 Okay, so I wanted to say a few words, usually very bad at these kind of things, but I didn't say what I wanted to say. So this is really hard to start, but I don't know if you've seen it, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but it's a nice line which I've got to begin with. So this was the end, I think this grandfather says to his friend on the phone, he says, grandson of mine knows how to cook very well, but he does not know why he has to cook. So I'm sure all of you are, I mean, very good TAs, you've been, you'll be wonderful TAs going forward, but, or instructors also, a couple of instructors here, you probably know how to do, how to be a good TA, but I think the question I wanted to answer a little bit is why should you be a good TA? So this course goes out as an open online course, and it's for, it's for anybody in the world to do it, right? And mostly students from India do it. And these are students, sometimes in IITs, sometimes outside of IITs, mostly outside of IITs, very few students from inside the IITs do this. And this is supposed to address the problem that maybe teaching outside of IITs is not really very high standard, or maybe the IITs have a better hand, better standard of teaching. That's fairly true, I think, on average. So people who maybe couldn't get into the competitive exams, right, very well or outside and still motivated would like to learn, they get an opportunity to get good lectures, top quality lectures, followed by assessments, followed by certification. And just imagine the kind of impact that it can have, you know, someone goes through this course, learns something, gets a certificate, you know, you can get a better job, get a better life, a family can be saved. This is kind of impact that, you know, reading a paper and getting citations for your paper, it's completely different from that. And that is my partial answer to the why question. You might also have other answers, I'm sure other people can put it more eloquently than I did. But that's the, that's the real reason, and I hope really you're motivated by that, I think you'll participate in this entire effort from NPTEL. And of course, we pay you also, we do pay you. So once the course is over, we get the instructor to say how many hours you spent on it and we pay the standard ICSR rate per hour for your contribution. So you do get paid, but really, I want you to think about the costs that we are doing this for, tremendous impact that it has on so many lives in such large numbers. I think that's something that's difficult to do in any other way. Okay, so I, please be very motivated and interested in doing this. So Chitra gave a very good presentation. She was a great TA for the last time. So hopefully we'll have more people contributing to this course. Yes, I don't want to say anything more in this sermon like atmosphere. So I'll stop here and I'll be very happy to take any questions or any of us will be happy to take questions from you. Go ahead. So that part, maybe, I mean, how many of you are computer science TAs? Okay, so maybe we can spend some time together a little bit after this. So I'll go through that, how to create programming assignments part with you. But she didn't do that, it was, so most of the courses don't require it, but computer science courses need that. So I'll do that a little bit later. Are we going by a definite deadline? So, yeah, I think those things are very important. Okay, so what will happen is the course is announced on December 1st, right? So what do we need by December 1st? We need the first page filled out by December 1st. So basically in the course dashboard, the settings tab, you go to settings and then edit, and then there are a few text boxes, I think course abstract, course instructor bio, the video, those things. So that is what you should do immediately, okay? And that should be available November 28th. And we'll start to look at it carefully, and then we'll make the course, and we'll enable registrations for the course on December 1st. And then we'll advertise the course using our own means to a lot of people. And people will start registering, the forum will become active, people will immediately start posting on the forum. Last time I remember when we opened the course, within five minutes there was a post in the forum. It's like, I mean, we didn't even advertise it to anybody. We enable registrations, so next fifth minute there's a post in the forum. So people, I know that just shows you the impact and how people out there are starved for high quality teaching and this is really the one good stuff for themselves. Okay, so anyway, so that's the first order of business. But once the course starts, the courses are going to start when? Jan 5th, okay? So ideally, I would say maybe a bit before that, we should release the first unit. Okay, so courses are starting on Jan 5th. You should release the first unit, say 10 days before that. Maybe December 25th is probably not a good time. Let's say Jan 1st or Jan 2nd. A few days before that, the first unit is, it's good to release the first unit a bit earlier. The reason is people are new to the system, deadlines, etc. They're going to be a little bit confused about what's going on the first week. So it's good to release it a little bit earlier. I would even suggest if the first unit is ready, release it on December 5th or December 10th. I mean, as early as possible. It could be up for a month. It's okay. I mean, let people look at it. They'll also know whether they can do the course. Is it at the