 So, first of all, welcome to IIT Bombay and truly HALTI welcome because most of you have come at the shortest possible notice. Let me assure you that we organize our workshops with at least two months of preparation behind all of your board. Without further ado, I would like to start off with a brief introduction of my team here. I am Deepak Phatak. I teach here and I am the principal investigator of this project for launching nationwide Scala program online courses. Professor Lagu, he was my colleague for many years. Then he was an entrepreneur. Then he worked in high-tech areas with TCS and Intel and few months ago he retired from everything, wanting to do something specific in higher education online. So, I caught him and he has joined us as an advisor. He will later on be speaking to you on the third day, telling you about the Section 8 company which is the not-for-profit company which is proposed to be set up to take this thing forward. Professor Pradeep Verma is the senior consultant in MHRD in the national mission and the reason he is moving out and in and he will continue to do so is because the MHRD's main website is being launched at 11 o'clock as we speak. So, instead of being in Delhi, he is in Mumbai and therefore lots of problems. We have our team, Kalpana Kandan is our content chief and she has been currently the program manager for our EDX initiatives. Sitting next to her is Jaya. She handles the finances. So, anybody has any problem with any TA bill or something, you know whom to contact. There is another important person here. I do not know why he is sitting in a corner. He will be speaking to you tomorrow. Professor Uday Gayatunde along with me, he is teaching a course on the international EDX platform on thermodynamics and he will be sharing with you his experiences of running the course on an online platform tomorrow. Sajjan Dixit is in charge of the entire video team. I will mention the backdrop of how we have created these teams but currently he looks after all the video recording and editing and uploading of files for the MOOCs courses. In fact, all the video recording that is happening here with his team, we have a fairly large workshop team which actually handles workshops for training teachers under our T10KT program about which I will briefly mention. And the team members here including those whom we met outside for the registration all belong to that workshop team. In fact, all logistics arrangements are handled by them for the workshop. Anybody I have missed from my team, you will be meeting many of them. There are more than about 100 people who have been working for last three years here and we are using that resource immediately to launch the nationwide camp. I would request all of you to introduce yourselves briefly and then we can start the business. So, I am Atul Negi from University of Hyderabad and I have been asked by my Vice Chancellor to be the coordinator for the activities at University of Hyderabad. Soon I am getting to know that what it will really mean and involve. My name is Upendra and I am from the English and Foreign Languages University Hyderabad and I came to know last week that I am in charge of this program. I am Dr. J. Kishan. I am from Institute of Lifelong Learning, Delhi University and I am the lead faculty for this project. I am R. K. Vyas. I am also from Institute of Lifelong Learning, Delhi University. I am ICT, coordinating the ICT activities in IEEE and lead faculty in computer science for this. Myself Pradeep Kumar, working as a system programmer at NITPALTR Chandigarh. I am Prof. Ramakrishna from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technicalities, Training and Research Chandigarh. I am the course manager. I came to know two days before. Thank you, sir. I am Mohammad Kasim from Mass Communication Research Centre Jamia Malia University. So, I also came to know that I am the coordinator for the university last week only. Thank you. I am Dr. Shatrud. I am research scientist in consortium for educational communication in New Delhi. I am Nageshwana from consortium for educational communication in New Delhi. We are in the business of right now the e-content creation for UG courses. Good morning, sir. I am Dr. Jyotsana Dixit. Currently, I am coordinating the technology enabled activities at IGNO. Yesterday, I came to know that I have to attend this workshop and since our vice chancellor, we were not able to contact him from the past three days. So, regarding the course and the lead faculty, it is yet to be decided. Yeah, myself, Prof. Shriya Kumar, yesterday morning, I came to know around 10 o'clock that I am supposed to be here. So, I am here and I am from Banaras Hindu University, professor of physics basically. So, I am really totally unaware what is exactly going on. But, I am aware about the MOOC program. So, that… I am Dr. Shri Narayan Hoja from Vishwabhati. I also learned about my status as coordinating this MOOC activities in my university almost 14 to 15 hours earlier than my departure. So, that is how things are happening. I am Orinda Matacharya from IIM Calcutta. I am the coordinator for this course. Good morning, I am Manju Jayaswal. I am from IIM Calcutta. Good morning, I am Preetam Basu. I am also from IIM Calcutta. I am from the operations management department. Actually, Saibal wrote to me very recently and I am very pleasantly surprised to see all three of you here from IIM. Thank you so much. I am Sameer and I come from Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Along with me, there are couple of faculty members. I am Madhu Sri Shekhar. I come from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Which subject do you handle, Madhu Sri? I have come from