 Good morning ladies and gentlemen on behalf of NPTEL. I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the principles SPOC's mentors Professors item address faculty my colleagues friends and all the other representatives who have gathered here Last December I stood before you saying that we have over 150 local chapters The last six months these numbers have more than doubled Today, I can proudly stand before you and share that we have more than 500 local chapters This is indeed Thank you. This is indeed a very proud moment for all of us. I would like to share some statistics with you Till date we have completed nine exam runs and we have completed about 122 courses in These runs we have given out 12,000 and more as scholarships and The number of candidates who has been certified is 28,000 plus We we appreciate the wonderful efforts put in by the principles the SPOC's and mentors of each college and For joining hands with us and making an epithelial local chapter such a huge success. Thank you so much and None of this could have materialized without your help So I want to say a big thank you to all of you We hope to continue to work with you and ensure that online education reaches every student and every individual who has a thirst for knowledge Thank you so much Now I'd like to invite Professor Mangal Sundar to come and welcome our guests. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Kamala Good morning mean all I can do is to say thank you for every effort and The wonderful organizational and reach of the NPTEL team I Must tell you in 1999 we had no idea where we would be that's when this whole thing started and It is really nice to Recall that you there are 500 institutions which have expressed direct Participatory interest not merely Observational interest No, when we had distributed the course materials the earlier many many Institutions very interested, but now we have many organizations directly participating in it And that's a wonderful sign for good things to come in India first of all I want to thank my own colleague Professor Andrew Andrew Thangaraj the Department of Electrical Engineering Professor Pratap Haridas Department of Metallurgical Sciences and Engineering and the NPTEL principal Administrative team headed by this is Bharati Bala G Here Kamala who just spoke to you before and many others and the whole team of NPTEL for ensuring the continuity and The rocket speed with which thing should happen When some of us were involved in the earlier design of NPTEL So it is it is through them that we have been able to get all of you here and also share your experiences your Expectations and the value additions that you would like to bring in to this project Please see that this is the national program on technology enhanced learning. It doesn't have any institution by identity Okay, everybody in this country in this nation is welcome to be a partner That's it Maybe it is our coordinating maybe some other institution would like to coordinate this later But it's a national effort which means every one of us would contribute to it as Voluntarily and as sincerely as we can to ensure that the next generation of students as well as the current generation of students benefit from the whole process and many of us as individuals also stand to benefit because we get to learn from our colleagues in Parallel because very often you and your colleagues teach at the same time And therefore you have very little time to see what the other person is teaching Now NPTEL provides you the basis to go back and look at what your colleagues would have said and what you wanted to learn from them And this has happened to me. Yeah, this has happened to me many many times because When I need to look into a particular concept a few years from now Instead of typing Google, I think you should type NPTEL to find out that a particular concept is is there or not I think that's what we would like all of you to do. It's not that Google is I Mean it's not providing. I think we should raise our level to that bar That is the bar to which we want to reach that I think that's the idea and therefore it means everything and everybody's contribution is important in that process now I just put up a First page some of you might have read the couple of lines, but let me still put that up This is an article that I'm summarizing for another international agency. So hopefully It will get published in the next few months and I will make certain that it's available to everybody on the internet Let me just see if I can Sorry So I need to increase the font size, which is somewhere down here, I guess Yeah Yeah, this is something I have been taught as a school or a college student The woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and Miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. This is a beautiful poem by Robert Frost Entitled stopping by the woods on a snowy evening The last line is important. I think that's what we are all here for we have Tens of thousands of miles to go before we can sleep and Remember there are at this point of time two and a half crore students who are in the higher education and About two times. Sorry about four times that in the high school education In engineering, we have about four and a half million Which is about 16 to 18 percent of the total student population in the world in India total student population in India four and a half million engineering students and about 16 million students in arts and sciences this is what was the number given by the UGC University grants commission in 2013 and all predictions are that the Demographical advantage that we have in terms of the average age of India actually going down as you are Becoming older it is surprising that the average age of India is still going down the youth is going to be the strongest component of this country for the next 20 years or 30 years and that must be due to the spectacular failure of the Indian policy of of Population control in the 1970s and 80s, you know, we failed miserably in the population control policy and China was absolutely successful in the Population control policy and the result of that is 40 years later. The demographic advantages with us and not with China so please understand that we have a great country and a great many student population that we have to actually help and Do that without asking for anything in return and NPTEL has always been from day one and until today Has been a social service and if there are charges involved for running exams and other things They saw incidental charges to ensure that the government is not overtaxed in running a project the government is already handing over a substantial fund to Support NPTEL and NPTEL like activities in many others and therefore you see we have promises to keep and We can't sleep until those promises are fulfilled There's a lot of stories about this and I know I have got just about five more minutes to tell you a little bit about Where all of this started? I mean when whenever you have assembled here in Sufficient numbers. I would also like to point out that this started with a person from this institute Professor MS Anand who was then a professor of chemical engineering and was the dean of Students as well as partly dean of academic research. It was professor MS Anand in 1999 along with professor Colleagues professor Netrajan here and Professor Paul Goodman of Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh They sat together and Involved me at that point of time to discuss your workshop on NPTEL No, they didn't call it NPTEL. They wanted a technology enhanced to learning workshop Most of you would see technology enabled the learning as a common phrase anywhere in the world But technology enhanced to learning was a phrase was that was used by Professor Paul Goodman who was a cognitive psychologist and he was always interested in cognitive learning Not merely learning through better communication and better methods of communication I mean that he said would automatically happen in any society when the communication tools improve Learning will automatically adopt to that But cognition is something that depended on the teachers that depended on the the social requirements of the learners and therefore cognition was more an intellectual and mind and brain driven processes and technology should enhance The learning process by inventing means and methods. This was the original idea and therefore we Adopted the name national program on technology enhanced to learning to say that technology enabling will automatically happen as technologies come in as communication methods come in and so on so That was 1999 and in 2016 to come back and think about that we have a little more than 1100 courses and we are moving towards another hundred courses to be offered as certification It's a long journey, but please remember no long journey is long enough The journey has now started taking up the speed and therefore it's very very important that you have an active participation in the meeting today And you tell us what are all the difficulties that you face? What are all the solutions that you have in your local environment that would fit in with the global Requirement for NPTEL as a project and as a program. So please keep this in mind You are here to tell us and Contribute to us. It's not that you are here to come and learn That's part of the process all of us learn from each other Therefore, please give us all the inputs that you would like to and please go back and inform you are nearby College colleagues and others how this exercise is actually beneficial to the student and how this is not Imposed on any one of you. It is not a procedural Imposition for you to use NPTEL. We have avoided that from day one When a CTE and a maturity wanted NPTEL to be compulsorily present in all the colleges We were the first to object and oppose saying that no degree of compulsion in learning can ever lead to learning I think what is important is the learners and the teachers have to adopt something that they think is valuable They have to be convinced by themselves that it is valuable and if not they should contribute to this process Therefore, we have always Maintained that NPTEL is a voluntary is a social exercise in which members who feel that they can contribute They can learn Participate with their own willingness and therefore if you are convinced that it is a very good project And it's useful to you and to your college. Please spread the word. We don't have too much money to advertise We do not send the newspaper advertisement by it like some colleges do saying they are the best institutions in the world They are in the top 10 category a full-page advertisement every 10 days or every 15 days that kind of money is not available Government of India simply cannot afford that Therefore it is by word of mouth that NPTEL has and also through electronic communication that NPTEL has reached the stage where it is But now we are on the rising side of what is called the hockey stick Therefore, it's very very important that we go as steep and as quickly Reach as many students as possible today Professor Andrew and Professor Pradap Bharati would share with you all the details of what the immediate launch on the 18th July and afterwards will be and how you can contribute to this through this mentoring and also having many students participate in it if the students ask you questions about why it is useful to me and What would I do with it? Please ask them in return? Maybe one question when your mother taught you to speak. Why did you think that it was useful to you? Okay, you learned and then today you communicate with that what you learned Therefore today if you learn something you do not know when and how it will be useful But please keep your mind open to learning This is the one message that I would like to give all the professors and faculty members and other Industrialists who contribute to this project. They have done it with this idea that This is the best of what I know. Please learn. Please follow it up and discuss with me and The only way that message can be taken up is the students to take up and say yes, but I don't understand this Can you explain this further? Can you tell me this further? Can you tell me where this will lead to this dialogue has to happen? Of course our network the social network using the Google platform allows this dialogue to be Instant during individual courses and offerings, but please feel free to communicate and write to all of us I am no longer an NPTEL official coordinator. I was here till last year but as is always the case that I'm around and I More than willing to contribute to any processes that NPTEL is involved. I have other activities I have to also worry about my students that are for five students in my research group now I'm a little bit concerned with their PhD and their MSc and other things but the team that is now here is Better than the team that I ever assembled in all the 15 or 20 years that I've been associated with and therefore I think they will take it up forward I'm more than willing to be with them and learn from all of them and learn from all of you through all The day we will have many more discussions. I look forward to your interactions. Thank you very much. God bless all of us Thank You, sir Next I'd like to welcome professor Pratap Haridas to come and talk about local chapter and some of our previous runs Good morning Actually over the last year or two we have been visiting several colleges and conducting workshops and In fact, so therefore actually some at least some of you are familiar faces I mean, it's a big crowd, but still we get to meet people and talk for a while so I do see familiar faces and For once it's nice to have you visit us and us hosting you. We're very happy that you could join us this morning so we just have a presentation here on our online course certification and I would like to point out that you know even in this gathering There are I mean representatives from colleges who have just joined us in this process And there are representatives who have been here with us for a while So we are giving you updated information, but some of the information you're for sure you would have seen at least some number of you would have seen and Some of it will be new for everyone There'll be some information which of course if you're a new participant in this process Would be new all together And we also want to add a few points that maybe we have not really emphasized much in some of our previous Presentations, so we would like to do that and most of it is based on background from I mean feedback from several of you interaction with several of you and so on so we'll get started here so as Professor mongrelson that pointed out and what you already know. It's this is a project from MHRD and NPTEL has been there since in various forms since 1999 and certainly projects since 2003 and We have Yeah, a lot of different things have been done Mainly accessed all over the world. This is just a highlight of that We give video lectures mp3 transcripts subtitles all of these are ongoing efforts on our side All major disciplines are covered and now we are on to online certification So this is all something that you are familiar with Also, I would like to point out that the between you know We have more than 400 and nearly 450 million views of our content This is the original content which was there on the as part of the NPTEL program and So the utility of the content has been well established and is appreciated So we have tried to make it more useful for our student community because ultimately they need to You know utilize it and benefit from it so much of effort has gone into it And it is in that context that the online certification process was started started because before this The content and even now the primary content that we have there is on a reference mode It's like a library anybody can take and see any of our students can take and see even now But if they so that is out of self-interest that they would do which is fine Which is always a nice thing to do but this makes it more structured for them They they more number of them will see benefit in it because you know time is limited students are doing various things So it is only you know very human and very natural to think you know What is the immediate benefit from this maybe later when you become a professional? You see the benefit in actually looking at good material regardless of you know a certificate at the end of it But as a student you have a tendency to look at it that way. There's already university exams and so on so This is a nice You know incentive for a student to additionally, you know think of you know to clear those doubts and actually have a reason to focus on this Material so therefore we have this online course initiative And as you all know you're aware the enrollment is free. So that's the other very nice thing We have an exam again. This is our No distinguishing feature there are international efforts which differ in both these critical aspects Almost all the two major international effect efforts of similar nature are commercial And they don't so they definitely charge fee because they have to run a commercial set up We are funded by the government. So our motivation is very different And therefore, you know enrollment is free enrollment is free only the exam has a fee because exam requires You know infrastructure it requires an exam partner to set it up. They have costs. They are a commercial organization So we need to be able to work with them So that's the process and then we get certificates from IITs So this is again something that students are very happy to look at and that's that's one of the things that is a big draw Because I mean it's a fact that we have only limited seats in IIT So we have always been forced to look at ways to limit the number of people entering the campus And we are forced to restrict what courses they take which is true even in your college You have some admission process you admit people to electrical engineering or civil engineering or computer science And they have to take only those courses. They cannot take any other course except for some very limited number of electives So so even when you enter a college, you have restrictions and certainly even before you enter a college You have restrictions so many students don't get in and I mean, this is actually the admission season across India And I mean if you know children of the right age, you are bound to hear You know all the anxiety of parents all the anxiety of the kids that you know They got into some college the fees is so much and you know, they may or may not be happy with it So this now enables them to reach into IITs get a course from IIT taught by an IIT faculty interact with an IIT faculty Get a certificate from the IITs and then use it to in whatever manner they seem see fit So Again just to let you know these things I'll go a little faster So basically the course is exactly like online. I mean exactly like a course that is in campus Except that it all happens online There are lectures every week there and we in a more organized way We have a tutorial every week also and then a final examination except that everything is online So that's where it all happens There is a start date for the course and an end date for the course just the way you would have in your in your university So that way this is structured And there's a final exam which is also on a fixed date known up front the Interaction with faculty happens through the discussion forum, which we are continuously improving There are several faculty who very actively participate in it who spent a lot of time on the discussion forum Of course that varies from course to course It depends on how well the students and the faculty connect through the discussion forum But opportunity is there and it can be utilized and it is being utilized On campus of course the admission process is there clearly defined there are prerequisites And an important is students meet each other So these are some things that you should become aware of because these are the issues and concerns that students will have So in in the campus when you teach a class 30 students or 40 students or 50 students who take that class are sitting right there in front of you And they know each other's names. They know each other's faces. They probably go to the same hostel They have when they're free they can chat with each other and so on that is not true When you do this kind of an online course because again, you may have some 50 students You may have even have more students You may even have 1,500 students taking that course or even 5,000 students taking the course But they will be distributed all across the country So you may have only three students from Chennai taking it maybe 20 students from Coimbatore taking it and they may be those 20 Students may be spread across 10 colleges. So most of them will not know who the other person is They will not know each other by face. They will never it's not like you know at lunch They're going to meet and chat and all so they are very separated out so the There's a need to try and work with them such that they also feel a sense of community in that learning process So the discussion forum is very important in that sense for both the students to participate in and for us also to participate in and In the college, there's clear, you know Goals that are present that students recognize they're going to get a degree They're going to get a transcript and so on and so they know what is going to happen in at the end of four years If they go through the process correctly in our case The recognition mechanisms are evolving. We already have a few that are showing up, but we have opportunity to have more So what we have done it started in 2014 So we're just little over two years into this activity with just one course we started in 2014 We have a website or a portal where the you know institutes Which are running the courses are listed and there are a lot of courses listed down there So a student can go and join any of those courses And since enrollment is free they can actually feel free to experiment and there are no real prerequisites. There is no Filtration process So it's not like only so many students can get in and there is definitely no limitation like, you know, you joined a civil engineering program You have a seat in a civil engineering program Therefore, I will not allow you to take a basic electronics course or a computer science course There's no restriction. Anybody can take anything and you don't even have to be a student You can be, you know, a person who's working from home working professional Maybe somebody who had to leave college for a while and would like to go back to something so all these things are possible and This is just a summary of some of the things I mentioned these are the major aspects of our online course There's a discussion forum a certification exam. This is again very I mean designed We have done a lot of things to design this whole process for the Indian student community so for us in India the exam is a very important integral part of Establishing that the student indeed participated in the process and the evaluation or the score or the certificate that they are producing Is you know has credibility. That's a very important part of the Indian process If you just I have heard people who have told me that, you know, they have taken some multinational, you know, course Online where the entire process is only online It's totally on faith and they have produced that certificate in an interview and that person said I can also print a certificate like this So there's a big difference there. So here we are actually doing it in person with all the, you know, rigor of You know in-phase Examination and the certificate is e-verifiable with the photograph of the person the exact scores they have got and so on So that's all things that we have put together So that's a course. So there's always once you get into a course once you click on a course and go in There'll always be an introductory video sitting there So student or anyone even as a faculty if you would like to advise a student some of your students saying, you know Why not you try this course? You can look at the introductory video get some idea of what is that course You'll also get an idea of how that faculty is, you know communicating. Are you comfortable? Things like that something about the course. What what is going to be covered there? What is the intended audience? As listed here, of course and the prerequisites. These two are there only as guidelines so that You will have a sense of, you know, who is the who are the people who are more likely to benefit from the course Comfortably others may also be able to benefit. They may have to put in a little extra effort. That's basically it But so this is not enforced. It is simply a guideline And then once you get in you have all the lectures listed here for each lecture There's a small write-up below which tells you sort of what's going to happen in that lecture and some additional links if there are any that are relevant and Then again assessment is an important thing as I meant spoke about the final examination Which is you know invigilated proctored in a center and so on assignments on the other hand We allow these students to experience an online learning process So assignments are on faith done by the student at their respective, you know Homes or wherever they are located and really we are not really enforcing anything if they speak to of course We would like them to submit their own assignment But if they will they would like to speak to their friends learn something in the process It's fine. I think ultimately if they learn that is good. So that's that's all it is We are not really getting too technical about it And this is how a discussion forum would look people can post questions and get answers done Sometimes the questions are you know elementary questions. I mean in the sense. They are just procedural questions They may want to know when is the exam going to happen? What is the format of the exam? These are questions that your students may post sometimes it'll be technical questions that you know some particular aspect Explain in a particular lecture in the course was not clear to them or it is something that is contradicting something They've read in a book something like that. They may ask some fairly involved technical question So Again, we do have again we have evolved a lot of features that are unique in our opinion So we have hands-on programming in on our portal So people can program on C C plus plus a lot of other options are also there which can be introduced based on the Faculty who's teaching the course we have some we can have both objective as well as subjective assignments So we do have a process where we have teaching assistants here who are MS PhD students here who work with our faculty and So they will assist the faculty in grading subjective assignments because Particularly because the numbers can be large. You can have a course which is a very I mean popular course Let's say something that many people feel is necessary for their learning process and we may have 1500 2000 more or even more