 Good morning and welcome you all. A very exciting moment for us at IIT Bombay where we are launching our own massive open online courses through the extension online educational service. This was approved by a committee long back under which we ran our courses on EDX and with that experience behind us we will be launching these courses now. For this brief ceremony I would like to invite the director, Professor Devan Khakkar to chair the session. Thank you very much. We also have amongst us the lead faculty members of the three courses which will be offered now. I am glad to invite Professor Vikram Gadre and Professor Uday Gaitonde please. Thank you. Professor Vikram Gadre as head of CDP is also the institute appointee for operational execution of all our online programs through CDP. So in that dual capacity also I welcome you Vikram. Thank you so much. I would just like to mention that this launch also sees the launch of three important online workshops for teachers. As you are all aware we have been conducting T10KT program for teachers but these are part online and part face to face through remote centers. This is the first time as per the recommendation and approval of the project review group we are launching these workshops for teachers online and the topics of these workshops is effective teaching and mentoring of students who register for online courses. So corresponding to these three online courses which we are launching today we are also launching three teacher training workshops exactly on the same subject. These teachers will be trained on how to handle discussion for a how to add explanations to difficulties that people raise, how to add additional examples and as suggested by Professor Gadre how to translate a given video lecture clip into an Indian language so that at the end of the course would probably have these courses available in multiple Indian languages. For the time being we will be offering them in English and Hindi. For the three courses that are being offered we have already prepared the Hindi transcripts our teams have prepared. We will also be launching courses on this platform from some of the partner institutions and faculty colleagues as per the guidance from the Standing Committee and Project Approval Board of the National Mission. ICRISAT is one such organization which offers courses in agricultural sciences. They were asked to do a pilot course and run it on the IIT Bombay platform to begin with before their larger project is approved. They are ready with the course and their course may be announced in two or three days time. Tata Institute of Social Sciences is developing a vocational training course on use of blender for educational animation. In fact the faculty leading that charge is Samir Shastrabudde who has ditched us and joined this but that course is getting prepared. We have a stipulation that unless a minimum three weeks of course material is ready and is reviewed by our team we will not announce the course because it could be very dangerous that once you announce the course course is not ready. So their course will be launched sometime during the month of February. Professor Mangal Sundar esteemed colleague from IIT Madras who ran NPTEL as many of you would know has offered to run his chemistry course introductory chemistry course on IIT Bombay X platform and as I agreed for the date of launch as March which is exactly the date on which Professor Vikram Gadre's course also will be launched. So with this brief I would request the director Professor Khakkar to say a few words and launch the site. So good morning and happy republic day to everybody just back from the other celebration to this celebration. So really a very auspicious day on which we are launching a very important initiative that is massively online open courses. There has been a big evolution of trying to use technology for education and I was told that when the telegraph was invented then everyone said that you know now you can easily transmit lectures over telegraph so there is no need for universities. Then when the radio came so then they thought definitely now the universities can you know close down because now all lectures can be delivered over the radio. Then when television came I mean you know there was much greater hope that there would be no need for teachers and universities and so forth and then of course there was computer based training CBT which went on for quite some time but I think MOOCs is something very different because for the first time you know there is a possibility of two way interaction because without some interaction with a teacher there is it is very difficult to learn and MOOCs offers this power that you know you may not have somebody in front of you but there are fora in which you can pose your questions you know you can interact with your peers and in some sense you know there is a person who can you know act as your teacher even though not full time. So I think that now finally we have a mechanism which seems very promising to be able to you know bring education to millions of people at a relatively low cost and that is something that is really needed for a place like India where we have a huge number of students more than 23 million I do not know maybe I am getting the number wrong 23 lakhs or 23 million I am getting it wrong but very large number of students there are a huge number of colleges and there are many teachers but I think this vehicle of MOOCs can supplement what is going on and I am very glad that IIT Bombay is starting off this and you know at least some of the best teachers of the of the institute are going to lecture in this program I mean all of them have multiply have won the excellence in teaching award multiple times. So you know there is good evidence that we have picked the right people to deliver these courses and their courses will go out to thousands of students at relatively low cost to the student themselves. So with those few words it is really something that we have been looking forward to for some time and I would like to take this occasion to launch the course I do not know what is the way to do it. You will have to click on you can just left click on the Mozilla tag it will open left click. Left click yes that is it instantly the site goes live now. Now yeah okay great. So any of you who are interested most welcome to log on to one of the courses I will certainly go and look at it. So congratulations to all those who have put in the tremendous work for me that left click did not take much effort but I know that huge amount of effort has gone in to come to this stage. So congratulations and all the best. There is a small animation which our animation team led by Kaumudi has prepared. So congratulations to all those who have put in the tremendous work. This is what they have done. It is also available in English. So the team prepared it very recently. So without further ado let me conclude this brief ceremony by offering a