a non-technical background. I have come from a political science background but I have been asked by our chancellor to come here. So, I don't come from a technical background. No, no, no. You will be teaching a political science course in MOOC or MOOC? No, I teach multiple papers, many courses at this. So, one of those subjects… Could be on… I teach governance… You have not yet decided. Yes, I could teach it. You are in guru company. Yes. Same confusion prevails amongst most of us here. So, don't worry. I am Shohini Sengupta from School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. I teach social policy. It's one of the subjects. Social? Social policy. Oh, social policy. While the mic is being shifted, let me introduce a few more colleagues who are joined in. Dr. Mukta Atres with us now. Mukta, can you just stand up? I can show her, yes. So, she is the coordinator for the entire workshop team. And I have two very key people. They will be helping you during the lab sessions, Vrinda and Urmila. They are the ones who have helped both Professor Gayathonde and I in creating all our courses in better understanding how to create courses and how to launch them. So, as of today amongst all my technical team, these two happen to be the most key resources. And I pray to God for their good health every night. My name is Anirbhan Hazra. I am from Aisarpune, Faculty of Chemistry. And I should introduce particularly to you, you are my teacher in 1994 of CS 101. Oh my God. Yeah. Got that. Okay. So, that is why the face is familiar. Yes. 94. I am Bhas Bapat. I ought to come from Aisarpune and I will be coordinating the Aisarpune efforts. Bhas, I got the letter from your receiver. Saurabh Bhutolia, technical officer. Hi, sir. But I thought you were not to come today. Okay. You are to come for one day today. The other person is coming for the third day. Right. And you are there for all this. I will be there all through. And the main physics faculty member who is going to first offer the course, he is in Italy. He is in Italy. Yeah. But he will be coming back on the 20th. So, he will come directly from Bombay Airport to the… No. He will be done by then. He is coming only in the 20th. Okay. So, thank you very much. You would have figured out one thing from these introductions. Practically, none of the people participating in this thing were aware of what is going on till about 10 days ago. In fact, most people had no clue. This is just one sign of how fast the government of the day wishes to function. And I think it is important that we match that speed, which means a couple of things. Decisions will have to be taken very quickly. And decisions will have to be taken what I roughly call the armed forces style. If the general is not available, a Brigadier takes a decision. If the Brigadier is not available, a Colonel takes a decision. Write down the link on the battlefield. If nobody is available, a Javan takes a decision. And that becomes the decision of the entire armed forces. That is exactly how we will have to function. So, let me first tell you about the genesis of how the entire MOOC thing came about. It starts with the distance education efforts. Distance education is nothing new. Open universities across the world have been doing it for ages. Ignore representative is here. In fact, what we call the flip classroom where the course material is in the hands of students. They study it. Then they come to a contact center for interaction with faculty for clearing their doubts, etc. It was the earliest form of what today we call a flip classroom in which there are no lectures. Students listen to their lectures in their hostels, but come to the classroom to solve problems and have discussions. In IIT, Bombay, we have been running such flip classroom for several years. Many of my colleagues have actually done controlled experiments and have proven that the students' engagement is far better in a flip classroom than in a conventional classroom. Of course, there are ups and downs. There are papers which I will refer to which you can look at. In India, the distance education was attempted through v-sats and other things earlier. But far before that, Professor Anupray of IIT Kharagpur started a unique experiment in distance education by actually recording video lectures on video cassettes. Those were the cassettes. Taking these cassettes to remote centers where people assembled. The cassettes were played there. And a facilitator will stop the cassette after every 10 or 15 minutes forcing an interaction amongst the participants. And then these interactions were recorded and were reported back to the teacher in IIT Kharagpur, who in the subsequent weeks prepared another cassette recording the reactions to these observations and so on. So it was like a slow speed thing almost like an open university kind of stuff. That was done very early. Professor Ray was ahead of his time. Even today under his leadership, a large pedagogical team has been experimenting with effective teaching and learning. Couple of observations by the pedagogical people. You would have all heard about active learning. Very briefly, it amounts to saying that students must actually participate into whatever we do. The second myth, which I myself became aware of the fallacies when some of my colleagues working in education technology here pointed it out that as teachers we all strive hard to make our teaching better. And that seems to be the single most important agenda for us. And Professor Siddharah here who leads the activity along with Sarnamurti pointed out that you got it all wrong. It does not matter how well you teach. What is important is how well the student learns. And the only mechanism for us