right level? Is it too high, too low, etc.? So that is good for the first week. But after that, every week, ideally on a particular day, you should release content. So what do we mean by release content? So she was creating the content, units and lessons. And then she made it public, right? That's when everybody can see it, okay? So ideally, the content needs to be created sufficiently far ahead of time. And you will be making it public at that particular time. On, say, a Monday of every week. Week after week, you release the material. You make it public. Hopefully, the material is available for you sufficiently ahead of time, so that all of it is in private mode and you're just making it public. On the other hand, you might also be, you know, one once in a while a week might be very bad and you might be working Sunday night to make it, upload the material and make it public. Upload, I mean, after I sent you the videos. In usual days, it used to take time, because we were figuring out all the options. But after that, within three hours. Yeah, it does take three hours of time. It's not, I mean, after all the material is made available to you by the instructor, it takes time for things to upload, let's say they give questions, put it in activity and all of those things. So it does take time. And also, I think once you upload it for the time for students to see it, I mean, it has to be, it has to propagate through so many things. It takes some time for the regular login or it comes immediately. Immediately, for students also. Okay, maybe that's something they've changed, because initially it used to take a long time. It looks like... For instance, the moment you upload into YouTube, maybe it won't be visible on YouTube everywhere. But that's a... Okay, it's not too bad then. Okay, so I would suggest you have a schedule like that. So if Monday you want to make the lessons public, it's good, I think, to have the lessons available with you at least one week ahead of time, so that you have that lead time to prepare it, go through it, and then make sure it goes out there. The thing that is most important, I would stress this once again, is it's very, very important to avoid errors. Any kind of error, typo, simple error, complicated error, whatever error you have to... It's absolutely important that you avoid it. Okay, it might be inevitable sometimes. In the worst case, it can happen, but if there is an error, it causes so much complication going forward. So what is good practice in my opinion is, is to have one person create the content, and then another person check it. And you can alternate that week to week, so that the load is balanced at the same time. This goes through two rounds of checking in some way before the content becomes public. Because once it goes public, it's just so complicated to undo things. Because somebody would have seen it, and he's not gonna go see it again. And then that's it, it gets... It's very difficult to undo. It's not like a regular class where you can just call everybody and say, you know, what I said that day was wrong, just scrap this step and change it to this. It's very hard to do that in an open class. Sir, one thing that cannot be undone at all is, let's say you have posted an assignment with the wrong answers. Whoever has submitted it will be graded against the wrong answer. After that, even if you correct it, that person may not submit again at all. So particularly for assignments, this is incredibly hard. You have to go to the student view, I think that's what I'm doing. So one of the tiers was always going as a student, entering all the answers and making sure that it was correct. They would solve it independently and then check it against whatever is programmed into the... And then change it again if needed. If needed, yeah, before many problems. So that's a good idea. So what I would suggest is you also register yourself as a student in this course. You have the course admin login. If it is private, you have to do it as your... Yeah, course admin. You can't... Yeah, so there's only one course admin. I think it's not a good idea to have multiple course admins. Maybe, did you have more than one course admin already? One share the ID, that's all. Yeah, so I think that's good. Just share the ID and have one course admin ID. You can register yourself as a student and then have the student view just to make sure that everything is coming out correctly. And... When's your Thursday? Oh, yeah, that's the other thing. So you have to set the deadline for assignments. Okay, so every week, ideally, what we are asking faculty to do is to release at least one assignment. Maybe there'll be multiple. Typically in a computer science course, for instance, there are three or four programming assignments every week. So every week, you have to set a deadline. Okay, so when you release the assignment on a Monday, it's good to set the deadline as the Wednesday of the next week. Okay, so why Wednesday, why not Monday? It seems like better to have it on Monday. So many students don't have computer or internet access in their houses. So they rely on their college for internet access or coming to the college for internet access. In many cases that happens. It's surprising how big that number is outside of big cities. Cities are different, but outside of big cities, that number is very big. So you have to give them that two, three days in college to finish the assignment. So that's why Wednesday is a good time as opposed to Monday. So that's a good schedule in my opinion. Week