 So, I was telling you that this portal for example, there will be one portal for every subject that we cover and eventually I wish that there could be such portals for every professional subject that we keep. So, that should be of interest even for professionals who are working. However, for our limited purpose, can IIT Bombay run tell such portals in 12 different subjects? After all for each subject there will be one teacher like me and you can definitely assume that that teacher will be passionate, but that teacher is also required to work here just as you are all required to work in your respective places. How will you sustain this effort? Simple, all open source efforts are sustained by building large community and letting the leadership emerge within those communities. To that extent, I did an experiment in the last workshop for the teachers, the 650 teachers whom we are framing into these what you call groups and the task given to them official task was to give this contribution to the question back. The other task which was given to them is that ordinarily students would do some course projects and we would like your teams to do some projects, programming projects. Take a problem, analyze it, write programs for it and submit that just as the students you would like your students to submit, but this I had deliberately kept optional and I had said the time limit is 30th March, so we conducted the workshop in December, they were supposed to contribute the questions by end of December 8th, January 10th or something, but this was optional and this was to be submitted by 30th March, this was deliberate. I knew not all teachers will do that, but I also knew that those teachers who do it are willing to go beyond the call of duty. They are not looking at the certificate when they do that, they do it out of their interest and Mukta, how many project reports you have got, 25, 25 project reports means about 100 teachers, which means to me 100 out of these 630 teachers are willing to contribute to this effort beyond whatever was prescribed. Personally, I think it is a very good ratio, 100 out of 600 enthusiastic people who are willing to give part of their time to their, so what we propose to do is we will evaluate these 25 projects, we will give them special certificates for completing these projects and we will of course, include these projects in the program, but now I will be writing to all these 100 people saying that we propose the launch of the website for this computer programming course, typically the website has to be launched within 3 months of the completion of the workshop. So, you complete the workshop by 10th or something, we will be launching this website or the portal by about September. Of course, formally we have yet to receive the what you call MHRD sanction for the larger thing and so on, but that will happen anytime we have to purchase equipment, arrange for a separate bandwidth etcetera, etcetera, but these 100 people and some additional people that we would get through this workshop would form the kernel editing and supervising team for this board and that is how we can distribute the work. Similarly, from the coordinators who coordinated that workshop last time, some of them have show interest that they would be interested in continuing. I hope that some of you could also continue to participate, not necessarily as spending huge amount of type, but maybe coordinating some of these editors, because ultimately we want after all when something goes on to a web portal, it is publicly seen by the whole world. So, it is not just my institute or your institute, but the whole nation is involved in terms of its prestige being compromised if something bad quality or wrong both. So, we require that effort and that will be the group effort that will be good. In a nutshell then, I will conclude this talk by saying that the objective of this entire project approved by MHRD is to try and increase the effectiveness of teaching learning process that is happening in the professional education. Mind you, we are not targeting any quality enhancement of an individual teacher. In fact, I find that word in very bad test, quality improvement program, the QIP program. I mean, this is 30 years ago when I first participated in the QIP program as a teacher, but I told the then QIP coordinator that if I was a participant, I will feel mighty cheesed off, because when you say I am participating in a quality improvement program, that means I am acknowledging that my quality is not good enough. And as a proud teacher, I refuse to do that, but that is the wording that we have consistently used. I have changed that wording to say that our effort jointly, of course individuals will benefit and of course there is an enhancement. When I interact with you, in spite of my 40 years of experience, the suggestion that you will make will enhance my quality. That is the beauty of any human interaction. But the objective we have stated is enhancement of the effectiveness of teaching learning process in professional education. And I believe that captures the essence of our efforts or the objective of our efforts better. So this is an overall scheme. We have run a pilot. We have learnt a few things during that pilot, the mistakes that we should not do, et cetera, et cetera. By no means our knowledge is complete. There could be new problems that we may face, not just technology issues but pedagogical issues. And all teachers including all of you are expected to contribute by identifying the problems if you come across the problem. And I would like you to start thinking about this issue in a general sense. Unfortunately, this is not going to be a five-day workshop. And you know the reason? We could not get rooms for five days. I mean this is very stupid. I have finally announced that I do not care how much it costs. We will hire rooms in hotels or some other guest house or something. But we should have a five-day engagement. Specifically about this course you will notice we have circulated the course, the three-day organization. You will notice that most of the time is going to be spent in the labs. And the objective is that the lab exercises we all use a variant of Linux. So we, of course, use Ubuntu but