students in that course and The exact fraction that is going to stay active or not in it is will only when you go into the course You will know so potentially this can be a large operation when we start the course We don't know we have no idea whether it's going to be hundred students or 10,000 students taking that course Except if it's a very specialized topic then you know in general yes The audience is going to be limited but some of the basic courses you can have a sudden spike in numbers and This is a typical may most of you know these kinds of exam centers Maybe in your colleges you already have that our exam partner right now is TCS So many of you in fact already know this exam partner They typically work with many colleges and have centers there for various examinations We use them for our examination. We have been working in fact for them. Also I mean I would like to share with you that for them. Also, this is a very Different learning process for them because they are typically they have certain types of examinations that they are already set up to run And in fact many of the banking exams and many other You know employment related exams are all run within that framework of that setup that they already have most of the time for our courses we Enable our faculty encourage our faculty to experiment to try out all new new things in the evaluation process So that the student also really benefits It they shouldn't get stuck to you know on standard way of you know taking a bcd a bcd and being done We would like them to actually participate learn something do a work example and so on So we are trying trying out new new examination types of questions So we had one exam on spoken English one course on spoken English and the faculty actually had students record Their answer paper was recordings that they had to make in the exam center So they came there was a room separately for the recording process while the other exams were going on with online and offline question papers The students who came for this exam had to sit in a room They were called in one by one and they had to make recordings for maybe about 10 minutes They were several no questions and comments that were there They had to respond to those comments and speak for a few minutes and get it recorded and those recordings were then given to The faculty as the answer paper which the person then the faculty evaluated it and gave a great So these are all new things new processes from our perspective that we are trying to do and our exam partner is working with us Trying to assist us in the process, but this is not without hiccups naturally when we try something new There's a great potential that there can be an error TCS also recognizes that they are when they work with us And in fact I mean although we would like to run it flawlessly and we make every effort to run it flawlessly From time to time some error creeps in but we always student you know interest is paramount for us So if there is an issue that crops up we try and try our best to resolve it in a manner that is you know good for the all these students That they're happy with so it's a very interactive process. It's a learning process So that's something that I wanted to share with you. You'll always see us We will not fit into a pattern. We would definitely be that is not our intention We will not stick to any one pattern. We will keep evolving with push boundaries and in that process We will also learn so that learning means we may make errors here and there although that is not the intention We have evolved our Scoring pattern is something that we have been evolving again You know intention was to first of all encourage people to participate So we are not trying to discourage people from participating and also to we are not running an entrance exam here So we are not so concerned about you know trying to eliminate, you know 20,000 students That's not the purpose of any of our courses Instead most of the time we would like to focus on what is it that the student has learned if they have learned something We would like to certify that they have learned that's all so that if they go to an interview and they show an NPTEL certificate and the interview You know panel ask them some questions There's a good chance that the student actually is competent enough to answer those questions Then our being I mean having done well in our course would be indicative that the student is actually capable of answering some questions So that's the purpose that our course tries to accomplish. So we have now this process We have about roughly 25% of the marks Given from the online assignments. So all the assignments that they do From that we'll get whatever the total that comes to that will be converted to 25% and that will count to 25% of the score And the final exam would also contain about 75% of the score. So we do emphasize on the final exam, but the Whatever work they have done in the assignment will count it will make a significant difference If they do very badly here, it will make a difference to their then chances are they may not do well in the exam Also, so therefore at least they should do well here and ideally if they have done well here That should convey that they have learned something and then possibly they will do well here and we do have grades of certificates We are moving to a process where For participation, we are no longer going to provide any certificates. We will not be providing certificates because first of all The numbers are climbing up drastically We have you know huge numbers of students participating in our courses and we really want them to cross some minimum threshold Before they get a certificate. It shouldn't be that you know, they just they just click a button and get a certificate So that's not our purpose here At the same time, we are not running an entrance exam. So we are somewhere in the middle So we do want them to make some level of performance before they earn a certificate So they have to earn it. Otherwise, we are not giving it to them if they cross 40% So that means they have got 25 and then at least 15% if they got this full 25 at least 15% from here Then they get a successful completion certificate So that's like that's more like what people would associate with you know Participating in a course at least this far you have to get then if it is more than 60% They get an elite certificate if it's more than 90% they get an elite certificate with the gold medal put on it So we are Through all our processes that you will see in in other ways also when we communicate with you And we put in new processes in place for various ways in which we interact with say SPOC's and so on You will find that our emphasis will be on students performing well Our emphasis is not so much on numbers. We don't really care how many students take a course We would like more students to try it. So we do we are not trying to discourage them We would like to encourage them to take those courses, but that's only one aspect of the show So if if there are places where you know thousand students enrolled that's only one aspect of the show And we would be more interested if you know 20 of them get an elite certificate Elite I mean sorry gold medal if 20 of them get a gold medal that that is much more important for us Than simply saying that you know we have had 500 students participating thousand students participating and so on So we want the whole process as a community No, this is not just an activity that we are doing on our own It's an activity that we're doing along with you and along with the student community We want that value system to be there so that when students take a course and they participate in the whole process They appreciate that you know the intention is that they should learn The results should show that they have learned and the whole any reward process that we have any You know reward process for the student and the whole community as a whole that comes Is reflective of this quality performance? So you will always see that in any other communication that we send to you also please always keep that in mind We value the fact that students participate, but that is only the first step that alone will not is not we are not going To be satisfied with just that so overall our systems will keep reflecting that Certificates will reflect that any other process we put also will reflect that so if we contact you on anything else You will see this in the background of our communication And we have courses of different duration now Increasingly there are universities which are looking at which are not just looking at which have Enabled and are actively carrying out credit transfer processes So we do have courses of different duration and those are roughly equivalent of a one credit course to credit course or three To four credit course equivalent so that that's the duration of the course and that reflects in the credit requirement so why do we have one credit course well the point is that some of the Courses that are done in NPTEL are highly advanced courses And some other courses are basic courses so typically basic course can run 40 hours You can run something for I mean there will be content there will be content because you're really exposing the student to a wide range of different things specialized courses are often not like that you have you know a very Concentrated content of a limited nature and therefore 10 hour fits that Reasonably correctly. I mean it doesn't you're not overdoing the content. You're not overdoing the duration. It's just right so that's how we have this and People can pick it up for different levels of credits And in fact when we do this I mean I'll talk about other universities also which are doing it The point is the credit is not really given by us the student takes the course They successfully completed we give you the raw data. We give you know what course how many hours? What does the score the student got the raw data has given to you it is for you to Incorporated in your system as found appropriate by your processes So you may have some process so you are right you're free to you know Put this into your process in the manner that you think is appropriate So what you consider as I mean so Student gets 75 marks. Let's say 75% they get it is your university's Decision on what they want to how they want to treat that they can treat it simply a 75% If that's the way the marking scheme is if they want to convert that to grades It's up to you to decide what grade you want to give we will give you the data not just of that student But for the entire course for all the students who took that course what is the average? What is the distribution all that information would be available to you you can calculate as you see fit So that full flexibility is there. We are always open on that that process So just to give you an idea we have now completed nine different course runs So that means courses started we went through the course and we finished off with a final exam Nine different course runs we've completed and we've completed hundred and twenty two courses so far And that's you can see more or less steadily. We have been increasing the number of courses in terms of how many courses are coming in and Increasingly more and more. This is also got to do with our own faculty also getting more comfortable with the process the online course process is Has specific aspects which are different from the kind of course that we run in our campus and therefore our faculty also needs some time to accommodate I mean adjust to this new processes and It is a it's always a learning You know Curve that is there So it takes time for people to adjust so invariably in fact their second run of the course will be vastly better than their first run And you can see here various departments. We have you know not restricted ourselves to any particular discipline This is another way in which we differ greatly from other you know international efforts of this nature There they are sort of because they are commercial They are sort of forced to limit themselves to you know courses that are hugely popular So they limit themselves to those courses because that's where they get the maximum number of students So any payment process that is there the profit margins are higher etc. We are not limited like that We are clear that we want I mean complete the entire undergraduate curriculum make it available We want to cover it. We want to cover specialized courses. So we are not worried if there's a course There are some courses where there are only 100 students taking it or 50 students taking it and there are other courses Where you know there are 10,000 students taking it's all fine for us as long as there is academic value in the activity The NPTEL process will support it. That's basically all it is You can see also slowly more and more institutes are getting are participating in it And there are going to be increasingly there are going to be more processes available so that you know faculty from other institutes Can also participate there may be additional portals put up for it and different processes available And in general this will be you know it will grow in a in a way that you know all of us can participate in various levels So that's a process that is that is steadily coming up and we will keep you posted when we have it Operation so this is all just selected titles. I won't go into it simply to show you that we cover various disciplines These are online certification. What impact we have done you can see that course enrollments is almost six and a half lakh And we have you know 32,000 exam registrations till May 2016 Attendances 85% in our exams in general this what you see here this blue is the enrollment the red is the People who actually register for an exam. So the enrollment is means the students simply Connects with the course and says that I'm just going to see those see the content They may or may not see the content but they have joined the course by hitting the join button the registration means they registered for the final exam which typically means they did assignments and then went through the Whole course process and did the final exam Generally only about 10% or so will participate in the final exam for various reasons and this is in keeping with international standards on this activity and We are fine with it. We don't see that as anything negative We would like more people to try different things that they have not tried before and then whatever they feel comfortable doing Whatever they like they proceed and complete. So that is the process. So it is it is all about including people not about excluding people And we have got data on what what kind of people have been involved Some of them are this is again, they are Their certification from their side voluntary information that they give us about 16% are employed 80% are students and 7% are others. We also have faculty and enrolling for some of our courses And so that's an aspect we want to show you. We do have an online portal for the which big which is Sort of highlights the efforts put in by our students because as I mentioned, it's a it's something that we want to encourage We want the community to feel happy with what they're doing So the toppers of courses are listed here. The names of the colleges are listed here and the statistics are listed here And if you go into the details, you can actually see what is the scores that the student got for the assignments what they got for the exam and across assignments, what were the scores obtained by the students and And the distribution of scores for the course from all students So a lot of detail is available once you go into a particular students You know mark mark sheet so for your college this is very useful if you are you're trying to do some evaluation based on it and The students have the since it's there is always an element of privacy in this The students have the right to decide where and how the information can be shared so they can select whether they want the details to be shared potential employers or Have it shared with colleges so it is their choice and we respect that choice and Credit transfer so credit transfer as I said, you know We do the course we give the content and we give the exam and we give this course after that The how the university takes it up or the college takes it up is their call how they want to do it You can see that from July 2015 for almost a year now a Centurion University in Orissa Kalasalingam University in Tamil Nadu and Madanapalli Institute of Technology in Andhra Pradesh they all been doing credit transfer actively with us and I mean to tell you that you know, this is not something that is isolated with the outside of IITs inside IIT Metras. We already have departments where the Students can take the same NPTEL online courses that you say your college students are taking and get credit in our system So it is not something that you know It's only an offer for others and that we don't think it is up to our standards or anything Our faculty are teaching our evaluation scheme is on our students take it they get credit for it So we already have some departments that have approved it many more departments are up in the process right now of approving right now actually we had meetings just a few days ago on it more are approving it and Again like in your university, there will be some limits on it How many credits they can do what kind of credits they can do and which category they can do some Framework will be there that framework can change but this is a process that we are actively doing our students do it My department students do it And this whole activity is expected to grow with support from MHRD. You may hear more about it in the upcoming months There is an intention to make there's an intention and an effort to make this a much more National Initiative from the government side. I mean we are already funded by the government only it's not like we're doing it I mean without their assistance, but there is a more coordinated Activity that's likely to come out in the next few months, which may include other disciplines include medicine include legal aspects and so on And at that point it may be much more visible right now We are doing personal contact with you with your students and so on but of course when once it becomes a government initiative In a specific manner you may see much more of it The lot of the efforts that we have all done as a community in this process Is the you know a core of the learning that has gone in towards making this initiative in the grander scale So many of the things that we have discussed with you many of the things that we are working with you You are working with us all those things are features that you will see when this becomes a national initiative We I mean we really share something very special here in terms of what we have you know accomplished as a unit together Because you will see you know a very unique national initiative which you may not see anywhere else even internationally Where many of the features that we have come up due to our own experience with it as a you know as a community are the features that are You know defining that whole activity Several principles have made it mandatory for faculty to do one online course per semester and linked increments to certificates This is just something we just wanted to share and Students can use it for various things for internship with companies and institutes We have course instructors some course instructors again. This is not compulsory But instructors are doing it because they really see this is a very nice opportunity Because it's not just it's not this is something that you should I would really like to share with you This is not just an opportunity for your students It's an opportunity for our faculty and and your and students and the general public in the spread across the country See because just like you may know I mean we say you know students try to get in and only a small number of Students get in so our faculty can actually access only those students under the normal setting Using this online course initiative We reach and we are able to communicate with students interested in our topics students working hard very intelligent students all over the country So you can I mean I can reach two students in Assam three students in Calcutta whom otherwise I would never be able to access I would never have an opportunity ever to meet them or talk to them or you know Exchange any information with them for us now through this process I can talk to people in Assam three people in Calcutta four people in Bombay and do this on a very Structured way throughout the semester and so when they do well I it's a you know It gives me great pressure. It gives them great pressure if they've done well We would be happy to invite them here for internships in summer We already have some summer internships in IIT through various other settings This is another way in which some faculty are looking at it And this also helps them prepare for gate examination because we are not diluting standards We are trying to maintain good standards in our courses So presumably somebody who does well in our courses will be able to do well in gate So this is just a list I won't go into great detail This is just there for your information that there are you know 10 hour 30 hour 20 hour courses with various numbers And there is a guest login. You may already have it if not you can always look this up and take it It simply is you have to go to the online course portal online courses dot NPTEL dot AC dot M And there's an ID reviewer one and the password is one reviewer. That's it reviewer one at NPTEL dot IITM dot AC dot N is the login and password is one reviewer if you do this this reviewer one this you know Hypothetical student called reviewer one is actually enrolled in all our courses. So If you go in like this, you can see all our completed courses also You can see what all has been completed student can see it You can see it you can you can be in a better position to advise your students saying This is maybe interesting course for you and so on and it'll also give you an ability to tell us You know what courses may be more interesting to you These are some frequently asked questions. So I I think I'll just I won't spend too much time on it Yeah, I think Barthi will look at it and so local chapter. We do have as Kamala was pointing out to you We have now got more than 518 local chapters and so there is a separate No website for it and a lot of information is put up there. We have state-wise list of local chapters We have the list of colleges with NPTEL local chapter and also what is required to start a local chapter Which is very straightforward. Most of you already know it. That's how we have this gathering here today and For every local chapter page where it displays the college and SPOC details Statistics of courses taken by the college are listed and college stoppers are listed. So it's a very again Like I said, you know, we it's it's all about being in a community and working with each other so all of that happens here and What are the benefits the main primary benefits are this we right now work with the exam partner in setting up the exam centers They have some formula based on which they set up the exam centers based on how many students have asked in which place They have asked and all that so that is why we have to do the registration a little bit ahead of time Only then they have the time to do this analysis and then distribute the centers But regardless of their way manner of distribution if you do have more than 50 students registering for an examination You can request for an exam center in your city and we will do our best to get you a center there So because we are we can work with the exam partner We'll do our best to get you a center so that your students don't have to travel very far and and You can make payments for the exam in bulk as a single DD We are actually evolving this exam payment process more and more to make it easier and easier for students to make the To participate in the process, but we do recognize that, you know Sitting in a city we assume certain things we assume net banking is there We assume that you know people have access to it and all those things which is not true in many smaller towns People may not have I mean students may not even have an account Maybe their dad only is paying or mom is paying or something may be there and and those people also may not be very familiar Or comfortable with net banking so therefore It is very natural that students would like to pay in some other form And so we have all those things available and very importantly this enables you to work with us to give scholarships to the students We simply require but this is a little bit based on corporate funding that we get we are I mean there are you know CSR funding opportunities Corporate social responsibility funding opportunities So some companies from time to time will use their funds to fund NPTEL activity and in that case They give us a fair bit of freedom on how to use those funds. We typically we one major Activity where we put those funds is providing scholarships to students so 50% exam fee waiver will be there So if it's thousand rupees or thousand 200 rupees that they have to pay they only have to pay 500 rupees and If you are a local chapter you can ask for this in a very coordinated way We only require the principle of this college to send us a letter saying the following students are economically Backward and they require the scholarship. We don't we're not asking any certificate. Nothing whatever you say your principal says We go with it so that's how it is and then Faculty can be mentors who can follow progress of students in the course this enables your students to stay focused on the course and completed Because students being students, you know when they start with some enthusiasm then there's so many things going on in their life That they get distracted they may start getting into other things So from time to time it helps if you know if some faculty sees them and says, you know Have you done this week's work? Have you done and then they get back to their no little bit of activity that they will do So I think we sort of hold with this We have 518 colleges with local chapters fee waivers that we have already given to 13,000 plus students So that's very significant We have conducted exams in 50 plus cities specifically on request from local chapters So this is not an isolated thing. We have you know really done this We have only done you know limited number of course runs in that itself We have done this 50 plus times and more than thousand mentors have participated so far Of course, we're trying to get the define the role of the mentor little better so that you know It's done in a very proper way. So I think that's it. We'll hold here if you have any questions take it otherwise Thank you, sir. Next. I would like to invite professor and share a few words Actually Kamala said a few words. I'm going to say a lot of words some of them are just going to be controversial Some of them will be I hope motivational some of them may be inspirational Let's see. Hopefully you won't throw anything at