,000 people have been trained another 15,000 will be trained whereas the Spokane school based training that I talked about is completely asynchronous. That is all available. They don't even have to contact. So the next problem we are going to talk about is asynchronous that people will be doing it at different times completely asynchronous. So the online test they have to do we have to take this. And it is synchronous. That is simple. They claim to have 1 lakh litres or 4 lakh litres various numbers they talk about but we don't know that. We try to tell them why don't you make this available for free. In fact people can even make money out of it for a day. Why don't you offer it in 8 hours. On the other hand they can even say that in order to make your experience better we will give you a headphone.