you could be using something else. We use GCC as the compiler. We use one debugger. These are the basic things. But we extensively use Moodle as the learning management system. And we would like all of you to have hands-on on most of these things. Except for one day when you will be actually doing Linux installation and other things for which you will need to disfigure the existing system. We will be requesting you to come to the crescent building where in the library we have arranged these machines where you can set things up. But other labs will be conducted here itself. That is why we have these netbooks with you and we will have server connection through the internet. It is quite likely that many of you are not only familiar with what we are doing but might have a few things additionally to tell us and suggest us. Please do not hesitate in doing that at all. If you already know things, you can help others maybe who are perhaps not as well versed with Ubuntu or GCC or whatever. But if you already have tried something which you have succeeded in terms of both the conduct of this three-day workshop as well as suggestions for conducting laboratory sessions in the larger workshop which all of you will be coordinating. Please feel absolutely free to make your suggestions. And that is about it. I think I will have another ten minutes where I would now like to take questions, observations, comments, suggestions, thoughts, whatever you have. So it is all yours now. Or should we have interaction sort of delayed after you have thought about these things and participated for sometime here, maybe tomorrow sometime. Can we have an early tea break? I know what had happened last time when I had done a tea break in the larger workshop in December workshop. You will appreciate that that workshop is being conducted at all the remote centers. We had 22 remote centers. Now on one of the days when we were in a lecture was going on two vice-chancellors wanted to address these students. One was in Tamil Nadu. One was in Amravati. And of course it was a privilege so the vice-chancellors spoke because we can hand over control to any remote center. The vice-chancellor was seen and heard by all the participating 630 teachers. It was very exciting. But the vice-chancellor of Amravati University was so excited she started discussing her plans about setting up distance education in Amravati so that hundreds of schools and colleges could benefit. Now that's a very exciting problem. But that is not what these 630 teachers have assembled here for. And I did not know how to tackle the situation politely because honorable vice-chancellor is an important person and after she had found time to come here. So what I did is at one point when she had made some observation I said it's a very good point. I will discuss this with my colleagues. And madam will get back to you and I announced tea break because that was the most polite way of getting out of that situation. So tea break happened 20 minutes ahead of schedule. Immediately came an email from our coordinator from Pune nobody from COEP has come. He says please do not change the break times. Our vendor does not supply tea 20 minutes ahead after he has been told at 11 o'clock. So you might announce the break now but the participants will not be back again in time. So you can see that when you are doing something at 30 different places then coordinating has to be absolutely by clock, you know. You can't take pangas like 5 minutes or 5 minutes or whatever. Like you can't do in a classroom. So I am putting her in the same dilemma. Okay, may I suggest one thing? I think your break is at 11 o'clock. Let me put it this way. Some of the participants have probably come late and you may not have been able to complete the entire administrative portion. The administrative portion requires that all of you should fill up those tables because what we are trying to organize is that we will do all the whatever internal audit checking, etc. And tomorrow we will collect a huge amount of cash and reimburse you in cash itself so that you are not out of pocket immediately for that. Now that will require some work and if anything else that you need to know or do about your stay here I hope the stay is comfortable, your rooms and all are okay. Luckily we should also actually maybe we will invite Professor Kavi Arya to give the validity certificate distribution after all he gave us those eight rooms, additional rooms. But it's a regular manamari here on logistics. I don't know how it is at your places. Same problem. Part of the institution. Part of these. So in fact this is one question I would like two questions actually particularly because NITs are here for the first time in large numbers. Most of the NITs are not part of the ISRO as you sat but Dr. Chidambaram told me and Dr. Dekhne from BRC that they will all be part of a national knowledge network in a very short while. Is that true? I mean are you having a part of... They are providing 512 KVPS, 10 lines for each and every college. This I have been hearing for last five months. But now just now we have received that letter and they are now giving the connection. You have received a letter. No, they are giving the connection also. We are all engineers. So seeing is believing. No, the connection is established in one or two colleges. I got some info from IEM Kori Code which is nearby our institute. So I have contacted the NIC people who are going to implement this NKN. So I contacted him some five months back. So he told that it might be realized in March. Now it is May. And recently I have sent a mail to him again. There is no reply for that. I tried to contact him by phone, no reply. And I have also talked to BSNL people. They don't have any idea at all in Kerala sir. Very good. So in short, it only buttresses my feeling that there is no sense of urgency. It will happen but it may happen at different times. Yes, professor. Yes sir, I talked to Dr. Mani if they are in NIC Nidali regarding the NKN. So what he later said that earlier the institutions were used to pay 50 lakh rupees for the NKN connectivity. Now they are not to pay anything. Yes. So the latest approvals they have been made. Of course. And I asked him that what will