me Okay, first fall very hearty welcome to IIT Madras and to the building which houses NPTEL I don't know if you know NPTEL IIT Madras offices in the third floor of this building. How many of you have been to the office? Yeah, so if you've not, please do Go up. There's a nice new lift that we have Flashy lift you can take that and go up to the third floor. I See a couple of people from TCS. They've come here quite often You know exactly how that is so we're welcome to come and see how we operate see our studios our staff our staff Mostly mostly they're here. We'll introduce them to you formally as well. Thanks a lot for coming I know some of you have traveled some distance So I'm going to focus mostly on how to I mean to give you ideas on how to use NPTEL online certification and use what we offer to the maximum extent possible so that it benefits you it benefits your students Okay, so I'm going to focus mostly on that in the talk Think some of you are probably Very seasoned SPOC's and a local chapters you've been with us for a long time I see people whom I can recognize there. They know exactly what to do. They are Very good at it, but maybe some of you are new. I think some of the very new local chapters are also here Maybe all this is going Very fast for you. You're not able to understand. So I'll maybe walk you through some of the important steps and Give you ideas on how to benefit from this the most. Okay, so there are a lot of NPTEL online certification is growing at a fast pace Sometimes I'm scared at the rate at which it's growing. Okay, too many students to a lot of local chapter colleges It's it's a bit scary. I think our processes are not so well I end out that we can scale at this extent and what is even more scary is In maybe a month or so from now, you will hear a big announcement from the ministry Okay, so this announcement is going to be about something called svayam, which is More or less I would to put it very bluntly They've they've taken what we are doing and they are trying to make a big announcement out of it Okay, so you'll see exactly the same thing they would do, you know, many of the many of the ideas They have the MOOCs portal that they're trying to build They want to have faculty teach MOOCs. They want to have certification associated with it They want to have credit transfer associated with it So of course when the ministry says credit transfer, I guess most universities would follow suit and the UGC itself is Going is coming out with a set of regulations for credit transfer. So how to do it and encouraging everybody I believe the AICTE is also going to come out with it. Of course, ultimately the universities have to do it So this whole thing of doing online courses for credit is going to become a big reality going forward And I believe NPTEL is going to be driving the effort from the front in svayam as well So NPTEL will be one of the main contributors to svayam Whenever it's announced, it should be announced soon. So so While we are here talking about it in a small scale, this is going to happen in a big scale as well Hopefully the pointers I give you will help you in in benefiting from svayam as well Okay, so let's get started before I even start I was hoping I can go through the portal once I don't know many of you probably have seen the portal So what I'm going to do is just walk you through the portal to begin with It's always good to see the portal once the portal of course is online courses Dot NPTEL dot AC dot N Okay, so most of you have seen this So what you see in the top part is basic information about the course run Okay, so whenever we say a course run, it's like a semester in your college This one, yeah, it's like a semester in your college Right now when you begin a semester you come up to the timetable for the semester and what happens when so this part is the timetable for the semester this video is just a simple video telling what happens What is most crucial is what comes below? Okay, the currently open courses and This well it just lists three courses here Okay, so someone who looks at it first might think okay, there are only three courses open But what is most crucial in this picture that little red triangle on the right which you click on will give you the other courses But also I'll suggest one more way of going through it instead of just going through all the open courses I will really suggest going through course categories Okay, so if you click on course categories You will get the names of all the different branches and disciplines and you can browse the open courses Discipline wise okay, you might be a computer science engineer You might be a civil engineer mechanical engineer chemical engineer, whatever area you're interested in you can go and pick that area and Then browse okay, so let me pick computer science and engineering So you click on that you will get all the courses in computer science engineering Okay, the courses that come initially are those that are open currently. Okay, so again for every course We have basic information here. This is introduction to modern application development The instructor's name is here dr. Gaurav Rainer who's from IIT Madras and then there is the course duration When does the course start this course happens to start on September 5th and ends on September 30th It's just a four week course and then the last date for enrollment. Okay, basic information about the course This will be there in One course after another and to the right is the join button Anyone who wants to enroll has to just go click that join button and you will enroll okay So you can see the other courses here. Maybe you can Look at this one design and analysis of algorithms The instructor is professor Madhavan Mukund from Chennai Mathematical Institute who happens to be here So maybe it's a chance for me to introduce him Mother so he's here. So in case you want to bug him later on he's around So course duration is July 18th to September 9th. It's an eight week course. The last date is 18th, July So like this you'll see different courses. Okay. Now suppose let's say Design and analysis of algorithms is a course. I know what it is. Okay, many of you might know it But you want to know some more details. Okay, so maybe I'll pick some other course Let's say introduction. Okay with this course itself since Madhavan is here will pick it So you want to know a little bit more before clicking this join button and committing yourself to doing the course Maybe you want to learn a little bit more. So what do you do? You can go and click on that course It will give you some more basic information Okay on what the course is Okay about the course then the intended audience Pre-requisites and some more details Okay, both the instructor etc. And there'll also be a little video Which is about a four or five minute video made by the instructor Instructor to describe what the course is what who it is for Okay, so I'll definitely suggest that you read this information and look at the video and then you can think about joining In fact, the join button is also here at the end of this course There's lots of information the course layout what happens in one week? What happens in the second week third week, etc. You can see all that and then finally also There's a join button. Okay, so you can join from here as well So this is something that you can do. Okay All right, so this is how the courses are laid out on the portal. You can go and join Okay, so so maybe I should just click the join button to show you what happens there once Okay, so first thing it'll ask you is it'll ask you for a Google account. Okay, so Most people typically use their Gmail account at this point Okay, but you can also use any other email account which is associated with a Google account. Okay, so you can have a something called a Google account with any email. Okay, so it's possible If you go to Google.com, you can have a Google account there. It's possible So for instance my email is Andrew at E.i.tm.ac.n. It has a Google account associated with it and I can log in Of course, I won't show you my password So once you do that it's going to ask you for some basic things So this is something that Google authentication will always ask So NPTEL online courses is asking for something you say allow once you say allow You are logged in to the portal. Okay, so this is basic login to the portal This login is a Google login that we allow on our portal. Okay, so now for registration some personal details are being asked So you put in your personal details Sometimes it will get filled based on Before is to ask you for educational details Etc. So now, you know, I mean couple of things I should point out here The profession is very important. Okay, so it's an important field So particularly many of you might do the registration yourself. You might also have to help your students to register Okay, so here there are a couple of things to watch out very important So most students are probably going to say student here Okay, once they say student notice what happens. Okay, this is a new feature We have introduced in our portal for people who are even local chapters from a long time back. Please pay attention to this Once the person says the student in the educational details one question will come up here Are you part of an NPTEL local chapter? Okay, this is an important question and your students should say Yes So once you say yes notice what happens here Okay, nothing happens. But anyway, so you say yes, then you can pick the state. Okay, so let's say What state shall I pick? I think most many of you are probably from Tamil Nadu So let's say some state which is out of this out of Tamil Nadu Andhra Pradesh, so it's very close UP. Yeah. Hey, there you go. UP. I like that. So let's go UP Uttar Pradesh so you pick Uttar Pradesh and Your college name should come here. Okay Let's see. What's the name of the college? Dronacharya. Oh, so you're a famous local chapter Okay, so there you go Dronacharya group of institutions greater Noida Uttar Pradesh. Is that correct? So they should pick that. Okay, so now this is very crucial for your students to do Okay, so if they go in register, they have to say they are from a local chapter And they have to pick the correct state and college because once they do that We can give you a list of students from your college who are enrolled in our courses This enables us to do it and this is a very crucial thing. Okay So otherwise, it's very very hard for you to chase your students and get the list of names Okay, so this is something we have introduced this semester in the portal Please make sure when your students register when your faculty register, they definitely definitely do this Okay, so this is very important and one more detail We are asking for which is actually not mandatory on the site But please ask your students to enter this is the college roll number So this also helps you track every single detail that you want about the student Okay, so the new feature we have introduced please ask your students and faculty who enrolled for these courses to put in this Okay, so of course if you're a faculty, you're not going to probably write a college roll number You might have some other number for writing it, but we leave that blank. Okay, so that's it This is a crucial new addition for local chapters. It's it's a very enabling feature It helps you to get the list of students from your college who are enrolled in a course Okay, so this is very important. Please follow this step Hopefully it's clear All right, so that's the registration Of course, I mean after this you have to agree to the NPTEL terms of service Which is actually very generic, but you also need to agree to follow the honor code I think please read the honor code. It's very important And you should encourage your students also to read the honor code and try and follow it as much as possible And you click enroll you're enrolled in the course Okay, so once you are enrolled What happens is you have access to the course content Okay. Now the course itself starts only on July 18th. So July 18th Madhavan is here. Madhavan courses content is going to go up on July 18th. Yes. He says yes Okay, so July 18th You will see the first week's course content or maybe even a little bit before that he'll put it up Okay, so usually the first week's content will probably be available Maybe a week before that. Okay, so it's useful so that you get into the course slowly Okay, so you'll see quite often students would struggle with the first week's content a little bit So it's good to get access to that early. Okay, hopefully this is helpful for you So students when they enroll through a local chapter They can provide that information on the portal and we can make this information available to you Through the SPOC page or something like that. Okay, so that's one thing I wanted to say I think that's all I wanted to say about the portal itself I'm gonna move back to my presentation and start going over the slides there okay, so Like I said, I'm gonna focus more on What what and as an SPOC as a local chapter what you should be thinking about what you should focus on what will help you Derive the maximum benefit out of NPTEL online courses Of course, this is once again my view. I'm very interested in hearing from you as well Okay, so what is it that you have done which you think is very beneficial? Now when you stand up and say that all the other local chapters here also benefit Okay, so they also hear it. Maybe they can adopt it in their colleges. Okay, so this is very useful We should think of this as a more of a knowledge sharing or practice sharing sort of event as opposed to just me telling you What I think is the best way of benefiting because at the end of the day, you're running your college I'm I have very little information about how your college runs, right? So you have to think about what works best for you So but nevertheless some of the ideas some of the emphasis that we have from NPTEL side I would like to share. Okay, so let me start So before I start a few numbers and some important things that happened in the past run or so I think just to give you some some feel I think some of you are very new might wonder how these things go So in the last run of our exam, so this March 16 and April 16 is the exam We held in March and April in the January semester We held two exams one is in March one is in April and this is the number of registrations We had more than 8,000 registrations from local chapters Okay, so it's a huge shift from before, you know So NPTEL online courses are being used by local chapters in a big way before January this never happened Okay, most of our registrations were from open registrations. Everybody was registering now in the January semester We had a huge change in the number of registrations Large number of people were registering through their colleges through local chapters Okay, so I think local chapters play a huge crucial role colleges play a crucial role in Making sure that the online courses reach the students There's no doubt in my mind about it But this again emphasizes that there's a late thousand is a fairly big number Tamil Nadu has been traditionally the largest one because I think I think Madras has been initially driving this effort And like I said once there is a national level launched by the ministry I do expect all these numbers to go through the roof Okay, so I think two people from TCS here I'm sure very nervous about exams etc But we are also a little bit nervous about the numbers going up because our staff are here We are used to these kind of numbers suddenly if one more digit increases here. I'm really scared, you know How are we going to scale? Everything, you know, so it's it's very hard for us also, but nevertheless. This is a good trend I think I don't want to stop people from doing it. This is a good trend and I hope this will continue as well So this is what I think I would really really emphasize. I'm very proud of this slide I really like toppers coming out of colleges and this is the number of toppers who have come out of colleges in local chapters in the January to March 2016 and January to April 2016 National Engineering College from Coal Petty. I think they are here represented here They had 40 toppers in the courses now a topper in an NPTEL course is not easy. Okay, let me tell you very clearly 90 or above you have to get to be a clear topper and if nobody scores 90 or above in a course Believe me that happens quite often. Nobody will score 90 or above in this course We declare the top 10% of the performers as toppers. Okay, so being a topper in an NPTEL course is something You and your college have to be really really proud of okay So it's not easy to produce toppers in NPTEL courses and this is the list of colleges which have produced toppers I think Dronacharya was also here. They produced 39 toppers. It's really impressive and the number you see keeps going down Pretty quickly. I want to point out PVP Siddhartha also. They have six toppers They are not a very huge institution But out of the six toppers is one of their computer science professors who's a topper in programming data structures and algorithms Okay, so that's a very hard course to top Okay, because that's a programming course many of you might have done it and she's she's got 93 marks in that course And that's really impressive. You know when we had a workshop there They had a big poster with her face in the poster. It was very high. It was very nice to see So me personally what I would like all of you to see is toppers from your colleges Okay, so toppers are the things to focus on you might say I have 500 people writing your exam I'll say yes. Thank you. But like I said the numbers I'm more scared about but if you say I have produced five toppers I'm going to be really really happy. I think that's that's what is the enabling factor here That's what's crucial here. So the six toppers. I'm really happy about they don't have too many students They produce six toppers. That's that's very impressive and toppers is what really shines in fact an NPTEL dot ac dot n slash NOC We give priority and prominence to toppers We put up the names of toppers and along with their pictures in every course and we would like to see toppers from all across the country And that really shows that our education system is working in some sense, right? if you think about it, there's a course that we organize and toppers are coming from all over the country so something is right about the system and we have to work on it and Make it even better. Okay, so this is the list of toppers and The more toppers from NPTEL local chapter that there's nearly 200 toppers have come from local chapters Okay, and I mean, you know, so you can look at the names, you know Some of them are really, you know, they're not in big cities. They're not big colleges For instance Kamaraj College of Engineering Technologies is again in Vrindanagar. I don't know people from Kamaraj here. Maybe not. Oh, you're here Okay, so again from from not not a very big city in Tamil Nadu again They're producing toppers and they also produce toppers in difficult courses. It's really impressive. Okay So this is something that I mean in case as an institution, you're worried about things like NAAC accreditation I know things like that. So this is something you can be really proud of and believe me people in NAAC will respect this This is something. It's not easy to get something like this Okay, so that's toppers and here is again a list of different category of certificates Like I said, so so see these these numbers are changing a little bit marks less than 40 is participation 40 to 659 is Successful completion elite and elite plus gold and like I said From NPTEL side, we want to see bigger numbers here Okay, so the first two columns elite plus gold and elite that's where we that's where we want to see numbers Okay, so the numbers here. Yes, of course, we're very happy that most students are getting exposed to it But when we produce toppers believe me our faculty are more happy So anyone who teaches the course when they see that so many people have got elite plus gold and elite Certificates, they're really happy. They think they're producing. They're really they're teaching is having an impact Okay, and here again, you see a big list NEC coal patis at the top see a lot of people are Doing a pretty good job and that's where I think the local chapter has to make a real impact Okay So when when you when you introduce these courses to your students You have to handhold your students work with them very closely and push them really push them to go to this level for any good course And that's where it's it's it's you're making a huge difference Just imagine some somebody from your college This phase is visible in NPTEL's website showing them as a topper in a course Yeah, the national level you've competed with so many other students and you come out on the top It's something really impressive for the confidence of the student for your own college and for everybody Okay, so please do work on that like I said the last column. Yes, you can improve We are happy if you improve that but really the first two columns is what we want you to focus on from NPTEL site Okay, so again more of a list here most more more colleges This is not the latest version I sent all right Okay, so let's Okay, so I'll come back to the slide later on I'll move on to the Move on with what I think an SPOC should do what I think a college should okay So how do I see an SPOC in a college, you know, I mean so I think this this acronym stick and somehow Personally not a big fan of this SPOC acronym We somehow started it and it has stuck so much that we can't change it now and I'm a little bit Worried about it. I've been thinking of other names and one name that comes to my mind is like an NPTEL ambassador You know, a lot of colleges say they are local NPTEL coordinators I've seen that also being used in a college but coordinator, you know as a nomenclature that we use for ourselves And it becomes confusing who's a coordinator So so I think ambassador is a very nice word a lot of call a lot of companies also use it So I would like to think of the SPOC in a college as the NPTEL ambassador in that college And maybe not just for that college and even for the surrounding areas Okay, so you're working with us and as a person who believes in this online course effort as a person who can Propagate this online course effort both inside your college and outside your college among of in the locality Okay, so that's the kind of person we have in mind You have to be really be motivated by this you have to you have to really get your students motivated for this your institution motivated for this people around you motivated for this and I know a lot of SPOC's here I've met them personally who are so motivated who come up and talk to us Very happy to be a part of this big group and that that's what we see. Okay, so ultimately In the big bridge that NPTEL has with students the SPOC's and mentors and faculty in colleges play a huge role in doing that so Okay, so now some of the some of the some of the things that you have to do as an SPOC are not always You know just inspiring and motivating people. There are also routine things that you have to do Okay, pay pay attention to some detail for instance the Your college page in the local chapter portal is under your control, right? There are things that you can upload their information that we can put their images that you can put there You have to first do that once you become a local chapter I think many of you have already done it Maybe the newer local chapters have to do this now You have to go and update the information that our local chapter page has about your college Immediately, okay, that's very important. Make sure that's up to date your logo your logo can be put there Your logo can be put there all of that has to be correct. Please do that Okay, and make sure that you are added to the group. Okay, there is a Google group of SPOC So many of you actively follow that I think it's a very active group right lots of email exchange happens Maybe a bit too active sometimes you fish like too many emails are coming in But nevertheless, it's an important Google groups to be part of make sure that you read it make sure that you participate in it very actively because a lot of our Announcements go on that Google groups Okay So we try to make sure that some of the announcements are made more prominently, but nevertheless We have kept it an open group. It's not a moderated group for now. The numbers are still reasonable But please post any questions that you have on that group If it is a specific question that's specific to only your college You might just want to write to NPTEL at IITM You don't have to post it on the group Okay, but in case you see that this is an issue that many colleges might be interested in then it's good to post it on the Group okay, so in your own judgment, please make this distinction if you have a simple question about you know My student did not get a hall ticket. It's probably not necessary to put it on the SPOC group Okay, so you can send a mail to NPTEL at IITM, which is also a very actively watched Watched email ID you will get a display soon, but in case you have a question about you know in this course These lectures are not very clear. That's something which affects a lot of colleges You can put it on the SPOC group things like that Okay, so you should make sure you use your judgment on that but this is important your active participation in ensuring that your college Details are up to date on the local chapter portal and participating in the SPOC group. These two are very very important Okay, so a few other steps that you might want to do and this is also this also goes a long way in helping your students Actively participate in NPTEL courses is to get the content from NPTEL on hard disks and then lock it up in a cupboard, right? No No, don't lock it up in a cupboard, please What is the next step the most important step is to make sure that that content is served on your Land, okay So there are a few steps there some of them are technical Maybe you have a local system admin who can help you but the technical aspect is very very easy You have to install you to get a computer install some servers on that computer and put it up on the on the on your local land It's it's easy to do. We have some basic instructions for it. We also have people who can help you with it Okay, this thing is sloping So so please Please make sure that that content is on your land. It's very easy to do I think many of you have Wi-Fi on your college campus is easy for students to access this content once It's on your land. They don't have to go on the internet. You can still keep YouTube blocked, you know All of that is still possible. So please please make sure that you do this This is a very important step in case you need help. Please call us. We'll help you and how to do the installation and all Okay, so very important So this is something okay one more thing I should tell you about this is our content keeps on increasing Okay, so just because you get a hard drive at one point. Don't think that you have all the content. Okay every month we add