to guess or judge how much the student has learned is to assessment an exam. And the exams and assessments are always too late when they come to us and we know some student is weak or some student is very smart. We are unable to do anything about it because 2 to 3, 4 weeks have passed between our teaching and our assessment. And that is how the flipped classroom and the active engagement of students came about. So active learning with students participation. This is again nothing new. More than 30, 40 years ago this was initiated. It is well established through heavy research that this is the best way to ensure that the students learn maxima. Of course good teaching is important but good teaching alone is not sufficient. Now earlier it was not possible to have active learning because the teachers in large numbers were not trained in doing this. But it is possible to use later on as I will mention blended MOOCs to permit this kind of active learning. We will explain the experiment that we are doing in IIT but that is for the later time. The MOOCs phenomena is again nothing very new except for the name. Online courses, online tutoring, online material has been there for ever since the computers came about. Many of you would have heard of the Gutenberg project which initiated open source contents in plain ascii characters for anybody to see. The open source movement in software took roots very early but the open source movement in content particularly in creative content started with the establishment of creative commons and most of the open contents are now released under creative commons license for anybody to use. The MOOC movement as the name stands is about three years old. While there were a few European and American universities which attempted this the major Philip or Bush came when Stanford initiated two companies which came out of their campus. One was Udacity and the other was Coursera. So Udacity and Coursera were two companies which operated from Bay Area of United States. A third company was set up EDX or Education Extended. The difference was these two were regular commercial companies where EDX was a not-for-profit company. It was set up by MIT and Harvard. Please note that while these two first companies emerged in Stanford Stanford and nothing to do with these companies. There were just startups which emerged in this Stanford. But the EDX is a company which is set up by a large grant by the regions of MIT and Harvard. Each gave 30 million dollars to set up this company. And the objective is to take further the MIT Standard Pension of OpenCourseWare and create massive open online courses for the benefit of people. They do not expect this money to be recovered but they expect the company to stand on its own start making revenue. So in that sense it is much different from the other companies. In 2012 when we at IIT Bombay were studying all these effects and we were very clear that such a thing is desperately required for the nation. The reason for our clarity was something else. IIT Bombay has been working on training teachers on large scale. We have a history of about 14 years and we started in this very building our first synchronous interactive course with a few remote centers connected by VSATS. Subsequently we scaled it up to about 10 remote centers and at that point in time TIFAC came to us and said can we see a program to train teachers in large numbers? We ran that program for about 4 to 5 years training 400, 500 teachers at a time. Then the ministry got interested. By this time we had shifted to internet and we have been running programs for training 1000 teachers at a time. We ran those programs for 3 years and more recently in 2012 the ministry gave us a responsibility to train 10,000 teachers at a time. So we have termed this program as T10KT or 10,000 teachers at a time. We have been training these teachers at 300 remote centers where the participating teachers assemble physically. More recently to investigate the use of online program we broke this 2 week workshop into two parts of which one week is conducted online but spread over one month. The participants actually give weekly assignments etc. etc. during that month and then they come face to face for one week. So this is one way of blended books often. Essentially we are doing all of this and we said we need to do two things. One, we need a good platform to scale up this kind of training with blended books offering. And second, can we use this platform to offer meaningful courses to our students across the country. That is how our activities began in 2012. In 2012 and early 13 we had meetings with various people Udacity, Coursera, EDX. There was a charging company in United Kingdom spearheaded by their Open University Future Learn. There were similar small attempts elsewhere but very clearly these three companies were scaling up very rapidly. There is a committee appointed by IIT Bombay to finalize a particular choice of a partner. Two reasons why we chose EDX. One, MIT and Harvard have the same principles as ours and we claim that any content that we create must be free. Interaction, if required, must cost some money and if there is a certification that it must cost a fee. So Open Source content has been the IIT Bombay's philosophy so has been MIT. More importantly, EDX was a not-for-profit company. As I have said elsewhere there is nothing wrong with for-profit companies but we as government funded institutions are more comfortable with not-for-profit. This was one reason why the committee said we will tie up with EDX. The second and equally important reason or perhaps more important reason was that such offerings can be made only on the basis of a platform which has