be the implementation time. What he said that it must be as short as 15 days or 21 days. Let's see what will happen. I am in continuous touch with him. Keep fingers crossed. I will tell you our dilemma. Our dilemma here is that if at all, see there are timelines to be met for organizing anything. So take the thousand teachers workshop. Now the workshop we are planning what are the dates Mukta, 28th June to 10th of July. Now I have to enroll thousand teachers from engineering colleges. Should I not give them at least two months? That means my marketing or whatever you may call it must begin two months in advance. If I have to start on 20th of June, 20th of April the marketing should have begun. I can't begin the marketing because I can't even list the remote centers where I will be conducting this course 100% guarantee. Suppose I say XYZ Institute in that list and 40 people enroll there. And the great BSNL, MTNL, BARC, whatever, whatever together goof up and there is no network there. I am accountable to those 40 people who said that look I would like to do this course. You told me this. I can't do this. It happened in the last pilot workshop and we don't want to do that. We don't ever want to do that again. Last time in fact we had 970 enrollments. But because we had to cut down on the number of available resource centers, we could ultimately take only 650 or 70, 670 teachers, which is a large number. We are complimented because never before in the country a single IST workshop for 670 teachers has been conducted. And the teachers we could see from their body language and their feedback, they were extremely happy. They believe all of them that they have benefited. Hopefully it will reflect when they go back and teach. But if we want to extend it, we want to take care of these things. Actually another thing Dr. Kamal Bijlani is saying is that we can work on internet. If we have a decent internet bandwidth. Now in big cities we have up to 3 Mbps or certainly 512 Kbps all broadband that we get from MTNL or BSNL or even with these reliance or Photon Plus kind of cards. So we are going to experiment whether the AV works on those bandwidths. In which case you could just have an internet connectivity or substantial type in your institute and we are done. But this is the but. Suppose we decide to do that and we start experimenting. Then each of the remote centers after you go back, you will have to set up whatever is the facility required, whichever way broadband or whatever, connect it. We will have a running thing every day. Our team will be here who will be connecting on that application. But we have to confirm that things work. It will take at least 10 or 15 days. Only after that we will say that yes, this center, this center, this center, this center, no problem. But these two places, let's say Sherwood does not get bandwidth. I mean you will get only 56 Kbps on that reliance. You can't get 3 Mbps. Now 56 Kbps this will not work. But if you are on an ISRO network, things will work. The dilemma now is that the ability to freeze the total number of remote centers from which I can run the program. I cannot freeze that quickly enough. So this is a challenge and we will work out how to face this challenge. But I am very clear that unless we can definitely identify and have enough time for teachers to enroll, we would not like to run that larger workshop. Unfortunately, that larger workshop running does not require any accommodation or anything at our place. But it requires facilities and labs at your place. And you can't do that either during a running semester. After all this, during a running semester, the facilities are occupied by your students. So first thing is to note whether your vacation time and hour and general country's vacation time coincides or not. What we are planning is months of May and June in general and month of December. So first feedback I need is by and large R.D. is okay. That during this time the facilities could be made available to the teacher. And you are talking about accommodation in guest house and so on. During these months, is it likely that accommodation will be available for the participating teachers and other things? Yes. Because we expect about 30 to 40 teachers to come at any remote center. Larger than that, it's the organizational hazard. And that means about 15 to 17 rooms will be required where they have to stay. Later on in one of the action items, that action discussion, I will also circulate the economics that we have worked out. Originally, we tried to go by the IST rules. You know some 1,15,000 for conducting a workshop for 35 days and so on. But the first co-initers meaning that we conducted, we asked people about the cost. And they said, this is nonsense. We can't conduct a workshop at these costs at all. Fortunately, we neither have to charge the fees nor have to depend on IST funding. Our funding comes from MHRD. So I could convince the MHRD people that if I have to run this workshop properly, then I must be able to pay a decent honorarium to the coordinator there. Something to the technical assistants who will be there. It is not just the coordinator who will be doing everything. After all, there are 30 teachers coming, you know, established like, I have my assistants here, you would have your assistants. Secondly, the teachers who come. So what we said is, the IST, there is a huge cost in travel for the teachers. But we said if the teachers are within a certain vicinity, so we restricted the travelling allowance to be paid to any participating teacher. So I think some 1000 rupees. So that means you should be within a vicinity where 500 rupees will take you from your place to that college and back. And we said, we increase the allowance for food, stay, coordination, etc. So we will circulate a sheet of the current thing that we have done on the basis of which we got approval from MHRD for funding. So this whole effort is funded by MHRD. And the other idea is that for the remaining 12 courses, which were 10 courses we have to do, by the way it is incidental that we started with teachers from IIT Bombay and we started with me because since I have to run the pilot, I have to have a first-hand experience, so I offered this course. But