about I think the way it's going like a terabyte or something we add every month Okay, so it's a huge amount of information that gets added every month right now So please make sure that your content is also up to date and for local chapters We do updation anytime you ask. Okay, so please make sure your content is up to date And it's possible for you to add to the existing content So in your server when you're installing don't exactly install nine terabytes You know have some additional space or at least possibilities to have additional space because in the next three four years This content is going to double either way the way which we're going. Okay, so make sure that you keep Enough space there and keep adding to it every month. I would say you keep updating the content Okay, and for the online courses that your students are doing actively You should make sure that the videos are updated as and when they are released. Okay, whenever we release videos on the Online courses portal. We also put up downloadable versions on NPTEL.ac.n or it's a YouTube video. You know how to download YouTube videos It's easy to download YouTube videos today You have to download those videos and make sure that they are also available on your local land Once it's available on your local land students are able to see it without going on the Internet So you've downloaded it once and everybody sees it Okay, so it's very important to do please use some system admin help or something for that and you can also ask us Make sure that you do that and keep your cut content up to date because the content keeps on increasing Okay, so here is something some sort of a structure that we suggest for how the local chapter can run Okay, so of one of course This is only a suggestion you might have your own way in which you're doing it I'll ask you to share some of these experiences as we go along But this is a suggestion that I have I would say you should have one SPOC Who's kind of going across multiple departments, but he or she needs to be helped by Individuals in a few departments. Okay, so it's possible. It's impossible otherwise to keep track of how things are going If there's only one person for the entire college or institution is just too big That's one thing and also I think the specializations the courses we offer the titles We provide will not make sense to only one someone who knows only one department or one branch No, we might have civil engineering courses mechanical engineering courses are these basic courses are these advanced courses It's not easy for people to figure that out. So you need people from multiple departments at least Multiple streams in some sense so that they can make sense of the kind of courses that we are offering. Okay, so that's very important and We also suggest, you know, this is one thing. We have not pushed too much But I'll really suggest that you try and get student volunteers. Okay now You can you can give them, you know official names If you like a student representatives of the NPTEL local chapter, we are very happy to involve with engage with them We can also engage with them in some official way if you like So this is something that will help you a lot, you know Students tend to be a little bit more resourceful sometimes doing some of the tasks that you might set them You know downloading a certain video putting it up in some webpage students might be able to do it more routinely Then you then you might be able to you might have some additional tasks, etc In your college students are relatively free. They might be able to do this So please try and get student volunteers into this system as well So that way you have everybody working together and that helps Helps things a lot Okay, so now Right now we are we are in this state. Okay, so you are an SPOC of a local chapter You're you're trying to get online courses popular in your college And we are before the run of a course the course run starts on July 18th. You're on July The second case we have two weeks to go before the run of the course Okay, this is a crucial time in my opinion as an SPOC and a local chapter. You have to spend Some time in this two weeks to understand what courses are on offer. Okay, so this is very very important Okay, so we always keep saying there are 93 courses all 93 courses are not the same They are not first of all and all they're not all in the same department. Okay, clearly They're not in the same department. They are not all of the same level of mathematical difficulty They are not all of the same, you know, same year or same Semester, so they're all different types of courses that will be appealing to different types of students in different stages in your college Okay, they're not all the same courses. So you you cannot for instance say here is a poster Which has the list of 93 courses students will take what they like. Okay, so that's that's not a very good path in my opinion Okay, so you know your students best. Okay, so so what the first homework to do, which is very important is The SPOC and the local chapter the people who are involved in the local chapter should definitely look at the courses very closely and Decide to focus on a few courses for which you will help your students Through that semester. Okay, so this is very crucial because like I said, we just don't want numbers We want toppers. Okay, if you just generally introduce core students to courses, they're not going to become toppers in those courses Okay, so you this initial homework you do in these two weeks to understand what courses are on offer What what is the difficulty level of this course? Is this course doable by our students? Okay, is this going to be a understandable course? Are all our students going to be able to top this course? Okay, that's the kind of work that you have to do in these two weeks Okay, and then maybe focus not on all 93 maybe on a few courses Which as a local chapter you will actively support your students do Okay, and then you have to set yourself some targets You have to make sure that at least a few toppers you will produce in that course That's very important. This step is I think a very crucial step So after you go back I would say you study these courses make sure that you understand what these courses are And then maybe even have a workshop for your own students Introducing them to these online course show them the portal how they can log in how they can register And then talk to them about these courses. What are these courses? This course is an important course for your career, etc, etc You have to make that pitch to them and also tell them that the college will help you do these courses We'll appoint a mentor as a faculty a faculty member as a mentor will help you do really well in this course You register for this course now This step is a crucial step that you have to do in your college if you don't do that if you just say Okay, these are the courses you register on your own and you do whatever you want It's very unlikely that you'll be producing toppers Okay, so for producing toppers you have to really actively hand hold your students and it starts now The process starts now you to look at the course understand what the courses and then advise your students Counsel your students on why they should do what course and how they should go about doing it And how you will help them in that course Okay, so local chapters which do this process are considerably more successful than local chapters which say These are the 93 courses. Whatever you do, we'll support you in support you and just providing internet access, etc Internet access today is not the most crucial thing local chapters are providing Okay, the hand-holding that you do is the most important thing So many local chapters use this also the other method they follow is the first run of the course They ask their faculty members to do the course Make sure that they are comfortable with that material and the next time the course is being rerun They enroll their students into it so that there is the faculty member was well qualified to guide the students through those courses Okay, and then faculty members may be keep doing newer and newer courses So they also become better at it. They can also guide more and more students So you should have an internal plan like this and I don't know what the best plan is I'm just suggesting one such plan whatever works in your college is great And later on I'll ask some of the colleges which have produced stoppers here who are here already How is their system working? Okay, so they'll be able to talk about it and maybe you will get some ideas as well, okay So this is very important publicizing the courses not just for the sake of getting numbers But for the sake of getting toppers identifying the good students who are going to benefit from this Okay, next is the enrollment like I mentioned enrollment is a simple process you go on the website and you click join button But then there are things in that form which need attention particularly the local chapter part of it needs a lot of attention Make sure that they pick your colleges a local chapter and they enter the college roll number so that we can give that information back to you Later on and you know who is doing it. Okay, so it's very important Yeah, so so as an SPOC or a local chapter or a faculty or a principal even of a college I would even suggest that you enroll in a course. Okay, so you might say, you know, I'm offended How can you ask me? I'm already a teacher you're asking me to learn I myself have enrolled in several online courses I'll learn from them. Okay, so learning is a continuous process Everybody learns there's no reason to stop learning the reason why I'm asking you to do is when you do that First of all, you learn something and I promise you you'll find some course in this 93, which you like okay There will be nothing It's unlikely that even humanities courses soft-skill courses. You will find something that you like okay simply enroll in it Just for the fun of it and go through it. It gives you a solid understanding of the processes What is the meaning of a lecture? What is the meaning of a lesson? What is an assignment? How do you submit as in what is a deadline? What happens if you miss a deadline? What is the procter exam? How do you register for it? You've gone through that yourself once. Okay, there's nothing like that You have fantastic experience after that and then when you guide your students, you'll really be in a good shape So for instance in Geetham University in Vizag, I think I don't know if people are here from Vizag. Maybe they're not here There is one SPOC there. He has four certificates. We're not wrong. All of them are in programming courses He's gone got a light plus gold medal and everything. Okay, so it's a really Impressive feed from him and when he goes and tells students, you know, you do this you really benefit Students will listen to you, right? So otherwise if they say, you know, you are not doing it Why should I do it just doesn't work? Okay, so it's very very important for you to do it as well It first of all it tells you about the processes. You understand the mechanism What is the difference between an online course and a regular course? You understand everything and you also understand how to help your students go through this and become toppers Okay, so it's very important to do that. I mentioned about choice of courses This is really really crucial. Okay, so what I'm going to do like I said, there are various types You know, are these courses math intensive? Are these courses core or elective? Are they industry related? Are they going to be little easier to do in some sense? All these choices you have to help your students make So what I'm going to do is maybe go through the list of courses a little bit and then say a few words about Each of these courses just based on my experience just to give you an idea of why these things are important The list of courses, I think Pratap already flashed it for you I'll just go through that a little bit and I'll also ask Madhavan Mukun to come up here and talk about his course a little bit after I go through This Rajesh also yeah, I think Deepak also walked in so I'll ask some of the faculty members to talk briefly about Their courses that are coming up in July But before that I just want to go through the list to tell you I mean how to go about thinking about it I told you to look at it. I'm sure you will have your own way of looking at it I'll just walk you through those courses and highlight some of them and say what but how it's going to run etc Okay So so as you go through this course the first thing is of course discipline wise So so if you look at chemistry this one, okay, so let me step back a little bit These are the 10 hour four week courses. Okay, so you have to start distinguishing based on that first there are four week courses eight week courses and 12 week courses First thing you have to see is how many of your students are going to be doing the 12 week course Which is kind of long right? It starts on July 18th. It goes till Something like October 1st or 2nd week are there holidays in the middle will students not be able to do a significant part of it Those are the decisions only you will know believe me the holidays in West Bengal or UP are very different from the holidays in Tamil Nadu in a particular semester Okay, so you have to be able to look at the college calendar and see what is the duration which is ideal for your students? Okay, the four week course for instance starts on July 18th and ends in August 20 Okay, so it's very quick and eight week Is the most successful duration usually most colleges like the eight week course It's the ideal content and it finishes well before you know starts on July 18th It ends sometime in the September 2nd week the exams are also over in September And then students can focus on any other semester exam or anything like that So they really like the eight week content So first thing you have to look at is look at the run of the course and then see your college calendar and figure out Which matches best but not as nice about a 12 week courses. You really comprehensively learn something You know I mean it's a it's a it's good content. It's sizable content. You really comprehensively learn something So there are advantages to everything, you know, that's why we have all these multiple options Otherwise, you wouldn't have multiple options. So please make sure you look at it and First decide which are the which is the time duration which is good for you and for your students as well So after that once you look at a particular duration, then you have to look at discipline Okay, so here is where I think just having one SPOC will hurt you No, I mean you look at even 10 week courses. You have chemistry computer science Design earth science electrical engineering humanities mathematics mechanical engineering even a multidisciplinary course Okay, not when one person is it's very hard for one person to know what all these areas are what are all this jargon is Is very hard. So that's why you need to have a few Faculty from different areas working with the SPOC to go through this list and maybe isolate some three or four Which you will suggest for your students and for yourself. Okay, so now that exercise is very important if you go through this I mean you can quickly identify which are the maybe the basic courses and which are probably more mathematically oriented courses Which are very intense courses for instance software testing I don't know you have to go and see how it is being done There are various ways of doing software testing one could be extremely theoretical. You can go into great Theoretical depth or maybe he's doing more practical things. So you have to go and see what is the type of material that are they are covering So you have to see the introduction page you to see the video introduction video of the instructor Okay, the page that I showed you in online course You should go see it and then get a sense of is this course going to be very theoretical For instance introduction to cryptology again cryptology can be done in so many different ways Okay, just because of the title you can't decide anything you to go there and see what the instructor is saying Okay, a few of the instructors are here. I'll let them speak as well But you have to see and understand what the course content is. Okay, so quite often there is this confusion You know I've done introduction to cryptology in my university Okay, so now believe me even though we have some standard university syllabus What one percent teachers is very different from what another person teaches and particularly in IIT is where we don't have a fixed syllabus for anything What one percent teachers will be completely different from what another percent teachers? Okay, so don't just go by names the names don't mean anything case introduction to cryptology is a name You cannot understand much from the course from the name. You have to go see the weekly content Only then you will know what is going on. Okay, same thing. I'll say for almost every course So so go through watch the introduction and make sure that it's that you understand what it is The humanities courses are also particularly interesting You should encourage your students to do humanities courses as well ask them to go through What these things are okay, so this is very important the last course down here I'll look at it and highlight it a little bit. It's biology for engineers and non biologists Okay, so that is likely to be an open course which is for everybody Biology for engineers is an open course It's for all disciplines and it's probably a slightly easier course and you can see the content and understand what it is Okay, so please do this Please do this exercise. It's it's it's very very important and then here are the 12 week courses 18 of them are there coming up in this July semester. You have basic courses once again Look at the discipline, you know, there's so many disciplines. There are two pages at the one page full of courses. There are various disciplines here We have aerospace chemical civil computer science Even computer science. There are three different courses. I want to highlight a couple of courses one is artificial intelligence search methods for problem-solving professor Deepak Amani is here. He'll talk about it Hopefully a little while and another course is mobile computing. Okay, so I'm going to highlight this course Because it's likely once again that you'll hear about this course soon enough This course is actually on Android programming. Okay, Android development. Okay, how to do Android development? We are partnering with we're trying to partner. I think we've already partnered the administrative things have to take over We're partnering with Google for this so Google will also be So many of you know Google plays a very active role in Android development So Google is partnering with us in this course. It's a 12-week course It will start with basic Java and then slowly people take people into Android development It's Android as you might know is a big-ticket job course. It's a lot of people can get jobs with it So it's a pop pretty popular course think about it and electrical engineering You have various different things you have basic courses advanced courses, etc. And humanities we have Different courses is one in mechanical engineering I'm just trying to see if there's anything else I should talk about physics of materials is a course that Prasaprathap is offering Maybe he'll also say a few words about that course itself. So various different courses are here That appeal to various different kinds of students. Okay, so please do this homework Make sure you understand what these courses are and you can present them to your students in a good way Okay, so these are like I said the eight week courses. These are the most popular Okay, our most popular courses are eight week courses and you'll see we have 59 of them Okay, it's quite a few numbers of them and again all disciplines are covered various Different topics here. I mean, I'm not going to go through them and great detail I'll just highlight a couple of things to tell you that you can't just blindly throw this list at your students Okay, there's a course here called modern algebra Okay, it's by a professor Manindra Agarwal from IIT Kanpur I don't know how many of you have heard about professor Manindra Agarwal from IIT Kanpur Few of you maybe no, maybe not. Okay, so it says modern algebra. Okay, so what do you think that course will be? Okay, so it's going to be Mathematically intense, right? So you have to make the judgment You have to again go and see and look at it But you know this course might still be accessible to some of the more bright students in your college So you don't want to just rule it out but go and see what the course is being pitched at Okay, so is he going to be pitching the course at for everybody or is he going to say it's a specialized course You have to go see that then make your judgment on whether or not this course is good for your students Okay, and for instance, there are other courses that is programming data structures and algorithms in Python Which is again being offered by mother one. So that course is more or less pitched for everybody Okay, I think I'm right. He'll also come and talk about it. Okay So you have to again make your judgment on that on the other hand algorithms for big data Okay, it's very tempting big data is a very famous word today, but believe me That's a slightly specialized course. Okay, it's not even a basic algorithms course It's slightly advanced algorithms course. We just tuned towards big data. So that's the kind of judgment You have to make inside computer science. There are these different courses There is modern algebra this programming in C++ programming in Python and then algorithms for big data and artificial intelligence, etc So you have to classify them as what year students can probably do it There is some information in the course introduction page, but for your college you have to make that judgment Okay, so since our faculty are here now, I think it's a good point for me to invite the faculty For each of them to come here and speak briefly about their course. I would like to start with Rajesh Kumar Who will maybe say a few words about his upcoming course on language and mind? Is that right applied linguistics? I'm sorry. Okay, so we'll start with him and then move on to the other You want to go later The course is ready so I can talk about it any time. It's not a not a problem As you have seen it's a part of the 30 weeks 30 hours course for 12 weeks The I'll tell you very briefly the Basics of this course and as Andrew was telling you please do encourage people in your colleges and Centers to take these courses and here is why you should you should encourage people to take these courses The name is applied linguistics. So give me a minute to tell you what linguistics is linguistics is the science of language It it I Asked you to ask yourself two questions. How did you learn the language that you speak? Answer to this question is not simple what linguists do is to find out underlying algorithm of learning language through natural process and that underlying Algorithm when it has been found out through the science of language is applied in various domains for problem-solving And if one domain which is going to be interesting to you is language teaching So it's for both When we want to learn a new language and when we want to teach a new language in both the domains the findings of the science of language is going to be relevant and I'm sure in All your colleges you do have a domain and component on teaching at least English and The findings of this are going to be helpful in doing so We are going to be available all the time online through emails through All kinds of contact information is given there At any point in time whether or not you are enrolled in the course if you want to know more about this Please get in touch with NPTEL or us directly. We will be happy to answer your questions. Thank you Talks for two minutes and get claps. I spoke for so long. I never got a single All right, so maybe Deepak Okay, so my name is Deepak Khimani I work here in the department of computer science and I'm teaching this course which is listed Between civil and computer science here. It's actually a computer science course called artificial intelligence search methods for problem-solving it's a course which we which I offered last year as well and Last year it was a 15 week course and this year Andrew and Bharti have said that it's too much So we have cut it down to a well big course, but you have also added those last three weeks of lectures in case students who are interested now It's a very basic course in computer science It's the first course in artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence as you know Everyone is talking about Google or you know Facebook or whatever But I would like to just clarify one thing is that you should not confuse this course with machine learning Because very many whenever many people talk about AI nowadays. They say it is they talk about start talking about machine learning This course is not about machine learning. It's a very fundamental course In fact, there are two separate courses on machine learning being offered one by I think Sureshna Sarkar and one called reinforcement learning by my colleague. He has been done So if you want to do machine learning, those are the courses this course talks about basic problem solving essentially How can you solve a problem? What are the methods that you can use and basically they are trial and error based search kind of methods So for example, if you are given a new puzzle, you try out different combination different possibilities and then find a solution So this course is mostly about that It's a first course in artificial intelligence any student who has basic exposure to data structures should be able to do the courses Okay, so one thing I would like to say about the course I mean courses in general in NPTEL is that we find that we have a large initial enrollment And then that paid Peters of very rapidly essentially and part of the reason is that Students are not able to sustain Interest maybe they have other things and so on but I'm hoping this time that since you are from colleges And you're going to kind of guide your students. You must encourage them to be more active Online so we have this forum in which you can pose a question and anybody can answer including other students And we also try to answer and if students are more active in the forum. They are more likely to be Surviving throughout the course essentially so it's a 12 week course and We cover the basic algorithms for problems solving So if there are any more questions, I will take them up during lunch Thanks mother so mother one is doing two courses and We'll talk about both Thanks, Andrew. Yeah, so I have so as you can see I'm listed twice on this page so at the bottom there's design and analysis of algorithms and Halfway down the page. There is this course on programming data structures and algorithms and Python So the algorithms course the one at the bottom is actually been