fairly large software and takes anywhere between 2 to 3 years to construct. We were planning actually to start constructing such a platform ourselves but we noticed that EDX had announced in 2012 that they will open source their platform in 2013 June. Now you will agree that if I have 250,000 lines of code written on millions of lines of open source component already working and available then it is much easier to start with that and change it the way you want over a year. So that was another reason why we decided to join with EDX. We joined with EDX in 2013. We agreed that we will offer within a year four courses. Two of them are already running as I mentioned Professor Gaithun and I are running these courses. Two more courses will be offered very soon. Professor Vikram Gadre will be joining us very briefly tomorrow. He will be offering a course on signals and systems and my colleague Professor Ramakrishna will be giving a course on computer networks but that is as far as EDX is concerned. Our courses on EDX are currently meant primarily for the global consumption. So as these thousands of students we do not even know how many students are from India or whatever. But right from the beginning I was very clear that we must use this for the benefit of our school direct. This year in February I was asked to comment on use of MOOCs in an invited talk in a conference on transformation of engineering education where I proposed the use of blended MOOCs and said we must have an open source platform. Very recently the government tasked us with development of an open source platform built starting from EDX and over the three years mature that platform to meet almost all the educational needs of the country. The idea there is that part of the project is to set up a not-for-profit company like EDX which will then continuously drive this activity because there has to be a revenue model for any activity that you do. You cannot perpetuate a system based only on government funding and people would be willing to pay if there are good quality things that are available to them that is the universal experience. So that is the project we started some time ago and that is the context in which Professor Lagu has joined us as an advisor. When we started building this platform we started working by the way almost 6 months ago we actually built a modified platform for what we call the blended MOOCs operation in which let us say Aisar Pune designs a course and that course is taken by IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, NIT Suratkal or whatever. Then the actual course contents would be created in Aisar Pune but in each institute like in IIT Bombay there will be a local course copy and there will be a learning management system which will be locally placed. So students here will login into their local thing. Students from NIT Suratkal might have a variation in that course but the main course contents come from Aisar. This was the idea in our blended MOOCs. We tried it only with one institute namely IIT Bombay. So currently one course called CS101 is running in blended MOOCs where the site is called IIT Bombay X for any better name. The course is created there and in the blended part the students see those lectures and they come to the flipped classroom as I made. This is the work that has happened over the last 6 months and that is why we are fairly confident of handling that platform to change it the way we needed or we wanted. February or March we were asked whether MOOCs can be given both in the standard fashion as well as in blended fashion on a large scale to students in it. I first prepared a proposal for deployment in what was known as Techip Colleges. Techip is a scheme for funding engineering institutions and there are more than 200 colleges that are so funded. But subsequently the national mission wanted to enlarge the scope and include all of higher education. That is the genesis of our current meeting here. For some reason most probably because most of your institutions have been involved in creating some kind of open content somewhere. So I got a suggestion from the ministry that can we launch an all India site for MOOCs for Indian students with courses created by to begin with centrally funded institutions. I was told about this decision I think on 24th or 25th of last month. I said who are these people and I need to talk to them. So a video conference was arranged in a hurry on 1st of September. I spoke to some people on 1st of September. There were some more people left. So there was another thing arranged hurriedly on 4th. By this time I had updated my own presentation getting some clarity. 4th of September is when I finally spoke to the Chancellor's and maybe some of you were present there and it was decided that when the site is launched on 25th for the Indian students there shall be presence of several centrally funded institutions and their courses. The ministry wanted the courses to be ready for offer on 25th when the site is launched. I told them in no uncertain terms that please understand our experience. I mean it is not a black magic where a magician takes a rabbit out of the hat and says this is the course. A course requires serious consideration and preparation. I suggested a via media which was accepted by the ministry. The via media is that on 25th when the site is launched the site shall name all the participating central universities as ready to offer courses. So all of your institutions will be there. Along with that list will be the list of courses from each university. However each course will state a start date which need not be within 5 days or 10 days of the launch. Only those courses which are absolutely ready to launch will