there is absolutely no reason to believe that these courses can be taught only by IIT faculty. So for all the 10 courses which we will be finalizing by about July timeframe, and we will be circulating to all of you, what we want is what in our collective opinion is the best teacher in the country to teach that subject. The best. There may be 10, 12. So in this, again, I will solicit your feedback. So you might know a colleague, let's say teacher's thermodynamics extraordinary level. Like for example, we have people in every area like that, every IIT has it, every NIT will have some teachers, and every college will have some teacher like that. So we would like and it is possible that two or three teachers could come together and handle a particular subject. Because we really want, since this is a one-time effort, after all the contents, they may continue to get edited and added and so on, but the basic contents will come out of this. We really like as much contribution as is possible. And one new thing that I would like to sort of ensure is that the labs that you conduct at your places, if you can have a video camera and record some of the tutorials or labs that you conduct at your place, tutorials if you conduct in that classroom, there will be a video camera. But any additional contribution that your center can make, we'll be very glad to add it to the open source, saying this comes from Trichy, this comes from Maarangal, this comes from Hamirpur, whatever. Because the idea is to expose this larger number of students and teachers to different things that are happening or the ethos at different places. That's the objective. So, but these observations are good. So, May, June and December are okay months for you to conduct these things. And up to July, sorry, up to what date in July can you go? Sir, I am from Vhenaiti, Nagpur. So, for us, our schedule matches with IIT schedule. So, we absolutely don't have any problem conducting during that time. But our problem, one problem which comes is basically the teachers who will be attending this workshop. They'll be in and around Nagpur. That is, Nagpur University, Amrath University and people from Chattisgarh region. And many of the university have their own schedules which doesn't match with Vhenaiti. So, their schedule may start early, which is like first week of July, first July or second July like that. OIC. So, there is a chance that, so, I came to know that last time it happened that way that during winter session, the session of the semester of Nagpur University started early. It was clashing with our workshop. So, my suggestion is that 28th June to 10th July, so maybe this year we cannot change. But if it is advanced by say couple of weeks earlier, say next year. Next year, we are planning to hold up to four workshops. First to 15th May, 15th to 30th May, 30th May to 15th June, 15th June to 30th June. Taking two weeks in between. Means, there will be few days gap. So, we'll end on 30th June. The problem is, if you want to start on 1st May, there are many colleges in North India where the exams are not over by 1st of May. But here we are not talking of students. So, it should be possible for the principals and directors of those colleges to say if the teaching has completed, then at least I can spare a teacher to attend that workshop. That is the idea. But you are saying July 10th also could be… So, before coming here, I was just enquiring in other colleges. So, I haven't got a firm reply when they are starting. Maybe other professor from Nagpur, she can put more light on that. Within the first week of June. First week of? June. June? Yes. Students will be coming by that thing. Yeah, they will be informed. They will be… Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So, let me ask you this question. Even though the teaching will start, is it not possible for the colleges around Nagpur to spare a teacher for 15 days? Sir, it would be possible but depends upon… Difficult. But it depends on the authorities of the colleges. Given the compulsions of educational administrators, meaning that… Yeah, exactly. That college is your… So, it happens that like for local people, if they come to say VNIT, so one fine day, okay, some call will come from principal or someone, basically from the college, saying that, hey, just say, chhota saha kaha mein aaja ho itna doh gante ke liye aaja ho and then go away. Something like that. So, there is a discontinuity in the… Yes, yes. So, he is pointing out the disadvantage in our scheme where people from local colleges come. According to him, everybody from Nagpur should be sent to Kedarnath or some place wherefrom he cannot come back for any work. But at the same time, people who come from outside like… Yeah, yeah, yeah. And residential facilities are available at VNIT. Take your point. So, what we are planning to do is if we can take more people from say… Who are not stationed in Nagpur, who are not placed from Nagpur, then we have better chance of getting it done. Our problem is funding. Yeah. So, I think from Chhatsai Chhattisgarh or even say from Amravati, they travel to Nagpur. That is fine because they do not have home and other things. That is not a bad idea. When we register people, we will say, all Amravati people go to Nagpur. Nagpur people go to Amravati. We had a very successful centre in Badmira last year. Yeah. But they could not do it this time because in Badmira, the summer is very bad. Care, care. So, people like that could come to Nagpur. What do you mean? Nagpur summer is exactly as bad as Amravati. Yeah, they will learn. And for essential facilities, we do not have power. How is your power situation? I am told that power situation could be very bad at times. Right now it is okay. So, officially government has decided that Nagpur is load shedding free zone kind of thing. But they do not speak, stick to their promise. So, couple of hours like it may go. How is this power situation in rest of the country, by the way? In NITs, it is okay. But the rest of the city, there is some... We had a problem in Nanded last time. We had to give them extra funding for a generator. Okay. So... Hopefully. Okay. Now, at least the tea should have arrived because it is exactly... So, we will stop now.