Conducted on NPTEL more than once earlier and so it's a fairly what I would consider a fairly stable course It's a fundamental course in computer science and I think many students Do need to have a good background in this. I've tried to make it Accessible and one of the things which is makes it a little bit different from maybe the way algorithms is done in regular courses is that there is a Programming assignment associated with each week's material. So there are about five or six I Mean there are weekly quizzes which are multiple choice, but there are five or six reasonably interesting and hopefully doable but challenging programming assignments so like Deepak was saying I think one of the main things that Challenges we face in this kind of offline mode of teaching is how to ensure that students stay focused and Keep up and one of the things that they really need to do in any course But I think especially in these kind of courses is you need to work on problems. I think you can't just read or absorb passively the theory and Hope that you understand so unless you actually apply what you have done in a concrete setting I think it you don't really derive the full benefit So I think that's one place where if we have this intermediary group of faculty who are all of you are Represent I think it would be a probably a good way to make sure the engagement is more effective and students they You know focus because also the thing is that It is possible thanks to the material being available to catch up, right? But if you kind of get this feeling that oh, I missed For whatever reason this week and then I should I will never get back So I'll drop out I think that we should try to minimize and try to make sure that people do actually stay To as far as possible on track with the material. So I think it would be great if this Interaction could be improved in that sense as Deepak said, I mean the forum is there. There are a lot of avenues to interact but the students must Have the energy enthusiasm and the stamina to do it. So that's the main thing So the other course I won't talk about too much because it's still work in progress I'm trying to Okay, so honestly speaking I have You know had a lot of Discussions with people about how programming should be taught everybody has their own opinion how programming she thought so I then finally when This question was put to me by NPTEL. I decided okay now having given a lot of theory to other people about how programming should be taught Let me try and Activate my own theory and teach it the way I think it should be taught now It's not guaranteed to be the only way to teach it well But I hope again it will I it'll it should have a substantial Amount of programming you can't teach programming without people like we're writing programs so again, it will require a fair amount of interaction on part of the students to learn the material and the advantage I hope of using a language like Python is that you can get past the Initial difficulty of learning a lot of syntax Which is what happens with languages like Java or C++ and actually start learning concepts much faster And this is what I would like to emphasize in that course. So in a sense, there will be Actually a lot of overlap between these two courses, but one in the sense that some amount of Basic algorithms will come into the programming course, but I think that without teaching Interesting things programming on its own is a very dull activity. It's like learning how to type or you know handwriting or something like that I mean you can't just keep Exercising your knowledge of semicolons and open brackets without having interesting problems to solve and at the same time if the language is Complicated that you can't solve any interesting problems then it's an end in itself just to understand how to write a program So we want to strike a middle ground where quickly people can write interesting programs and start working on things which are relevant This is for all in a way, but it is definitely aimed at computer science students I mean there are again divergent opinions on how programming should be taught to people from other disciplines and what should be the emphasis So from that perspective, it is very much a computer science oriented course, but it is for all I mean it is for a beginning person I have taught this course in a conventional way to people who are studying applied mathematics So it's not that I'm coming at this from a completely You know the accuracy point of view So I do know it can be taught to people who have no programming background and we are not specialists in programming But I'd like to emphasize that this is not going to be something which for example people who are I'm not going to teach Things like scientific computing or something like that, you know how to write Eigenvalue Solving problems Okay, so okay, so anyway, so I hope that all of you will keep your students well informed and Well engaged and that this is initiative when peter will only continue to grow. Thanks We have a few more faculty members of joint as I believe demon is here. Yeah So the man is offering one course this time. He'll talk briefly about that Thank you I am Dheeman Cherajee from mechanical engineering department and Myself and my colleague professor Shamid Bakshi. We are offering a course. We can see that fluid dynamics and turbo machines this course is intended for the undergraduate students and also the master students who would like to I mean refresh the basic concepts and learn some of the details and Maybe also for practicing engineers So this course essentially starts from the fundamentals of fluid dynamics We talk about what is fluid to start with and then Talk about the different conservation equations the mass and momentum equations and Then we move on to certain concepts like boundary layer theory or the pressure drop This first part of the first module on fluid dynamics is covered by my colleague Professor Shamid Bakshi who is also from mechanical engineering department IIT Madras In the second part we talk about the fluid machines or in particular turbo machines The name turbo machines may appear a little unfamiliar, but we all know the examples in our everyday life pumps Turbines fan in our homes. So these are all examples of turbo machines so we start with what constitutes a turbo machine and let's say not a Piston pump which is a positive displacement machine. So we bring out this through some examples through some drawings and Then we talk about what are the operating principles? How to how does the energy transfer take place from the let's say the blade to the fluid or From the fluid to the blade as the case may be So the first part of the second module that is on turbo machines. We talk more about the general approach and In the second part we talk about the specific machines For example, we talk about pumps Because there is a very common use there are a lot of industrial applications and we can solve the Principles from the first principles we can solve the problems in the second part We have also that hydraulic turbines steam and gas turbines in all these cases both for the first module on fluid dynamics and For the second module on turbo machines. We actually give a in-depth coverage Accompanied by solved problems we solve it and also give tutorial problems every week So we hope that a student who takes let's say all these courses and tutorial seriously We'd have a very good grasp on the subject and then can go on to the advanced courses on fluid dynamics or advanced courses on turbo machines if required And I hope that the students if they take it they will also enjoy it. Thank you Thanks, Damon. I think we have Professor Suresh Kumar. Yeah, please. Yes, so he's Doing the eight four week course Yeah, the biology biology for engineers and other non biologists. Yes, it's always in the bottom Good afternoon to all of you I just finished recording of the last lecture for this particular MOOC. That's why I'm wearing this type of shirt You know they they recommend that we wear pastel colored shirts for appropriate reception on the video I finished that I said I was more interested in hearing from you As to what your thoughts are and that's the reason I attended when I came in I kind of got hijacked into telling you something about the course, which I will do pretty much The same as what I said in the introductory video. See this course Biology for engineers and other non biologists Bend it. Okay, fine Am I better audible now? Should I shout more or okay? I guess I'm able to see better which is which is much nicer Okay, the Title title is biology for engineers and other non biologists I'm sure that Some of the institutions are offering some such courses already We at IIT Madras have offered this course for the past 15 years at least That is because We all have this feeling that it is the century for biology and A lot of great things are expected from biology in this century and so on you know We ourselves are biological beings, okay We haven't understood ourselves much and therefore the level of Manipulations that are possible with us are rather limited at this stage although it may appear large and Irrespective of the field that you are in okay I have a bias towards engineers because I deal with an engineering a set of students Irrespective of what engineer you are it is very highly likely or irrespective of which field you work in It is very likely that your contributions say five years down the line ten years down the line Will be in a biologically related aspect in your own field, maybe and to Prepare you for that Prepare the students for that we offer this course We felt this course is ripe for offering to all And irrespective of the field that you are in you would be benefited by this this My colleague dr. Madhulika Dixit. She's a biologist. I'm a biological engineer I'm basically a chemical engineer from IIT Madras B. Tech and Then went on to do various things and somebody described me as taking the longest route to medicine and so on So you I'm in the department of biotechnology now I fully realize the importance of knowing biological principles to achieve the various different Fantastic possibilities at times and this course gives you the very basics of those We look at some fundamental molecular aspects That you would need to know to be able to first understand get out of the fear of biology many engineers fear biology Okay, they may not accept it, but essentially it's a fear. They don't like the terms Mainly because the way they were introduced to biology in school and so on so forth you memorize this and that's it Memorization is a very good skill. Definitely You know without memory you cannot dance you cannot sing and so on so forth very essential skill but at the same time there's a lot there are more aspects to it and biology is a Field in itself in every I mean in all rights and it's a very useful field This will provide you with the very basic principles just in ten hours and that was a challenge to do We normally do this course over and an entire semester. Oh I was supposed to touch this okay entire semester and That's a good challenge. Okay, I very briefly would like to mention one of the course. I just finished NPTEL online certification course and bioreactors That was earlier done. I'm basically bio biological engineer Which is also available on the NPTEL side if you're interested We will most likely run the course again sometime later if it is appropriate And then you could get benefited by the course which is entirely on bioreactors again in ten hours That is bioreactors is an aspect that I did research on for my PhD and subsequently after that when I began my independent research and It kind of became a mature subject mature aspect any major Development and that needed to come from the industry and so on and so forth and it has gone through a complete cycle complete Developmental cycle and it was a challenge to give that in ten hours. We've done that. It was well received Hopefully you'd have a chance to look at it again. Thank you Okay, I think we have one more faculty member only one more We'll have him talk about his offering two courses in the upcoming July semester So now a couple of things that process Suresh Kumar mentioned in case you or your college has participated in this course before Either bioreactors are thinking about participating in any of these courses Please do take the time to meet them and talk to them if they are around they might give you more hints There are a couple of courses. I'm one. I'm offering directly one. I'm coordinating The in the 30 hour course you will see down there The closer to the end. There's a physics of materials course So it's a core course in our department metallurgical and materials engineering but actually a lot of materials and materials engineering departments even electrical engineering department students often need to take and physics students often need to take course on solid-state physics and In my opinion as I mean both when I learned these this material as a student and also when I Prepared myself to teach this course The it's difficult to find the book at the right level to learn this Subject there are you know books which are appropriate for 12 standard students And then suddenly there's a big jump in between there seems to be a big gap And the other books are at you know, they assume a lot of things they assume that you know a lot of things and they deliver at that level and So this course actually bridges that gap very well Or at least that's the intent the intent is that So anybody who's in a who's basically done the first year undergrad courses of you know basic physics and maths can take this course The idea is you know, this talks about why materials have those the properties that they do that's the idea So normally we simply know that you know a metal is a good conductor of heat good conductor of electricity Saraming is not a good conductor of electricity Things like that but we in this course We're trying to understand in a from a first principles approach starting from say an atomic level or even you know band structure level How do how do these properties come about in fact? Why do even bands come about we you know normally we simply say conduction band valence band in all our school education And we you know have a lot of information related to that, but we rarely talk about why should there be even a band? Why why does the material have a band atoms are there separately? Why do the bands appear? So all those things are discussed here Lot of so you know new concepts are presented They're built up from basics and you know derivations are made no assumptions are made on prior knowledge except some basic You know physics and math thing. So that is one the other courses here which will come under General let me just see here Multidisciplinary introduction to research the multidisciplinary course the fourth from the bottom so we actually have several faculty involved in it and That list is not really the correct list anyway So that the courses and it's basically even in our Institute all incoming MS and PhD students have to take something like an introduction to research kind of course It's called different things in different places Basic idea is you know students come with the different backgrounds. Some have done small projects Some have done elaborate projects before this this is their first Experience and carrying out research. So we talk of a lot of things, you know, what is research? We have a lot of discussion with several faculty and this Professor Anand also has a class on it. What is just research? What are some ideas related to research? We talk about you know data analysis. How you do data analysis? How do you do computational work? Then how do you make a presentation? How I mean how do you make a technical presentation? How do you write a journal paper? What are those important things that you need to know to understand what it is? So things like this, how do you do experimental work? What are experimental skills you should have? What about safety in the laboratory? All these things which are you know necessary for a researcher to have And it's something that it would be nice to have research students introduced to it early in their You know career as a researcher in the University Of course, they may not use everything in the first semester that they are there But it's nice for them to know that these are all the aspects that are involved and that it is all Available in an organized way here. Maybe as they proceed into their research You know second year or something they may they may want to revisit some of this material and utilize it So this is a general purpose course about you know, seven eight faculty are involved in it And we try to present it across 20 hours. We'll also have something on intellectual property We'll have something on design of experiments and so on so that's those are the two courses Okay, so we are running a little bit short of time. I think but I think for some angles on there Wants to say something I need to say this. Sorry. I sort of intruded into this but up. I don't want to embarrass you and But I'd still have to say this Here is the message which I received and many of us received from Douglas half-starter Who is a very famous? writer and a physicist Has written many books and one of them the most famous books is the Godel Escher and Bach and the other one is I believe is Metamagical theme us if I remember mathematical themes was written as a pun called the metamagical theme I was is very very famous writer and a physicist from Indiana University See over the past few years for a few months. I've been helping my friend Indu Satija a professor of physics at George Mason University in Virginia in Polishing the chapters of her book called the butterfly in the quantum world But since I left solid-state physics essentially 40 years ago I had forgotten some of the key ideas involving reciprocal space and Bruhan zones Which are needed in a couple of her chapters? I therefore went to the web to refresh myself and I happened upon YouTube videos of your lectures at IAT Madras Especially numbers 27 and 30 and this reference is to professor Pratap Haridasa's videos and Found them very helpful and enjoyable. I just wanted to let you know That you are easy-going teaching style and you are elegant hand-drawn hand-done drawings They are very much appreciated by this viewer in far-off America Warmest wishes to you from Bloomington, Indiana. I have not read the Citations that we have received for many many other faculty members here There are many we will slowly put them up, but since Pratap happens to be here We decided that we should read that up But there are hundreds of citations like this from various other people and therefore it's important for us to enjoy what we learn Thank you Thanks, Wangal. So we are a little short on time I think I want to go through some of the other things a little faster than guest login was already, okay So this is a different presentation Move to the right presentation Okay, so we took a little longer the choice of course, but it got mixed up with the next one also So I think we're doing more or less. Okay, so let me just go through the Remaining things Barthi was very upset with me for not mentioning many of the important things that is there Presentations. I'm gonna go through this Okay, so I have to do some 10 more slides after which you All right, so deciding on a course I've already spoken about it a couple of pointers These are like, you know cheat sheet pointers. These are also quite important several courses will be reruns So what is the meaning of rerun? All the Material that was done in the previous time is also available material including assignments Solutions video lectures, etc Okay, so quite often this is of great use when you do the course again You know if it was run once before you know what assignments were given you can practice that ahead of time You'll know what kind of questions would come in the exam all those things are very useful So you might want to exploit that as well in particular the videos for those course will already be available for you Which you can download and put it in your land. Okay, so this kind of thing is very useful So please look out for these rerun courses if these courses are rerun Make sure you access the previous times content and use use it for your own benefit Okay, so student enrollment. This is another thing. I'll emphasize once again Even though a bunch of students are doing it through your local chapter each person has to Individually enroll in the course and individually submit assignments. Okay, so this is very very important You can ask them to watch the videos together if you like But they have to individually respond to assignments because otherwise we will not have their marks And they will not be able to write the exam. It will be a big problem So make sure that they each of them does it correctly and make sure that they pick the local chapter option when they enroll That's also very important. Okay Yeah, so the forum for instance We have seen continuously that local chapter colleges somehow the students are not using the forum a lot Okay, so now I think maybe this is for various reasons In fact some of the faculty from the mentors from the last time We had a meeting like this they mentioned that our students are not going to use the forum That's what they said plainly. They said forum is not really very actively used I don't know why but I think I think maybe you know if they want they're hesitating to write the questions directly Maybe you could help them, you know paraphrase that question and type it out for them, etc But asking questions in the forum is very very important. It gives valuable feedback to the instructor I think all the faculty here will also agree with me forum participation by your students is very important Please encourage them to do that Now another skill it develops in your student if you ask them to type the questions themselves is they have a question Now they have to think about communicating that question through written words in English on a forum Now this is an incredible skill for students to learn for everybody to learn. Okay, so it's very hard to do that It's not very easy. You have to write it very clearly so that somebody else can read understand and respond Okay, so it's a good skill to develop for your students as well So please encourage them to participate in the forum by asking questions directly on that. Okay Also even responding to questions. That's also very nice Okay, so during the course run as an SPOC you have to work with the mentors You have to monitor the progress of the students. Just make sure that they're doing okay So those emphasis on how dropouts happen For various reasons, it might be a bit natural that dropouts happen in online courses But do make an effort to minimize that as much as possible try to motivate students keep them motivated throughout Here again, your choice of courses will help you choosing the courses for which you can ensure that students stay motivated throughout will help a lot So please do Make that do that. I think All ticket. Yeah, so these are more administrative. So maybe bear Barthi will come back to it So exam related. Okay. So here is again an issue. So quite often when your students write exams This is done like I said through TCS. I on in various centers We want to hear back from you about what happened in the exam What did something go wrong? Did you have a good experience or not? No, this is very very very important I cannot emphasize this enough So for instance if you find that a very good student in your class in your school in your college is not getting good Marks in an exam, please let us know I mean these are things it could be an exam related issue if there were particularly exam related issues if you had good students Not getting marks that you think they should have got please let us know because these are all things that we can help out You know, this is feedback. That's important to us We can go back to our exam partner and tell them about these issues and get things resolved Okay, so please please keep the communication channels open even during the exam when the exam runs Are there issues with the center? Is it something not go well in the center? Please please let us know don't don't think that that's out of the outside of your involvement Okay, so was it easy to go to the center? Was it easy to write the exam? Was there air conditioning or are you sitting in 50 degrees writing the exam? Please please write that It's hard for us to be everywhere. So if you if you serve us with that fashion, it'll be very helpful Okay, so now I come to the notion of mentors Now this is also very important and the last time I think we frankly didn't do the mentors part very well we didn't pay enough attention to that part and Some of the things slipped Nevertheless, I want to talk about a few of these things now. Who is a mentor a mentor is some faculty member in your college who can help students? Go through that course. No, this is not just monitoring students or asking them to write the mean there are two parts to it Now one part is you monitor how many people are submitting assignments and ask them to submit assignments Make sure that they watch the video and encourage them to come to the lab give them some labs That is one part of it. The other part is to help them actively in the content of the course Okay, help them understand the content of the course help them do the assignments in the course now both of these are very critical No, you should do both and we think of a mentor as someone who does both Okay So someone who facilitates the online participation of students to do doing various things and also helps them understand the content Etc. Okay, so now We have some restrictions. We don't want one faculty member to be mentoring too many students We want we want that number to be Lesser now a mentor has to enroll in the course. That is a very important thing So every faculty member who wants to mentor students in your college They also have to themselves enroll in the course as a student and then they are added as a mentor and your students have to Pick them as mentors. Okay. These are important steps. I think we try sending instructions about this, but this is important And like I said basic tasks are quite okay Okay, so we will check if the mentor is enrolled and we will add that is something that you would do Okay, so I think this is fine. I think probably want to stop. I just want to mention recognition of mentors We are going to be a little bit more diligent and looking at what the mentor is doing Okay, so we want to see for instance How many students were being mentored and also the performance of those students? Okay, so if a student was mentored by someone we want to see how well that student did in the exam Okay, so we want to use that as a criteria for recognizing mentors This is an important step that we will be introducing from this semester onwards. Okay, so I think I want to stop here Maybe what I'll do now is for I'm gonna ask Barthi to maybe come on and talk a little bit more about some of these Administrative aspects of SPOC's and mentors and what you have