have a start date preferably around 1st or 2nd October. I have suggested 2nd October being a good date. That is because when you launch the site there is no non-trivial time to students across the country to register, choose courses and prepare for the course. This has been agreed upon and what Liwe that at least the mission director told me is that the central universities should at least decide on the duration of the course and the start date of a course for each course that they will offer and that course must be listed on 25th. That is the reason for this hurried decision making. The modest operandi I suggested is each university to identify number of courses that they would like to offer at least 2 courses from each institution. We have understood the operational activities that happened between EDX and the rest of the university partners. We are actually trying to fashion out an exactly similar kind of setup here. So a relationship between Swayam central administration here in IIT and each of the central university and that is through the notion of a coordinator. In EDX we call them program manager. So as I said Kalpana is a program manager. We will soon appoint a program manager for Swayam. Maybe she will participate or we may need a group here but that is the reason why it is absolutely a must that each one of your central university and institutions must have one coordinate and in case of any issue related to MOOCs offering whether it is related to administration of MOOCs registration whether it is related to any course that is ever offered by your university. It is the coordinator who will be the person responsible for resolving all the issues and therefore I have suggested to Vice Chancellor that the coordinator must be an empowered person. Empowerment in IIT system works differently than in some of the universities but that is for you to sort out. In our case empowerment means that if I am the PI well whatever I do goes. I might take a decision which is unpalatable. In the worst case if I take a decision which is very very bad not like by people my dean has a heart to heart private talk with me. Occasionally my director will call me and fire me but my decisions will always stand. They will have the backing of the institution. That is how we have functioned in IIT Bombay. I believe many of your institutions would be functioning like that. If they do not I think it is high time we started doing. I will sincerely request you to go back and make sure that this process is followed because we may have to take decisions within 5 minutes of a telephone call. So I was actually I must admit that I was frankly surprised when I got some correspondence saying our VC is not in station. Now doesn't the university run if VC is not there? There is an acting VC. My institute always runs whether the director is here or not. Half the time he is not here. So this is something which I find very unpalatable. An institution or university must run 24 by 7. I am sorry for being very blunt but please take back these precise feelings and ensure that your university functions 24 by 7. That means the decisions are taken. There is always somebody in the hierarchy who will take a call and take the decision. Please. You are most welcome to enter. Sir, I am from Banaras in the University. Yeah. Right now the faculty strength has reduced to half of its bench. So 3000 post 1800. The student strength has increased. So finding a faculty who can offer, design the course and moreover the infrastructure whatever you have created over a six year or three years of time. There is no time because there is no such centralized facility and as far as university system I am not very much familiar with you or not. Tomorrow I may not be the coordinator because the vice chancellor will appoint and he will say that ok Mr. Kumar now you are no more required. Mr. why will be the coordinator? God bless you. God bless Indian education system. No sir. I think Indian education system is much stronger than that. I will submit the following. Like you say I will I can tell you that there is no institute or university here which is running to the full strength of faculty. I don't think that is true with any university. It is not true with IIT Bombay for example. Half of the things. But my humble request is if you scan through the faculty list you will find a few individuals who will be willing to commit beyond their call of duty. Now please such initiatives depend only on our ability to locate and empower such individuals. Otherwise such schemes will not work. That much is I think patently obvious. Do you think all of them have come here only because somebody has appointed them. They are also interested in doing something. Not that they will know anything about it. I think most of us has come here because someone has entrusted that you have to go there. Oh is that true? Second thing please take another piece which is much more serious. We are in a system. Means why I came only from BHO. That is the answer. IIM has come with the three faculties or the reason whenever I was asking to the vice chancellor he said we are the 150 departments. If you take one the next thing in the academic council I will question why you have sent this guy. Why not my department? Every department offers almost 20 to 30 courses. So if it is very good everybody will be willing to offer the course and for BHO it will be very difficult to say that these two courses will be there because the vice chancellor has to answer that why only these two courses or the coordinator has to answer why only these two courses. I can provide an indication of solution. I wonder whether it is going to be a solution. If program coordinators are