vote of thanks actually a huge list of people to thank to begin with like to thank the director for sparing his time. He agreed to come here after completing that ceremony and God knows if you have to go for another ceremony now I do not know but thank you very much sir for coming here. I am also grateful to all my faculty colleagues who have founded their time from their own busy schedule. I would like to particularly thank the three teams of faculty colleagues who had earlier helped IIT Bombay X to run these courses globally and now they are running these courses for Indian students and for Indian teachers. Professor Vikram Gadre who leads the Significance Systems course very unfortunately his colleague from IIT Kharagpur who gave the original course is no more late Professor Sen Gupta who was the P.I. for the T10KT program there. Professor Uday Gayatunde has been a veteran of teacher's training workshops and this time he is joined with his colleague Professor Bhandarkar and Professor Milindathri in both teaching the online course to students and also for the training workshop in thermodynamics and that course launches from now. I am also grateful to my colleague Professor Supratik Chakravarti who has joined me in running the global course and now joins me in running the teacher's training program as well as this online course. There are a large number of teaching assistants and course teams particularly for CS101 we had Nagesh Karmali and Firuza Aibara who actually helped to run even CS101 in blended MOOCs this last semester with Supratik in us and I have no doubt that there will be other colleagues like that in the other courses. The most important people I would like to thank on this occasion is a very large team from the National Mission Projects which have been working tirelessly for several months initially to work on the SWAYAM platform which the ministry had directed. Since SWAYAM is getting delayed they had to hurriedly convert a whole lot of things both in software and content for the IIT Bombay X platform. I would like to begin with Professor Kannan Maudgalyar who is the co-PI for this project and also the coordinator of all National Mission Projects. Unfortunately as usual he is either in Coimbatore or in Bhoj or some place not in IIT Bombay trying to spread the word but his contributions have been absolutely extraordinary in all the National Mission Projects. There are three advisors who at the very senior level advise us on various components of the activities. One is Mr. Avinash Aute has not been able to come single handedly he has led the team for the complete software development. In fact under his leadership Aparna is here. Yes Aparna and her team actually prepared the blended MOOCs platform which we used last year in CS101 and now the IIT Bombay X. Professor Prakash Vaidya who is actually an expert in embedded systems but he specializes in correct documentation and proof editing so he has been a source of inspiration to all our team. And last but not the least Professor Pradeep Verma who was a senior consultant in MHRD. He left that MHRD job to pursue his academic inclination by becoming an adjunct professor in IIT Kanpur where he is teaching management courses. We requested him to join us as our advisor part-time which he does now and he has been instrumental earlier for the Swayam launch and also for our variety of activities. We have several senior managers who lead individual teams. I would like to recognize them Dr. Mukta Atre who is currently in NIT Agartala with one of my faculty colleagues, Professor Belinda Atre. They are visiting NIT Agartala now. She leads our T10KT workshop team, Kalpana Kannan who leads our content team, Parag Tiwari. He is there. He is actually the project management office and also a technical lead on variety of issues related to this particular software and software management. Sajjan Dixit, he is the head of our audio video team. Jayashila Gayatonde who handles our accounts and makes money available from the projects. We have so far not had a single occasion where we had to go to DIN R&D to make for funds. So that way we are lucky. Rajesh Kushalkar who heavily led the Akash project and now participates in the clicker application development and incorporation of T10KT workshops. Shaukat Ali who leads the logistics team although he handles the Akash logistics. He is also in charge of all procurement related activities for the national mission projects. Satyajit Gopi who currently heads our benchmarking team. He has confirmed that our new site which is the last man I would like to acknowledge is Abhilash who is the head of our system administrator team and creator of the micro cloud. Very quietly by using an approval from the ministry we have created a micro cloud here and Gopi confirmed that it can handle up to 1 lakh registrations in one hour and also the online quizzes and everything. So we have run benchmarks to ensure that once we launch we do not fall flat. I would particularly like to thank the software team leaders and their teams. So Aparna do you have anybody else from your team here today? They are all working. She has come only for a short time she is going to go back to check minor things. But thank you Aparna to you and your team. Shweta the NME ICT software team leader she is also working she and Deepesh are working on the mass mailing. So you will be glad to know that apart from the press conference which has already carried the good word elsewhere. We are in touch with about 1 lakh teachers through our T10KT program. All 1 lakh teachers over the next 8 to 10 hours will receive a personal email giving details of these courses along with an attachment which is a notice for their students which they are expected to put up on their notice course. I believe that this mechanism to outreach is much better than just the press or something like that. So the teams are unfortunately busy doing that thing. Abhilash I have already acknowledged and introduced he has a team of several says admins. System administrators are called gods in our parlance because they only permit or un permit you to touch a machine. So they are important people for us. Content team Kalpana is aided by Kiran Kausla for the for the Hindi translation work. Kavmudi for the educational animation. Kavmudi is here she is the one who has made that ecologetic. And there is a young chap called Nitin Iyer. He is a very unique person. He spent so much time on the project that has not yet completed his own degree. So he is appointed on an honorarium basis for several things. But he performs a task that about 10 graduates would ever do together. So we are thankful Nitin to you and to your team. Bhairav is the artist who actually made that all the backdrops and everything. Thank you one and all and let us hope that this initiative goes out to lakhs of students in the coming weeks and months. Thank you so much. I am glad to offer a small memento for this. It is only an IID Bombay cup.