to pay attention to etc. Okay So I think I'll stop you for now and ask Barthi to take over Thanks a lot once again for coming over. Okay, finally I get some claps Thanks a lot and I'll be around till the end of this workshop. I'm happy to chat with you in case you need any help. Thank you Good afternoon everyone Just as important are the courses the content and so on I think I'll be more speaking from the administrative point of view because we need also the run to be smooth and all Other aspects related to the courses we want to kind of smoothen out So we kind of put in together some points that we have again found from our experience of the last one year when we've had huge numbers Coming from local chapters Many of you may be familiar many of you it may seem new people who are just coming in as local chapters may not make sense But it's okay I guess I will go through some points and get back to us on any of these points in our later interaction saying where you All had difficulties that we would definitely want to know Yeah, so SPOC as Professor Andrew said already if you're a new SPOC you've just become a local chapter Please ensure that your details on the page are accurate many of our local chapter pages still don't have a college logo SPOC photos are not there so kindly updated be nice to have all the pages, you know having all this information there See if you start receiving emails from the NOC SPOC a Google group That should be something that we add in your email ID to the group and you'll start receiving emails one suggestion here We've had SPOC's who give their institute ID or somewhere where they receive really important mails and ours is a flood Okay, I think we see almost like 50 mails a day and many of them are related different issues may not you know Be directly involving you so in that sense you're loose track of what important announcements We give and it kind of puts you off from the other mails too We'd suggest maybe create an email ID specifically for y'all to be an SPOC some College name hyphen SPOC gmail.com or something and share it to us so that even if you move on as SPOC You just give that email ID to the next person coming in and the continuity remains rather than saying remove this ID Put in this ID and so on so don't kind of mix up your existing email IDs with this Just give us a separate email ID might work best for people who are getting in as SPOC's Yeah, we've been getting many requests from here as we're talking around saying that can you do workshops for our students internally in our college If you'll have seen our schedule for the last three weeks I think in three weeks We are doing about nine workshops and every workshop is a day or two for all of us Invariably the coordinators come with us from the office. We do all this organization So currently it is kind of a little hard for us to go to colleges and do workshops internally for your students One thing we could help you with this. We'll share all the presentations with you They're already available on the NPTEL website You can take it from us and we would encourage the SPOC's or anybody who knows our processes to actually You know organize your students into meetings and talk to them about the same We are putting a team together who might probably be able to help you in the future We're doing such programs for the students, but currently it's not in place once it is in place We will definitely let you know we would also like to come and interact with the students directly But currently such requests. I don't think we'll be able to accommodate We'd be more than happy to accommodate if you want to organize a workshop in your area that we have not done Say for the past two years if you can get about 30 40 colleges in your area that we could come in address okay We have sent you some posters and brochures regarding the new courses We have many many more available on the desk outside or with any of our office stuff We'd encourage you to put it up in places in your colleges where students frequent these places Maybe the canteens or the hostels or something so that they can at least look at it that there's something called NPTEL happening There's something called an online course happening and these dear titles are being offered Okay students enrollment has been emphasized kindly see to it that every student is enrolled to the course if they're not Enrolled to the course they will not be allowed to write the exam because the basic check we do when we open our exam registration form is is the Email ID of the student in that particular course then only we allow him to even write the exam So if he is you know enrolled to maybe two other courses and now wants to do the exam for a third course But he's not enrolled there. He will not be right to allow the exam for the third course So that is something you have to keep in mind when you want the students to take up our exam nations Yeah, this is something that we have been seeing the last two times that we have run exams There is a way in which we collect money from colleges for the exam registration fee in bulk That is y'all pay to us through a single DD or an F transfer or something and give us a list of students who are gonna Write the exams but we ask you in that only for the basic details of the students And then we send y'all recurrent males and the students reminding them to come to a form and fill out all the other details For instance, what we get from the SPOC when we ask them for a payment is just the name of the student Which course he wants to write the exam for exam date center and whether he's eligible for a scholarship We don't get the other details such as maybe the address that he wants to give maybe some contact number Mainly his photograph and signature that is something we absolutely Absolutely required for generating our hall tickets We have had many issues because students are not coming to our form before the last date when we need to share data with Our exam partner and get our hall tickets out. You might think it's a very trivial issue But for us and say 80 centers across India when they are checking the ID, there's a guy who goes there with just a name There's no photo there. Then how do you verify it against a photo ID, right? It doesn't make sense for us We've had cases in the past where two students are carrying a hall ticket Which carries the same details of name college roll number everything It's like one student has the same hall ticket of the other somehow this has been missed and only on that day They call us up and they ask us so the minute we send you all hall tickets We are uploading the zip folder of hall tickets as soon as we receive it from our exam partner inside your SPOC logins Students also can go separately and get all the hall tickets, but it's also there kindly check that all these details are there This time on we are going to start tightening up processes so far. We have kind of let anybody can write come without a hall ticket It's okay come without an ID. It's okay photos not there on the hall ticket It's okay. We've been pretty lenient in you know Just facilitating students from all the local chapters write exam so that that day they don't come and they don't get disappointed But I think we'll have to start tightening our security processes also because we want to ensure that these people who come and come with The correct papers and they write it so this time on if you're sending us data and you're doing bulk payments kindly ensure that your students Give us all the information much ahead of time and we have all these details For instance, we've generated certificates for the March and April exams and I think about 200 students still have not given us photographs And we've actually generated certificates without their photographs for them and sent it out to them We have sent about 8 to 10 reminders. We do keep reminding SPOC's we do keep reminding students But that's all that can be done. So kindly ensure that this happens You know the correct data supplied to us on time. That is something we'd like to emphasize Yes, the reporting of issues very important was kindly. Let us know the very next day after the exam So September 18th and 25th if we have exams running in that particular week Please write to NPTEL office about any issues that you have faced in the exam any discrepancies that were there either related to the question paper either related to the conduct of the exam the center Whatever we want that feedback from you. We do try to send our representatives to these centers But in the center when we go there are 300 students writing it's spread over five labs So we get a kind of broad overview of what happens there But not an in-depth of feedback of you know what each person has faced So kindly let us know about that we can actually work better on our processes also internally for the next time if you give us this feedback Yeah, one thing we'd like to mention here is for the mentoring this time We are kind of putting a cap that one faculty Member can be a mentor for only two courses. So when the SPOC is uploading the list of mentors Which is now currently open. Please ensure that you give us only one name for two courses not more than two courses And the number we are recommending is about one mentor for every 50 students who is there from your college Okay, we have put in some guidelines We have shared it with you in the printers that we've given it to you in the folders also regarding mentors We didn't have these in place last time They were more like suggestions, but these are more some things that we would seriously be looking into this time when we are giving out certificates for mentors, so we Suggest and recommend that mentors also be following the course and they submit assignments They give us weekly feedback on a portal on you know What were the contents of the course that particular week that is invaluable to us because that will go directly to the course Instructor who's giving the content, you know You all have faculty who are probably teaching that same course and the content makes sense to you So when y'all give us feedback about what is there we can directly share it with the faculty members so that's a critical component that we'd love to have from you and hear from you every week and Encourage students to complete the course register and make use of the VC sessions This is where information that once the local chapter colleges register with us and tell us that we have so many students with us You know coming as groups to your exams what we try to do is we try to get the faculty on board and have direct VC Sessions with you so we have done it in the past with the March and April courses We had I think about 10 12 sessions and this we did across Kanpur and Karakpur also the faculty from those institutes Also did this so this we would like to definitely encourage and have more of these on board So if you know even today that so many of maybe hundred from our students from my college are actually getting into this course And we plan for them to take the exam tell us during the run of the course Also, we could try to have some BC sessions so that we don't wait for the end But we could do it even during that and when we organize such things We'd encourage that you actually be there do the testing which is available ahead see that the connectivity and everything is okay So that you can get the maximum benefit from this kind of session That'll be a direct interaction between the students and the faculty That is something like a missing component in the online courses because everything else is offline there So this is something that we'd like to try and encourage Okay currently what is open on the portal if you all are SPOC's and are looking at students entering your courses for the July run We have opened request for an center in your city Okay request for an exam center in your city is open as a tab today in your SPOC login on the portal So if your city if your students are going to write exams this time in September October And it's not one of our listed cities kindly request for a city and give us some numbers so that we know What is the arrangement we need to make with our exam partner here? We are kind of saying a 10% elements this side that side but not more than that for instance Don't say find it students will write and finally end up with 50 because they will make the arrangements for find it students And then we get a 50. It's very hard for us to deal with that Okay, so kind of just get an idea of how many students you want right from your college request us for that again One thing we'd like to emphasize your many colleges are TCS Ion exam credit at centers One thing as a policy or something that we'd like to try is not give your own students Your own college as a center just to maintain the integrity of the exam if there's no other choice and other colleges Is too far of for some of the reasons they are not able to find out other centers We may do it in that case. We will send our representatives titan of processes Yes, but as a generic policy we will try to avoid when you all request for centers We will try for a college in your city close as close as possible to your college But probably not your own we have two people here. Mr. Rajesh Kumar and Mr. Mr. Rajesh and Mr. Ram Kumar here from TCS we get many requests from colleges saying how do we become an Exam center what should I do for that and all you can directly interact with them on that You can also ask them about yeah, will we get these dates? What are the colleges in my city? What are questions you have regarding any of these exam centers you can ask them? Yeah, we'll get them here Please So this is Mr. Ram Kumar. He's the manager who works on our project Who's kind of singly responsible wholly solely responsible for conduct of exams giving of our Centers results and all that and Mr. Rajesh is our local manager who works with us also in this So you can interact with both of them and clarify any questions that you have with regard to any TCS related issues here You want to say something She has spoken about us. No, we represent TCS and I take care of delivery of examinations This gentleman is the project manager for NPTES especially for this assessment So hopefully your students are you know people from your call people who represent from your respective colleges or institutions Would have had a pleasant experience. Maybe you can share your experience These are a place where we can also hear from you that you know, how did your students give feedback about a particular exam or so and Anything beyond that if you want to know that if you want to be a partner of an examination center or or anything else and or related to the examination process and things like that you are welcome to Ask and where he will you know give you the relevant answers to that? So we'll get on with this No, the questions will come later on I guess we're not giving you time now. So I have a lot more to say so Okay best practices we have put in some we'll share this PPT with you in the forum So probably you can go to it But anyway the next slot that we have is sharing of your own best practices within your college if you have implemented something So probably we'll skip this and go in for later Infrastructure recognition of SPOC is yes for the last turn we have done something wherein I think the certificates for the SPOC's and the mentors have gone out So this is something that we definitely can do every time regarding any other thing that we can support to recognize SPOC's and mentors that depends on the future on various factors. We will keep you informed of the same later on Okay, this was an interesting comparison we had put out in our NOC SPOC forum also I don't know how many of you had the time to go through it This was actually given by one of the SPOC's of Geetam University So he had said to saying that you know this is something that he thought could work for faculty who wanted to short term courses And so on as to why they could adapt or adopt NPTEL as a short term course that they have to do two per year or something he was giving us So there was something that we shared here that you can do it from your college You can put in the time the courses spread over two or three months rather than you know concentrated within a week And you have an exam and so on so there's something that we thought we'd project to faculty members of colleges of how they can use it as a short term course This has already been done. I guess Yeah, this is a major major request We have for all the SPOC's here and we are going to try and work on this because we hear from many sources Not formal actually informally through word of mouth or when we just meet random people We don't hear that our certificates are being used for instance We get these requests from companies saying can you verify if the student has done your course? And then we see that he's applied for mentorship in a company and cited our course saying that he's done it And he has a certificate in that then there's somebody else who writes that I got a job change or something Can you verify that and he's shown some certificates? But in a formal basis we haven't had anything which we can put up on our website and say at least some success stories of having run So many courses, you know, how have people benefited? So that is something we Definitely want from the SPOC's of colleges if you'll have any stories to share that these certificates help your students in placements or Internships or how it helped the faculty members whether y'all benefited directly indirectly from doing our certification courses If you are if you're living doing credit transfer for instance the three colleges We told you incidentally we came to know about it But probably many more of you are doing it or giving it on your transcript or something like that We definitely want to know at least that for data points, you know When we want to tell people saying how these are being used it would be an invaluable feedback So if you can either tell it to us today or send us an email or send us a letter from your head or on some letter head We could put it up on a portal and say, you know, these are ways in which colleges are using our online courses Okay, this is very specific admin stuff that I want to say for the current run I'll run through it a little quickly I know we've been talking for quite too long without letting any of you talk and you all have been just listening But we're sorry for that. We'll next will be your slot where we will sit and listen so scholarship yes this time we have very limited number of scholarships because We still haven't heard a confirmation from our company partner who has been giving us money for the scholarships So we have a limited amount We haven't come up on a criteria of how we are going to distribute the scholarship because we do not know the numbers that we are Going to receive for instance last time for the March run We actually got request for 18,000 scholarships and about 5,000 we couldn't match the email ID So the only criterion we had then was we were checking the portal to see the students were at least in the course and About 5,000 were not there. There was some typo or mismatch in the email IDs 13,000 of them We actually approved scholarships. So we had that kind of money then we are not too sure about the numbers Which will come in now because the number of local chapters have gone up and if more people are gonna request as we wouldn't know So some criteria will come up based on that and we let you know on the group as and when we kind of do it One thing to the SPOC is when you'll upload the list for scholarship Please give the correct email ID of the student faculty member Whoever is from your college who you want to avail the scholarship as Enrolled in the portal because the check we do is we take out the list of enrollees for every course from the portal And that will have the email ID. You'll miss out a dot. You'll miss out a dash You'll miss out an A, B, C, whatever or it's totally different He enrolls there using a Gmail gives you an institute ID. We are not going to match it up We just have an automated process. We compared this sheet with the other. We say yes. No. Yes. No So some SPOCs have come and asked us why did you give some people? I applied for 300 you gave for 250 50 of them Didn't get what was the criteria? No criteria. We did last time except for check for email ID So the email IDs had some problem. It wouldn't have matched and we wouldn't have approved it So when you'll upload the list kindly check that whatever email IDs you're giving have no typos And they're exactly the email ID students have used to enroll to the courses for which you are requesting for scholarships So this is something that you need to keep in mind Exam fee payment. Okay. This is something we are really happy about and we want to share it with you So one thing is you all saw the numbers there right about 8,000 people from the last turn The colleges had come up with paying through a DD payment or a bulk payment the idea between You know idea for introducing this bulk payment was we didn't have this till Maybe last year come a or July exam time I think so what happened that time was there were colleges which said we don't have bank accounts for students and they can't pay online So then we said okay do this bulk payment option But some of the last two runs we found out that the SPOC and the college team kind of gets caught up in this whole process Of getting students together collecting money from them giving it to us giving details and all that and the focus moves from Actually Ensuring that the student is learning from the course doing the assignments and actually being there to this administrative tasks So then we again with thinking this is not what we want I mean we wanted to facilitate bulk payment for people who definitely do not have bank accounts And you want to do it for them for those students helping out those students but safe Chennai colleges We are looking at I guess most of somebody their parents uncle's friends Somebody should be having a bank account with a credit card debit card So we would rather discourage them to go in for bulk payment and ask them to go to the form pay online on their own Now that on the portal we have this local chapter tracking right we can tell you who's the student from your college was paid it So that should be possible. So one thing this time we would actually want to stress specifically is And another thing we'd want to say is we are not going to recognize any college based on the bulk payment Amounts that we are getting or the number of students It is only the total number of students as president was saying it is a performance of the students that we are recognizing So whether you all give 300 students all of them paying on their own or you give a DD or they do something else It doesn't matter to us. So that is not going to be a factor when we are going to recognize you on the portal Okay, and this time what we have implemented is we are doing a cash collect We have done that in form is integrated with the bank account So what students can do it even if he doesn't have a bank account. He comes to our form fills the form He goes to the payment gateway there It'll say do you want to avail a cash option if he says yes It'll generate a chalan and in the chalan he can take it to the bank pay in cash there and actually do it We will reconcile the amount So now there is even no requirement for the student to have a bank account He can pay through cash using the chalan facility that we have introduced So we recommend that they spears he actually with his team work more on students learning and benefiting from the course Yes, please do it if you have an easy process in place Maybe you have an NPTEL counter somewhere students just come and pay that's easy for you. Yes Go ahead and do it. We are welcome and very happy to get DDs and checks from you in bulk We are also happy saying oh six lakhs today one check came three lakhs a check came Yes, they're really happy when we see that that's so many students have come in But if it's really tiresome for you and you're saying my god is such a pain to be an SPOC of an NPTEL local chapter Because of these tasks, this is something that you couldn't use today use the cash pay in facility use the Ask the students who have bank accounts encourage them to do the payment on their own the other advantage here We see is when they come to a form by force They will fill up all the details of the form and then only go to the payment. We will get his photo We will get a signature. We'll get all his details And we don't have to be behind them to get the other details that we normally don't get when they do A bulk payment. Okay, so this is something that is that we will also put it out in the form Yes, there's pure see mentors the mentors tab is open in your SPOC login So please start filling out your mentor tabs there Tell us who are the mentors for the courses in your college request for the exam city the next steps Which will start coming in the next three four weeks when the course starts is you'll upload the request for scholarship We will process it. It will take some time We'll process give it back to you if you're doing a bulk payment upload the list for that and Other two tabs that are there inside your SPOC login are request for a course If any of your colleges want to request for courses that you want seen run on NPTEL as an online course Please put in your request there even with maybe some syllabus or anything that you want applicable to and A feedback is also there if you could give us periodic feedback That will also be great. We'll take that into account as in when we use it Information given by NPTEL office inside the SPOC login. This is what people have not seen it We've done it prior to or for the new chapters that are coming in one is as soon as the hall tickets come in We put a zip folder off the hall tickets of all the candidates writing from your college inside your login So if somebody is not able to download not able to print You will have the complete list of the hall tickets of all the students who are writing the exam from your college The second one what we do once the marks the results are announced We give the mark sheet of the students each student who has written the exam from your college The zip is again put inside your SPOC login We will share the raw scores of the assignments and the exams code that the student has gotten So that will be something that will be available to you in your SPOC login The third one is a e-certificates once we generate the e-certificates for your students the soft copies We zip that up put it inside your SPOC login again for your use if you want to put it up somewhere or give it to the students Then the soft copies a mentor and SPOC certificates. So all these so you can see how many tasks We are actually putting inside the SPOC and SPOC login There are many things in which you'll interact with us through email through your login phone It definitely come in person. That's all there But there are multiple things wherein we'll keep on working with you constantly through the run of the course even after the course is over It keeps on going the interactions