appointed directly by HRD ministry rather than by the university that will obviate shift opposition within the university. I understand although we are digressing but let me briefly comment. I understand the import of both your observations and questions. The reason I do not like your suggestions sir is because we will lose our autonomy greatly if we permit any external agency including government of India to appoint people. I think this is a call that we have to take ourselves. Secondly, there is a very specific request that has gone out perhaps it has not reached you but if you read my presentation you will understand. What is the objective of these books? The objective of the books is to get the best quality education to the largest number of people. Now amongst the umpteen courses that we have probably the best courses which will fit this bill are described as follows. A, they are meant as introductory courses. B, they are courses which are taken by the largest possible number of students in my own university. And C, I have some of the best recognized faculty members for that course in my institution. If you just follow this simple principle because initially we want to reach out to the largest number of people with the best quality. You know that there are teachers and teachers and teachers. There are very good teachers everywhere but there will be a few who would be recognized not by themselves but by others that they are really good teachers particularly students. I think every university every institution has a set of them. All that you need to do is get such teachers, keep them in mind find out which are the courses which they are teaching. Then from amongst those subjects you find out which are the subjects which are likely to have maximum impact and then find out whether that particular teacher is willing to take the extra efforts of creating a MOOC schedule and offering it. Now this will take some time but how much? Now this I have stated on 1st of September I repeated it on 4th of September. Today we are on 11th of September. One week has passed and if within that week the university or institution has not been able to apply this principle then I have to sadly conclude that either your university does not have such courses which are meaningful to large number of students or great faculty members who are renowned to teach those courses. I refuse to believe this for a minute. It is not possible. Every institution, every university has such courses. Or somewhere it has not been understood that these decisions have to be made quickly. That is the only point. And I would suggest sir a coordinator cannot make these decisions but a coordinator can casual the vice chancellor to make these decisions. Saying these decisions are required. See if I am a coordinator, I do not make these decisions for example I am the PI here but we have a committee of deans director, director and in the worst case we just take that decision convey and we just get an endorsement. So what I would suggest is this is the principle. It does not matter. Whatever has happened, time has passed but at least let us go ahead and do that. My request to you is at least these few lines convey to your vice chancellor today itself by email saying this is an urgent action required identify such people and keep them ready on Monday when we meet them because Monday and Tuesday are the two days when we have to announce the courses. By 17th evening if we do not get the details of your courses we will not be able to put all the digital contents describing your course and university properly on the site which has to be launched on 25th. Now that is our limitation. You get my point. Sir life is not simple. Life is not simple. But my humble suggestion is we have to sort of go ahead and make this happen. What will happen? Perhaps one of our institutions may not be able to come up with such solution. That is the reason why probably ministry has suggested 15 institutions. But I will tell you the minister is herself monitoring this activity and if a university is not there with the courses now there might be some private discussion that will happen with the ministry. So it is and in any case what do we lose? We might make a mistake. We might not be able to put the best course forward right now. Doesn't matter let that course run. This program is to run for decades in future. There will be an opportunity to offer other courses. There will be an opportunity in fact to do a better design for the course that we offer for the first time. No problem. Sir we have to experiment and we have to learn by mistake. But we have to ensure that we make sure that is the only thing possible. So don't worry about it. Even if there is another coordinator appointed day after tomorrow as you say I am sure you will go back and brief that coordinator on everything that you did here and that coordinator having become learned because of this interaction should be able to take decisions in 24 hours. That is the only way hopefully we can proceed. So a very long answer to a short observation. So yeah please. Sir I am just giving you a slightly different picture. We at the university is having a separate institute is known as Institute of Life Long Learning. We are already into this online courses business. Since last 5 to 6 years and we are offering all the major courses which we are teaching in the university in classroom as well as in online platform. But my worry is about the cut off date. We are offering to planning to offer my Vice Chancellor and Dean of colleges directed us to offer economics and commerce. I am economics faculty. So I just want to know in economics there are 20 paper which we are covering in 3 years. Only one paper. Now I understand. One paper in economics and one paper in commerce. Your choice. Your choice. The choice should be something which will maximally help and definitely that will be the essential paper. So now I come back to the confusion that is caused because of a significant difference in terminology used in the IIT system and the university. In IIT system when we say a course it is actually a paper. It is a very fundamental difference. It took me quite some time to recognize that a course in university is actually a program become BSc, BA etc etc. So what we call program you people call course and what we call course you people call a paper which is my mistake. So I am clarified that when we are talking about offering a MOOC course we are most certainly not talking about offering a program completely as of now we are talking about offering a paper which could be either semester long paper or a year long paper depending upon the nature of the paper. What we have is that the paper that you so select should be amongst the best thought courses in your place and should be as widely meaningful as is possible because the ambition is to reach out to large number of people. I represent Tata Institute of Social Sciences you know and in this we are already offering an introductory course which is called the Foundation Classes on Indian Polity Society of Economy which is offered online to everybody so that's the course that we are planning to offer it out as part of the MOOCs which will come up may be announced on 17th so that's an online program which we already have online and that's going to come up and by course we also mean that it's a paper that is offered in a semester we don't mean a course that is meant that you follow a terminology which is similar to IIT but that is not the standard terminology in the country which I myself realized only we follow the same terminology that we are using. I was seeking to optimize the time in fact can we introduce with courses on Japanese, Chinese, linguistics or the like that is one thing however if they believe that course will have maximum impact and usefulness then there is no we do not know frankly we do not know what these students will like also this is going to be the first time in the country I will tell you the next 6 months will tell all of us a lot more about how things will emerge today we are groping in the dark all of us are starting some of us are fortunate because we have experiences of giving these courses globally or as she says on giving these courses online some of us are fortunate in other way the open university people have been dealing with lakhs of students already but in a different way but for offering these moves in India on a national platform for students I think for all of us the first time in so there will be issues there will be problems and we may in retrospect realize that this was perhaps not the best choice but I would suggest that the best choice is best left to the university because they also have to decide on the basis of how well that course is being offered you see if you offer a course and if it is taught in a very mundane fashion by an extremely bright researcher but who is unable to relate to students and explain things properly then that course may fall flat in the eyes of the students so these are the considerations and these considerations are best judged by the individual universities and people so when you say about Chinese and Japanese you never know there might be a large number of students wanting to learn Chinese here on how you would teach Chinese online but it should be possible to figure that out we were saying that faculty who are appointed for Japanese they fly off to corporate houses for better humiliation and the strengths are left high and dry so that kind of scenario and lot of corporate demand is there for this Japanese and there is discussion in the later part of the workshop where we will discuss on the individual issues and problems but I think you would all agree that by and large these should be the parameters for decision making and most certainly the decision has to be made by the individual institution and the Swayam thing will actually go by whatever decision you make the name that has been chosen by the ministry for this platform is called Swayam we had some unfortunate problems in IIT Bombay when we were building it original plan was to build further on to the blended book site that we had prepared the IIT Bombay X we found that there were lot of core changes that were required and we suddenly found that we would be unable to do that very recently we therefore took a decision to take the latest version of the edx open source open edx platform and fashion it with almost no functional changes into the Swayam platform we have tried to change the look and feel but in the process we have to suppress several pages which actually were remade for our blended books you will agree that when you handle a large software you make a small change somewhere and unless you test the whole damn thing for one week you would not like to release it we had other challenges national mission had planned a cloud in Delhi to host the because lakhs of students will login online unfortunately that cloud is taking some time Delhi IIT has just put up some mini thing for experiment recognizing this in the last one month we have broken our backs and created a mini cloud in this very building you will briefly see it later that will house the Swayam site Professor Lagu pointed out that I should write down very clearly like the Americans do they first decide on an acronym and then figure out the expansion you can see that something very similar has happened but it appears