between you and us kind of never stop. So you can see that what happens here There is a new feature on the local chapter website again There's in response to many SPOC saying that you know I get hundred emails a day I lose out the important announcements We have created a tab called announcements forum on our local chapter website people have not been there kindly Just check that out Currently we don't have any posts there, but all important posts that we want to push out to the SPOC's will be available here So if you think you don't want to check your email and you're missing out post come here All are important date lines what we want you done our timelines everything will come out here The other thing that we have done is that NOC SPOC Google group We have embedded as a forum inside your SPOC login. So this is a public thing visible to anybody It's a public on the web So this is just announcements from our side But the actual discussion that we do on the email right that we have embedded as a forum But that is available only when you log into the website inside your SPOC logins. So these are two recent changes that we have done I think I'm done with the PT Okay, I just wanted to say that some of them are asking about hard disks that you possibly sent us for copying We have a person called Nagarajan here Nagarajan. Are you here anywhere? Yeah, Nagarajan there. You can contact any of our team But specifically he's the one who handles the hard disk copying if you want any status updates about your hard disk He'll be the person that you can ask and check out about the hard disk and Morning I did this announcement I'll repeat it because many were not present at that time if any of the colleges have to collect certificates from us for the May April exams the bulk certificates are with us in our office kindly come there and please collect it from us After the lunch, we'll be giving you the same so our team will be here Okay, so I thought maybe a little bit more organized about the feedback where it looks like it's just open so So when do you want to do the staff introduction? All right, so what we want to do is Yes, okay, so maybe the NPTEL staff was standing all over the place could come to this side So after the feedback session, we'll have we'll introduce some of our staff to you just so that you can see some people who you interact with Okay So now what what we'd like to do is to throw the floor open to Local chapters here. So many of you have been with us for a long time. We've been quite active. You produce toppers So, you know who the colleges are so maybe maybe I'll start with The toppers list that we had NEC coil pretty I think was people if somebody from there can Come in and share a few experiences as to what you do I think what is important is to tell people about what your practices are. What what do you do as an SPOC? Etc. Introduce yourself briefly and yes Good afternoon myself Camillus from National Engineering College Last time we have a nice experience with our students mostly we have more than thousand students have been registered for the courses and at most 600 have written for March run and 200 plus has been written for April and yet to we have to receive the results related with the April run, but for March run 40 toppers that is more than 90 marks. We have been secured and to to our own faculty members done introduction to research and most of the students are done in English a technical English and they have secured more than 90 and Related with the feedbacks from the students they go to have a given with a good feedback Related with the courses what it has been offered in the NPTEL and And we form one Google form Related with the collection of information related from students and that Google form will be has been useful that What are the details that we have been asking with NPTEL and NPTEL has been asking with us and that Information has been updated in the Google form and so that whatever the details They have been asking we have been able to give and what are the details? They have been asking we can able to get it from the students now also we framed a Google form for the registration process And so automatically whatever the information they have been updating is been updated in our Google form and Back and we have been collecting and the same information has been updated with us because the last two experience We have faced the problem with the Email ID and so most of the students have been lost the scholarship because of that And so we framed this topic Getting their updation with the Google form so that there will be error-free statement in their names and their email ID So this process has been going on and we started this process by last registration that is exam time registration, so whatever the students they have been registering and That has been registered with us too So what are the students who have been registered and not registered these information we have been getting at the back end So this is the way we have been tracking with the students and yet another we have a lot of Feedbacks from our side The certificates related with less than 35 at this time the marks was been printed and so the certificate will not be useful for Such students so supposed to be if it is successfully completed and the marks is not been displayed They can use it for any other purposes So that that is one side feedback from our students The rest we are have some of our administrative difficulties and that we can discuss All right, so I think the new policy is to not to give any certificate for people who are less than 40 So this is a change you might want to tell your students that for about 40 you give a certificate and marks will be printed I think that is the decision our committee took it's it's not in it's not in my hands You know that there's a committee which runs these certification exams and they they make these decisions Yes, let's hear from Dronacharya. Maybe I think they've come from far Dronacharya College of Engineering is again the next college which produce a lot of topics Very good afternoon to all of you. I am Prachi Agrawal and We basically have two colleges sir one in Gurgaon one in Greater Noida So I represent the Greater Noida campus. I have my colleagues from Gurgaon as well Ashu ma'am and I don't know your name. I'm sorry So I think the success remains the same as Andrew sir very aptly said that getting to the crux of the course and then probably Getting the faculty understand the the contents of the course and then probably Diluting the students towards the same so that they understand what exactly is in sight You know that that course material rest I am sure little secrets could be shared by my colleagues in Gurgaon So probably I'm not sure if they want to share something of how the success stories go there Very good afternoon to all of you. Firstly, I want to say thank you Thanks to napdal team due to which students learn a lot of good things secondly Last time 500 students from our colleges registered Last time 500 students from our college registered in various courses various courses and out of which 40 students are in Topper list and more than 100 student got the above 80% scores Mainly problem with student face from the last time is that assignment pattern is different than the question patterns last at the last moment students got the mail that Assign your question paper is offline and that is very difficult to them at that as Students prepared according to the assignment during the course But at the last time student got the question papers offline that is very difficult for them So if it is possible that if is it possible if it is possible for you Please mention in from the starting of the course the types of the question paper pattern of the question paper I think the faculty here also heard it We've been asking faculty for question paper type and I know mother one had something very interesting to tell So it's very hard for our faculty to mention what kind of exam they want in the beginning We will try to make that better But I think the other thing is we are telling our faculty is to have a significant fraction of questions from assignments Used in the exam also. So so that it's so very important What's very important is for your students to do the assignments well, okay? 100% important if they do that then the questions in the exam are going to be similar to the assignments So it's not just for the 25% marks for most of the 75% also you have to do the assignment very very important Okay, so you heard from two people who have been very actively working So one thing I think so on a weekly basis Do you have a separate time when they watch the videos or do they just you just let them do it on their own? Do you organize it for them or you don't do you do anything like that? Okay, you organize some extra lectures or something in any seed you have Okay Okay They will be collecting the information from one system You will download all the lectures and put it in one server one server and they will be collecting the information and they will be accessing From wherever they are, okay, so they can come to that mission physically and then download those lectures if they want, okay? So something like that Okay, so Kumara Guru College Kumara Guru is there anyone from Kumara Guru? Yeah, okay I'm Rafiq. I'm the department of mechatronics engineering Technology as you already told first. I did the course sir. I started the course Infacting system technology. I got 88 marks 88 percentage as the top are in that course after getting the top or it is published in the department of this boards Then these people are got their information that there is a NPTEL online certification courses that I I started my principal to use these courses in my college after that Please publish that only two top was But the but it is a 10th opposite my college 10 top was in your college. Oh, very good. Okay. We started we started the NPTEL local chapter in the month of February only But we got active at the college participation Recently at the same time we are publishing the top was list in the notice boards as well as we are Creating the mentors what's up group as well? This in this course and we are going to create the what's up mentors group as well at the same time. We are going to create more number of More number of top was in this question. We are looking for that This in this time we my aim is to produce 25 top was 25 top was Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for a NPTEL team for your con consistent support as well as guidance, thank you Okay, yeah So I guess the other thing that about these pointing out is in case you any of your colleges are using it for credit internally Okay, please that's also a thing that you can share now Okay, so I think another college. I would like to hear is from Kamaraj College Yeah, sure In my college the faculty members has to go anyone move course certification course. We already know Oh, you have to do it. Yeah. Yeah, we have to do it at the same time We already know that there are more courses certification process are there in course that are edX Are also there but in that courses we have to spend 29 29 years dollars that is around 1900 and 900 rupees we have to spend as the same time it is here introduction in course means 1900 we have to spend it is here advanced or intermediate level means we have to spend 49 US dollars but in the input it is It is easy to get the certificates at at the same time we are getting from the IITs means it is More valuable for us At the same time the faculty members has to get so not only the certification There if you we get the top us means it is a national level recognition we are getting for the faculty members. I Want to say something if we my evaluation process is so strict if the people from the Students can't get Easily marks. So the people the students will tell he is not teaching well like that He you don't know the concepts as well. I like that. They will they will tell But the thing is that if you show the certificate, I have the concepts already. I have the concepts good like that means No, no one will question us. This is also a good thing to do. Okay. Good So you're saying really I mean students like students also recognize faculty who have these certificates is what is that's great Yeah, maybe comrades. Yeah, I think you can focus on if you're giving credit for these colleges Many of you may be affiliated to Anna University or something maybe they can Yeah, if it helps in your placements or anything like that was also good to hear was that people have these questions in their minds as well Yeah, sure I am Dr. K. Muthulakshmi associate professor triplet department comrades College of Engineering College I took in charge as a SPOC This semester only before the doctor is Naag Lakshmi was there So in in this semester more than 300 400 students enrolled and we got scholarship for 290 students and 130 students have registered Seven students got I think the number shown is five I think it's number seven including the April 2,000 in top us especially the subject electromagnetic theory and finite element Elemental resist in the mechanical department and technical English for engineers even the first-year students even the first-year students enroll for technical English and got ranked and One thing I have to mention that in our college More than sorry out of seven five faculty members got a light-plus gold five faculty members got a light-plus gold and They sit with the students the faculty members sit with the students and they solve the assignments and our management and our principals are encouraged my set that is SPOC to Enroll more students and participation is Important that Encouragement from the principal service more for getting this activity and Are you participating in the forum? Do you ask questions in the forum? No? No, we are not because As madam Bharathi mentioned we have continued we are getting males more than 50 males every day We are to concentrate not in the SPOC forum. I'm in the course forum Faculty members I was so ends a enroll for electromagnetic theory, but I'm not able to solve assignment Because I have to collect the details from the department coordinators and I have to upload the details I don't find uploading the data any difficulty in uploading the data or nothing else, but I have to collect the data that that Face difference difficulty, but you have introduced one Think you know the student roll number college. So that will be easy for me You can also use the Google form idea that they are using so that students can enter the information Students not entering the difficulty I can and I'm very happy and proud to be a part of NPTEL. Okay. Thank you. Thank you Anybody else? Yeah, sure Hello, everybody. I am the SPOC from Pondicherry Engineering College V. Vijay Lakshmi So first of all, I could like to applaud the NPTEL team for the fabulous work, which they have been carrying out Such a wonderful work because they get about 50 males every day and the power with in which they I see with them is Instant incidentally within a few seconds. I get back Answer to my query. So that is it. So they have been doing such a wonderful work I don't know how they are doing the database management for about six plus lakhs of students Is it is it not and how they are managing the queries from? 500 Institutes a 500 local chapter and Pondicherry Engineering College entered into as a local chapter only from this year January 2016 and we have got about 600 students registered this time out of which 329 students took up their examination and We have got about six rank holders. That is a light plus gold and one student Narendra And he scored about 99 marks in data structures and algorithms. That is how I think the faculty members to say about it so and About the credit which you were asking of we are an autonomous institution So we have got apart from our regular curriculum the professional development courses for these students Are mainly being Taken up as a very important course because they have to update themselves so these professional development courses are these courses like the NPTEL certification courses, etc and We have actually taken up the 20 course as one credit course and the 40 courses certification courses as two credit Courses, so in that way we encourage them to take up your courses Okay, and that is the first point which I wanted to tell you people and I could really like to thank your Faculty research person over here say they have taken so much of pains in Presenting those videos which our students really enjoyed we also enjoy together and we have lots of discussion in the forum with them and One more thing is that certain limitations which I wanted to point out a lot Limitation like what I feel is that when we have a direct conversation with you people in the studio Why is it your audio too low? Is it do you have some attenuation of the signal level? Through the phone I'm talking about just calling us on the phone. Yes. Yes all the time the other end We never receive your voice Just find out why is it landline the landline number and I think one of the colleague from Gurgaon already pointed about the question paper that was a problem So if you could make it available after the end of every course and the other main problem Which we faced that normally you say 18th July like you say this the last date for registration of a particular course Then after that you give an extension for the registration I think most of the SPOC could have faced this but the course start before that So the students who are registered registering late will be have will have a problem in catching up with the assignments So if you could solve that for us Yeah, so that's why we are stopping enrollment this time on July 18th, but you know what will happen You know what will happen the faculty here There will be a mail from some student to a faculty member who's teaching the course Desperately saying I really have to do your course and then the faculty will forward that mail to us So we really have no choice. You know at that point. He said, okay, okay enrollment extended They want more day or something so that so there are factors beyond our control But yeah, that's a that's good feedback. We've tried to do it this time. Will we stick to July 18? Yes, apparently we are going to stick to July 18 If we stick to July 18, then there's no problem But one more issue I'll point out some of the colleges across the country do not open by July 15th or 20th apparently I think in the south we open mostly I think some places West Bengal apparently Yeah, so in Kerala, it's August 1st So we've been you know, we are fighting this a lot, but it's very hard when you go across the country There's no common timetable that anybody follows. It's impossible to follow You know Bengal for instance, everybody is out for like one month in October Pooja, etc. So things like that come in in the middle. So it's very hard to have one calendar We will try this time to stick to July 18th. Maybe let's see Separate Excel sheet for one Excel sheet is for Excel sheet is during for the registration of the examination. So these Yeah, these two Excel sheets are different quite in the other the data entry if you make out one Excel sheet for us Then for the students who are not registering for the examination Probably we can delete out the names and just forward it. Otherwise it becomes mandatory like Preparing to Excel sheet separately becomes very cumbersome for us Thanks a lot Thank you. That's very comprehensive feedback. Thank you Anyone else who has maybe used it so extensively as somebody In the back Yeah, I just hold on one minute. It's not I'm SPOC from SSN College of Engineering. I have two more suggestions Some of the PPTs can be uploaded in the local chapter that can be presented in the classroom itself by the class teacher That will be more benefited by the students I'm sorry, just didn't understand the presentation that we are making I mean, okay, so the presentation that we make the slides that you want How to how to do enrollment how to do these things Sure There is a entry You are saying that the drop-offs. Yes, college name is there. Yes when college name is included That's will be repeated in the local chapter of log in spoke log in that will be more benefit Students enrolled. Yeah, suppose five students or ten students or maybe when they are enrolled that will be reflected in the SPOC login itself so that we can know more how many students without conducting students That is the plan we have introduced it now. We'll add that. Yes Thank you I think there was a person Good afternoon. I am SPOC from a coastal engineering college Only we started only from this semester January 2016 So we thought of it should be purely student centric because we are from so soon, right? So we have to check however students are so we left out as it is they have to taken by themselves But anyhow the number of enrollments are good Even our students registered around 500 But due to our academic schedule, they I think they didn't do as they are So this is our feedback so we Felt like that and even we secured a six gold medal that to from only from technical English Nothing known is received from core site really We are shamed for that So but we have to work so from now and also we felt that From SPOC login now we have a right to check the statistics of our students even in intermediate, right? so here Statistics Performance statistics we can check Now we have a Forum for that so we can even give a trigger that is essential for our students that we know so We have to aim for higher Really we have to appreciate and NPTL to share you are all the coordinators to share their Valuable Outcomes to our students really we are happy and I should be very proud to be the part of this Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much Just to clarify the mentors can see the progress of the students not directly in SPOC the mentors who are registered for the course can see Sir mentor side means whether our students can because in the previous Previous semester, it's like our students can take any mentor throat Our students are very brilliant So Yeah, so we'll work on that we can talk about it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much Sir, I am Biju Dharma Balan. I'm SPOC of Marathineshya College for Advanced Studies Thiruvallam Actually, we started this local chapter last year, but unfortunately Apart from myself our students couldn't register for the exam because it was overlapping with the university exam So one of the suggestions I have is if we could give two or three Exam days or for the students it would be useful another thing is if somebody Disqualifies who didn't get a minimum marks. There should be a second supplementary exam So that the students Okay, so just to reiterate our exams are on two Sundays two consecutive Sundays in the afternoon Okay, that's where our exams are. It's really hard to do more exams than that. So that problem is Some of the Sundays we have allowed to Kerala, especially our I'm from biological science. It is in very remote place So the center I I participate So centers. Yeah, I will give the city name the exact center and the city is chosen by Because the center it is given as it is given as coaching I know the college is very far without any what you call public transport conveyance There is no what you call a restaurants for taking food nothing. No facility was there. So it was a terrific Center because I myself participated in that Feedback that you have to give after the exam, you know very important And we have to give it back to them and they have to figure out what the centers are and then sender itself But there was a lot of noise from the air conditioning and they are not willing to switch off that So I mean, please please keep this in mind. It's very important for us to hear this feedback about the exam Another thing is in biological science course, which I took the audio This player clear. It was not clear. Okay, no video video is good But the audio output was for the course lectures. Yeah, okay So this is another thing which the SPOC login has I think even the mentor login has Every mentor can give feedback on every week's content Okay So if you log in into that local chapter if you go to NPTEL dot ac dot in slash local chapter and you log in as a mentor You can give feedback on lectures every week Okay, and that feedback we will faithfully take it into give it to our studio people give it to our faculty It can be any kind of feedback. You can say this week's content was very advanced Our students could not follow what were the exact difficulties that level of feedback You can give and in fact, I would I would say very frankly, I think that that part is being underutilized by mentors Okay, as a mentor if you're tracking the course very closely with your students, please go and use that forum to give us feedback Okay, so that will help a lot this kind of thing can be pointed out like in the first week of the course So we'll be happy to take it But please please give us that feedback because it's very hard sometimes to figure out what this yeah this gentleman there Okay I am pro-selven from Sri Ramakrishna in College Coimbatore. I am representing in the form of students I've asked that they want one more day for the examination dates three three days because this year that is we have started in the year 2016 February in our local chapter in Casey in SRCZ, but unfortunately Nearly around five eighty-nine students have registered for the examination Both days comes fall under the examinators of our students. They are not able to write the examinations So they are asking one more day Instead of two days, they are asking one more day in addition to that some of the students they have studied in the IIT's Now they are studying M Tech in our college. They want a full scholarship. That is a thousand rupees hundred No fee because what they have studied in IIT's either IIT medros or IIT hydra back They are asking that and also some students of Some other right lawyer category a CST. They are asking a full way for the examination fees This is the request from the students side. I am representing for that. Thank you Thank you. Thank you. I am thanking you all the NPTEL members It's a very good opportunity for the students and all the faculty members utilize their Benefits from the NPTEL NPTEL team. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. There are six faculty here You know if I ask them three question papers, all of them will run away Anyway, I mean that's good feedback But I think the September exams are much better that way I think the main exams tend to be very close to the university exams We try our best to manage. We will keep trying. Thank you Hello My self is Dr. Malikarjun Angarge working for Karnataka Arts and Science income Actually, we have joined NPTEL in the last semester only only 45 students have been joined the course But unfortunately our students have not performed well But anyway that awareness regarding the NPTEL courses actually our colleges located in a remote place and Just I asked Bharti madam that around 300 colleges are affiliated to Gulbara University Kalu Brugge, it is in Karnataka State So what I would like to ask you that Suppose the NPTEL team if you are ready to come to that area or at least from the through the universities If you are trying to reach the traditional colleges, of course, I am seeing here almost all they are belongs to the engineering colleges I am belongs to a traditional Arts and Science Commerce College But we have introduced this course in the last semester and four student have successfully completed the course among 40 43 So my intention is please either you have to permit us to make an awareness camp in our college By calling all the traditional degree colleges those who are at least they should know what exactly these courses and These are very important courses. We are very thankful to the NPTEL team You're taking a lot of effort and you have reduced the lot of gap and expert teacher you are bringing to the rural areas So this is actually an image already vision what I learned it and we are very happy to say that That IT Mumbai has recognized our colleges and a super center for running the first courses We are running very successfully that around 700 students have passed very with high percentage like that that is But that is different. We are only with computer science things are going on But in generally if you want to reach in all the subjects this Workshop is that courses are very very helpful Please either permit us to conduct one organized one workshop there If with your support then it is possible to reach all the rural area colleges. Thank you Please make a request to NPTEL at ITM. We will we will definitely consider it Yes, I am Pradeep Kutta from Veltek high-tech engineering college SBOC. I Have three queries first one exam dates are fine. All exams are falling on Sundays. It's very much Helpful to students but exam timings two to five. It's odd timing. So can you change it to ten to one? It will be useful because after five o'clock girl students reaching from last time TCS Karapakkam is a exam center reaching back to home. Really. They took two hours and the traffic Eight o'clock they reach home. There was so next time Girl students may not come across to write such exams So ten to one is a My session and second one as Pondicherry College madam told Excel sheet Date of birth format is not a DDMM yyy. It's a MM DD yyy yy month date and year So students obviously if you ask data birth they will write in a date month we are format once I do that In the scholarship needs to their name won't come. It won't match that that's first thing and Okay, sure and excel sheet one more thing Let us take example language and mine is a course name if I type language and mine in capital letters and upload the Excel sheet it shows a row row number 13 error Because as in the excel what courses they have given exactly I have to copy and paste if I give Capitals or a small letter it won't take I have to copy and paste every time so little Visibility good should be given for these two. Thank you. Sure. Thank you Yes, hello, sir. Yeah, just a remark about the exam time so two to five We Came to after a lot of thought because some people travel from say Pondicherry to Chennai sometime to write the exam So it's harder for them if they do 10 a.m. In the morning, so two to five I think this day and age 5 p.m. Is not too late. You're saying, okay, so maybe from there all the way to already We'll look at it Myself Ganesh Prabhu from Coimbatore Sri Krishna College of Technology, sir We had a great experience last semester. We started with last semester only. I mean from January 2016 and for SPOC for mentor to settle down with the responsibility it takes some time for me So we are not in the table actually That's what I'm pointing out. But definitely in the next coming. We hope we will have Topper we try for a top and none of the thing is the timing and all I will accept the exam timing. Okay Especially day Sundays, okay, but we can plan for a December month or May month Totally that month will be a vacation month for the student. So when we have a two couple of days Optional days for during that month and a semester wise it is very useful for them to sit and study before exam Because other than that they will having a lot of commitment in our in our institution We are having internal competent for 40 marks So it is very well dumped at the students are so hopefully if we have a in these two month They are in vacation they can utilize properly and they can get good marks also Other than the timing and everything it is good. Okay, and another one-month thing From the student point of view Whenever we say it is a free of free for learning and we will give the space for learning everything NPTEL is doing great thing free for taking a course in a free is a very great thing but While they come for a examination while they approaching for the examination thousand rupees 1200 like they are they are talking they are discussing like that. So If possible we can reduce dues to some other we can reduce from their point of aim talking So they feel it is a huge amount everything is free, but for examination. That's why they are date not taking up the examination So this point I want to convey to you if possible Do for a favor for the students and really appreciating for the NPTEL team When I am studying I am not having this facility. I feel now Very bad. So thank you very much. Yes Hello, this is Rajesh from Krakati Engineering College, Kakinada. So I have two requests One is after the course examinations are done Some Google docs have been being created to showcase the evaluation criteria of each subject so that also not to give the track of when the certificates are being released and when the marks are being shown all that Procedure is fine, but the evaluation criteria is changing from subject to subject I suppose. So that has to be informed to the students before the start or at least in the first week So that if they miss one or two assignments, they don't feel that the course is gone or the subject is gone So better to be informed earlier and second thing is regarding the active status for the colleges You have been appreciating the spark in the form of certificate But if it is possible to give a certificate in the name of the college Also, so that if you get to the college, yeah, instead of appreciation to the name of the person Anyway, spark requires a certificate in addition to that if College is being given with a certificate so that can be shown as a achievement of the college also Thank you, sir. Thank you. So one thing that nobody says is you know when the feedback for you know the kind of Teaching what kind of lectures are good? What kind of lecture? So I guess that is universally good. You're all very happy You have no feedback on this can be done that can be done Which is which is nice to see but also all these processes. I mean we are processing when we are noting it down Some of these processes are hard for us to change. Hopefully you will understand so dates for the exam and all that if We have exam in December our next run of courses start in January It's it's more or less impossible for us to get back into ship So and they're also December there are several universities which have exams in December's you just look across the country you'll see So it's very hard to change some of these things. We'll try our best. Just please please be understanding of that Whatever we can change will definitely change Pradeep Kumar from VIT University Chennai campus. So as you asked we are this this year onwards last year onwards We introduced a new curriculum. So in that curriculum, we have two credits for the MOOC So the students can go register elsewhere. They bring the certificate. They get the two credits But the demand is 30 hours lecture, but here you mentioned as 20 hours as two credits But our requirement is 30 hours to credits. You also have a 30 hours version. Yeah, it's obvious So obviously you can have that also and also we faculty members have a performance incentive So we have to have innovative teaching methods. That means for what kind of innovative methods you follow this This year for getting your incentive. So usually what we do is what I do personally is I just Endrolled for a course so far. I never seen any Python course even I have requested also in the request form that we need a Python course I mean actually Madhavan sir is taking now So I am going to handle Python code this semester along with my 60 students So he asked every one of us to enroll and we have a good participation. So in that context, I have some innovative things So thank you sir. One more query is since you announced the course on first June that you can enroll some of our students have already in the process of Enrolling now the mentors are giving their names now only so we are going to give the mentors list to you But shall there's already enrolled students can they be enrolled under their mentor? Yeah, yeah students can go to their profile progress page and so mentor page There'll be a mentor tab that will come they can pick mentor any time. Okay. Thank you, sir They can also remove the mentor Good afternoon, sir. I am Dr. Anbucharian Spock Valemi engineering college. Yes, Aram Nagar in our college. We have started in the last July 2015 to Father up to this for July 2015 to October our college secured five ranks Topper five top us and then for this time March goes I think nine top us in March course nine top us And then two in April goes so totally 11 top us from our college So in what we are following the online course certification online We give full freedom to the students to learn the courses in everywhere The accessibility is possible for students for hostel and why five is it is there in our college? The digital library the student easy to assess so for preparation is fully the student interest Those who are securing the top are we discussed with the top us the courses are very nice The professors are explained very well and for soaring scoring the low mark Somewhat the students told is a difficult to understand Sometimes the appropriation the uninvited examination told and then for I'm also get the certificate from Spock received the certificate one of the courses physics of material. Oh, okay. I Secured 61 mark but difficult to Score because the assignment only 50% from assignment and most of the questions are standard questions already discussed with the sir and this time we purchased the book written by sir, it's a very nice book and Very good feedback from our faculty members and the faculty also told that the lectures are very very useful sir for particularly for introduction research in our college 63 Stop and the students are totally enrolled. So this is a credit NPTEL So mostly in any commission in any we ought to represent the NPTEL unknown courses Most totally four hundred students are certified from our colleagues. So this is the With the help of the NPTEL we achieved all these things and then for for last time the Place I will discuss the wrong ones are for uploading and the Submission of the answer. So I will discuss with this. Okay. Sure. Thank you very much, sir And one more request is for mentor 50 students for mentor. So he said possible to reduce 50 students per mentor. Oh, that's the upper limit. You can have less than that. No, okay Thank you, sir. Hello, sir. I'm Ratan Kumar from Arbadev Institute of Technology So these NPTEL online courses is very flexible. I had a kindly stick to that flexibility policy Don't restrict it because the academic schedule throughout the India is very difficult. Like some staff said restricted To one date and all please don't do that Because opening and closing closing time of colleges varies So because of this flexibility only last time because of floods many Chennai colleges could not participate in this thing So I would request to maintain that It's a personal request and NPTEL was like always whenever we get a new subject We don't we are not able to buy books of a very high cost You go for NPTEL notes whether it is my first experience was wind energy conversion systems. It was the IIT Kharagpur Dr. Banerjee, I suppose I don't remember the name exactly still I have that nine videos Which I still I follow for that subject and all now it is PsyLab and I have downloaded this PsyLab NPTEL videos so all these things are there but the flexibility should always be maintained and dates Timings are comfortable, but dates we can have it like Preferably like in the month of November and December Thank you. Thank you Time-wise maybe we can take Two or three more we can take after that we'll go for lunch. Yes I am Dr. Shoshu Brahmaniam the lunch me college of engineering the first I conjured for the entire team so my question is Suppose it's a engineering is a four years course. I talk about the engineering So two years will be studying for the core later and next to two years is a advanced oriented. It is a industry oriented I think that some of the project will be added means very useful for the I Want NPTEL projects Possible means added. You learn like courses. Thank you Thank you. Good afternoon, sir. I am Madhu, SBOC from Sir my request is Many students are required requesting courses and softwares the software which are Nowadays HFSS math lab lab view They are asking the tools courses if possible Some students are asking us embedded system courses in edx edx the embedded system shape the world Their courses are like that those courses are very useful to enter the industries like that courses they are asking from the students and Students last time we faced a lot of problems Gathering the data how many students are and Restore how many students are interested to reach of the exam for that to make the simplicity we designed a website in our college college website. We are NPTEL local chapter is designed in that we are given complete information our department coordinator names and if the student wants to restore Registration login registration will be there if you want to update us of scholarship everything is there 10 hours courses if possible just Open that sir. I will show everyone Yeah, what the one college? Oh my god. So really what the one just type for the one I can show You're running out of time. So anyway, since you're asking we'll do once What the month Did I get it right? I don't know. DHA MN Huh? So you have a webpage for your local. Yes. Yes, you maintain everything In the left side NPTEL local chapter is there. Oh Okay, yes here and Local chapter in most in notification no local to me it will go to the local chapter website In most notification click there sir in that we are given complete 10 hours courses 20 hours courses if you are student wants a coast list enrollment scholarships Everything will be there only if you can get that are complete information on that and Department coordinators in when events through a subject mentors. We have to give the subject mentor list also, sir That's why you given there. Okay subject mentors and Videos we are not in the NPTEL videos there Okay, like that even just speak the event sir. We are having the Or NPTEL workshop on July 9th. Oh, yeah, July 9th. We are having the until workshop Okay, that's Very nice. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, we'll do one more and then we'll stop. Yeah Graphan, this is modern from SRM University. I'm up and Basically both the success and for NPTEL I was involved in initially with a NEC also starting and then Initiated thing and then now SRM How to sucks be successful for this NAPTEL is Yeah, only the faculties have to take forward once the faculty have to take it because they have to have the confidence that yes It's really thing as such so in SRM group. We are what we have done is we've asked all the faculty to do it There'll be always a little opposition thousand rupees and thing then we ask the management over the top score us the management will refund the Thing Wow We have our eligibility 75% the management will refund the certification course just to give an encouragement For the faculty to do is because they should be the one who should say yes This course is really useful because one person cannot tell everyone Another thing is you can involve the placement officers each college just because it's basically in PTEL What you link is it will link it only to academic you should involve the placement officers because they related which course at Least the final years they can use it for the resume as such with certification They can encourage the final years. So with that anyone went which course this okay This will be useful for your department placement or thing so that involvement and linking with the placement officers The SPOC has to link the have an interaction or thing as us because they're always the capital NPTEL Okay, it is mainly library or Academician will be involved not the placement officers. So that should be because Any student who wants to take he's just see what's a use? Okay. I've learned in my academic. So what's again? What's it's going to be if it either higher studies or we are carrier So that importance only from the carry development another thing is we are bringing from the semesters This is as a value added courses as such we are having as a separate carry development department So they are giving some value added courses every year every semester. So this Every department is taking one selecting one of the course and that is being given as a value added course in that One of the faculty will be playing across the Assignment or whatever video courses and a faculty will be giving a mentoring as such So they'll be acting as a mentor and as a guide for clearing the doubts as such So that we either in the Saturdays or in the after college hours So that instead of giving a separate value out of course, which is totally different Something which I had and added value combining your Thing as so that is the one thing you have to take it as such So all these combination only then normally what happens is I've seen in many colleges They buy the NPTEL address that is installed just in the library in just install it is not Steamed into the land network because a student going to the library It's always go to the library go and see the NPTEL will be a thing Okay, when it's streamed in the land the college labs or whatever department as whatever thing then you can encourage the students They take it up. So these type of things Involvement as such as to be done because everyone has to get me involved only then it will be taken thing Okay, thanks a lot. Thank you. So maybe one last thing with that will stop I'm Chandil SBOC from Sasuri Academy of Engineering Coimbatore First thing is you are collecting 1250 for the programming subjects. So why don't you make it a common fee for Like other subjects because the last time five students registered for Algorithm program subject and they got less than 10 or 10 percentage. So they lost money and Yeah, certificates. So second thing is this time you are opening the portal for registration and Payment so if you The SPOC can view the details register the students though those who registered in the particular course as well as the students who registered Online payment those who Complete the online payment if they are we can able to see the details means it will be very beneficial the odd thing is after the course run if you provide is the Custom papers as well as the answer key Then the students can understand why they secured Below marks and they can prepare for the next year course. Thank you. Sure. All these things are taken. Thank you Okay, so last one. Oh my god So I'm Shanta kumari from Rajiv Gandhi College of Engineering and Technology Pondicherry And I thank NPTL team for all their works. So I have just three suggestions One is for the student enrollment or the mentor selection Usually the mentor selection is done via the mentor email ID It was little bit. It was more confusing for the students to identify the list of mentors Especially for a programming data stresses. We had at least hundred mentors to search for their mentor email ID It was a bit confusion So it's better to publish their names along with the mentor email IDs The second thing is that I thank NPTL for providing us a nice certificates for SPOZ and and the mentors But these certificates They can serve their value if it can be used for academic performance index APS course So you please give a suggestion to MHRD so that that could be useful for our career wise and The last suggestion is that the courses that you are introducing are very nice and they are very good And they are rich in their content We also suggest to run courses that are literally with respect to the industry expectations That could be helpful for the students to directly appear for a HR Interview rather than once again going for a technical round those certifications. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much So I think thanks a lot the last thing is I know we have a little bit over time. Please bear with me. Please this is We're going to introduce the team behind the show think the people who are in the NPTL office who do all this work All the appreciation that you said is directed towards them. I think of course the faculty are also there So Barthi will take some time in introducing each one of them. Please do get to know them So I think many of you would have seen names in emails talk to us on phone calls or any other interactions So I would like you all to you know to be able to put a face to that name today We'd like to start introducing our team. We have Arpita here who is newly joined as Deepa was with us She must be a person that you're a familiar with as she wrote in the group She actually moved on to another organization recently So Arpita somebody who's joined us recently and she'll be working closely with the local chapters as Deepa used to Then we have Kanupriya who's joined us now. We'll be taking care of the portal activities here Then we have Kamala with us who's also working on the local come up on stage So we have she works basically on the local chapters Organizing workshops and also the text transcriptions that you'll see on the portal that is basically her effort and We are all we have a lot of sub teams also. I'll start introducing them We have Nagarajan Who maintains our servers does our infrastructure inside the office and the hardest copying he takes care of Then we have Muni Prasad and Gokul Shekhar who joined us recently So they will also be in this particular team We have the coding team that many of you are talking about what you see as the NPTEL website the NOC the local chapter And all the details within that we have a coding team Navin is not here with us today He's also moving on to another organization. You might have seen some mails from him He was the basic architect who's done a lot of the work, but he was ably assisted by Venkatesh Govindrajan Jason and Jeffery Anto is a new joining again who'll be with them We have our designers who's our brochures. You see the designs of many things that you see We have a booklet which we have produced for the 93 courses. We'll show it to you We'll probably be sending you all a copy of that So the person there is Anushree Who does all the designs for us and she's assisted by Sujin and She biology who's joined us recently. He's taking photographs so you can finish that and take it so Then the local chapter team that you all would have heard again names Krishnamini was with us again She's moving on so she's not here today with us Gayathri is here who has been with us throughout on the local chapter front She does entire integration and many of you would have interacted on various capacities Go to the center Mohana and Jason take care of the basic portal in the sense of publishing of results and Certificates and so on so Mohana is not here again, but Jesse is so Yeah, Punguly and Jitakar are new join is again with us Who will now be working on the outreach of NPTEL to various colleges and also on the local chapter front with you people We are trying to make the teams bigger because our volume is increasing. So they are Punguly and Jitakar We have Anita with us Maria with us who also work on transcription and subtitling and The local chapters again. We have Gokul Shekhar a new joining who is again joined us recently he liven Who again help us in various tasks and Then we have Jainty with us who holds the four together with putting all the question papers together She does the coordination across institutes for getting it seeing that it works on the TCS systems works with TCS on that front So she does that kind of for the last four and she's been handling that completely We have Lakshmi with us who you'd have again interacted She handles the portal issues anything with students changing IDs We're drawing from the core central link to the course doing all that stuff putting content out there That's Lakshmi on the stage Then we have a team of Surya Madhu and Krishna. Can you come on stage? Where is Krishna? Okay So these are the hands without which our office will not run They are they need to go to people that who will do anything for us, you know, right from A to Z They are the people to go to then we have our Accounts team. I think they're busy settling all your TA accounts that you'll be getting after lunch so we have Ganapati Inba there and Mr. Murli who's now recently joined us to again help hold all the processes together So I think you'll be meeting them when you get your TA settled and the most important the videos that you all see that Well, you all were appreciating about the video audio and so on we have the entire team here I know how many members are here. Mr. Kannan Krishnamurti hedge the entire team. He's been with us since I think 99 or 2002. I don't know. He's been here since long long ago He's still with us So he kind of maintains the studios that we have here He gives expert advice to the other people and so on he heads a team under him The team members are Benjamin She Balaji again, Ram Kumar Karthikeyan, Ravichandran Gomati, Shivajay, Prakash, Mohanarangan Karthik Bupati Okay, I left out Karthik Karthika So Karthi also helps us in various processes here. She Balaji you'd want to join us. Give the camera to I don't We could have never nice photo at least. Yeah, we have a coordinators probably I think we'd like a team photo also which we never got last time So we'd want the coordinators on stage. Professors Mangal, Professor Pratap and Professor Andrew So this is the IIT Madras NPTEL team that you see out here Who is doing all the work from the NPTEL office IIT Madras? Yeah, just to give you some announcements The lunch has come in it's been arranged. It's in the same dining hall where you'll have refreshments The tea is I think it has been settled. It'll come to the same tables where you all did your registration So after that you can actually collect your tea amounts from there. The entire team is again available to you Please come back and talk to us regarding anything that you want. Don't forget the certificates You have to collect for the main exams. There are buses arranged for taking you all to the gate outside We have two or three trips. The buses are waiting right out there Yeah, so similarly IIT Kanpur every of the seven IITs and IAC has a similar such team The team sizes may vary but this is the IIT Madras NPTEL office team. So this is