to be an apt this is not just accepted by the ministry but this is likely to be accepted this is something that has been suggested but anyway that is a minor point on which we struggle the Swayam site the temporary site for our training purposes that we have put together is there you will find I am afraid a lot of loopholes in that site in fact as an added request apart from designing this course and apart from checking out whether the course runs properly or not I would request you to go through the entire site that you see look at the pages of the English mistake please help us correct it so you also form a large team of auditors for our first attempt of this site and we would depend on your feedback on correcting whatever it is the desire of the ministry was that when we launch an Indian site it should at least happen in English and Hindi eventually the idea is to have the site accessible in all Indian languages in fact there is no reason why such online initiative cannot be used to supplement the students education even in at the school level or vocational so immediately plans are being made I will tell you the speed I was talking about the speed yesterday I was called by the secretary department electronics to attend meeting where school books by NCRT are being translated into EPUB or HTML compatible books and there is a huge initiative so I suggested why not we start with MOOCs for high school students and immediately plans are being made so you would not be surprised that before our courses fully roll out actually another parallel activity for MOOCs or school education may also start but I digress so here is one request after the tea break when we assemble I will show you the swam site as we see now but please do keep your eyes ears and minds open and be very critical of every small mistake that you see in the site this is not the site which is going out there are other pages that are getting integrated for the final site this version has been released for the training program temporarily but any feedback that you give would be most valuable I have very basic questions who are the expected audience for these courses very similar to the students whom you currently teach in your postgraduate students you teach only postgraduate students which subjects I am from the accounting and finance department I am sure that there will be a large number of MCOM students across the country who might benefit so accordingly this is important feedback for us to design the course I know I mean if you primarily teach postgraduate students it will be silly for anyone to expect that you will offer an undergraduate course that is very correct because you should stick to your own area of expertise and domain that is the whole idea I did not know that would the courses have some prerequisites for enrolment you can say that yes you can of course define the prerequisites these would be in the MOOCs or in the blended MOOCs all courses will run only in the MCOM another thing for the recording part of it the infrastructure like it was pointed out at our home institution we would not be having the infrastructure currently so that has to be created for the course finally to roll out so that is the time that has to be built in the start date and the end date in IIT Bombay we are able to build something very quickly in 3 weeks to 4 weeks time but if you take 2 months for doing that you will get up those 2 months so the infrastructure would be at the home institution for the recording part I fought very hard with the ministry that if you want to roll out then you cannot roll out unless each institution is empowered with its own infrastructure and people so I was to tell you later but I will take 1 minute to inform that I have requested for a budget of 2 crore rupees for infrastructure at each institution which includes 50 lakhs for a small video studio and lab editing lab and 1.5 crores for the other infrastructure including a mini cloud at your own place subsequently you can offer online courses specifically to your own students using the same mini cloud that is one second I have suggested a team of about 20 staff members to be recruited, built and nurtured for a period of 3 years and I have requested for annual salary budget appropriate to maintain these people of course we have taken the budgetary figures from our own experiences appointing people on project but we believe that that will be about a crore rupees per year or something in fact the joint secretary himself said to all vice-chancellors that please feel free to start spending today so your institutions do not even have to wait for any money to come or any further thing to come you are empowered now it all depends upon how you could put things together we will discuss that after the tea break any quick observation I will also it is a good point I will introduce to you a pair Professor Kamishwari and Professor Bhaskar Raman who are preparing MOOCs courses you know where they are they are they are they are they are they are MOOCs courses you know where they are recording in their own offices they use a Camtasia studio you will soon see that it is not necessary for the face of the person to be seen in all recording you record with your handwritten notes or something like that and they are recording in their rooms many of the global courses very well-renowned courses have been so recorded by their faculty in their basement sorry so we should have this facility but we not wait entirely for this so the proposal that I have said which of course once it is approved I will be circulating formal copies where even listed recommended set of equipment for a minimum thing and so on with approximate cost as per our thank you so much