one, material release on Monday. Deadline is week two, Wednesday. Invariably you'll see in the forum, people will say all kinds of excuses. Of course, there can be very natural excuses like there was the cyclone and Vizag, for instance. So people cite very legitimate reasons. You'll have to extend the deadline and you can do that. You just go to the assignment and change the deadline. That's of course the instructor has to make that decision. But once the decision is made, it's possible to do those things also. But typically this is a good schedule to keep. So if you do that, then you start on Jan 5th, according to our calculations, an eight-week course will end on February 28th. That's the last release of material. So that will be the last date in which you release material. So the course, entire course can be wrapped up by March 15th. And our exams are going to be on March 22nd and March 29th. So these are the exams in which students will come. It's like gate, they have to come to a center, computer-based exam. Then based on that, they get a certificate. So the whole thing is, I mean, it goes on an exact scale. So for instance, you know, with TA work on campus, I don't know, it depends on the instructor. Some instructors are very strict about keeping the timeline. Some instructors are quite relaxed about TA work. But here there is, you know, there's no slack. It's just, it's good to, it's very important to stick to the time. You miss one week, it's going to become a big mess. It just adds up. And remember our exams on 22nd and 29th. There's no way we can change that. That's with those guys there and they have their own plans outside of that. We cannot change that date at all. So everything has to be over. If you miss something, that's it. It's missed. Can't go back and fix it. We have a certification and writing exam. Yeah, so that's the next thing. I think, I mean, these questions, I might ask as a TA, you probably don't need to know the details of the administrative issues, but you know, students ask these questions in the forum. The forum is full of these kinds of questions. Or how is the certificate given? What is the certificate? What will it look like? Et cetera, et cetera. So it's good for you to know it so that in case there is a question, you can answer it a bit authoritatively. So the way we decide certificates is, like I said, anybody can register for the course. We've had school students register. We've had old people register. Anybody can register for the course. For the certificate, you have to come and write the exam. And usually there's an eligibility. So this technically can be decided by the faculty, but what we're going to propose is, you give about 50% weightage for the assignments on the online course. And then 50% weightage for the proctored exam. And together if the score crosses a certain percentage, which we are suggesting should be 60, then you get a certificate. You can earn the certificate. So you can see, I mean, so while I say assignment, et cetera, in a relaxed way, it really affects whether or not a person gets the certificate. So there is, I mean this, so as T is you have to get it right. You can't make mistakes. Assignments score is wrong. And because of that, somebody doesn't get a certificate. It's just not nice. So you have to get it absolutely right and not make mistakes when you've set the assignments, et cetera. Is that clear? And the certificate is usually issued by the IIT that is conducting the course. And yes, the logo of the IIT will come on the certificate. Assuming that we're doing a completely theory-based course, that's purely just lecture recordings. What would a unit and a lesson look like? For example, what if I'm doing something like post-tructuralism, and I'm going to be talking to the camera about what this is all about. Would that be the unit and the other set, yeah? Yes, that's it. So the course, which is, which is intended to be 20 lectures, it would have 20 units. Yeah, one hour is roughly a unit. And presumably you might want to split that one hour lecture into, say, three or four segments just for easier consumption. And that's the idea. So then the 20 units, there'll be only eight units. For eight weeks, no? Right, okay, okay, so that's how it works. So eight weeks, you typically have eight units. Each unit will be eight. So it's up to you. So for instance, one week, you can release three units if you like. So it's completely up to you. If you want, you can keep the unit as three lessons. Some people, I mean, you saw, I think Nagendra and some units, that's two units? Every week. Okay, so he was releasing two units every week and maybe one and a half hours per unit or something. And it changes from instructor to instructor. These are all completely flexible. There is no point there. But I think good things to keep are this, like 12 minutes, 15 minutes. Those are the end of the day. The internet connections are not that great. You go outside of the cities, only in some place you have it. Maybe you have only a dongle or you're using it using a mobile device for it. It's good to have smaller videos which can be buffered better, I don't know. So somehow it helps if the videos are small. Maybe the sizes are small. People can distribute it on sticks or something. They just like it if it is small. Eight weeks and we are suggesting not to do more than three hours per week. So average, we are expecting two and a half hours per week. So that comes out to 20 hours. 20 hours is half of a course that you have here. That's the idea. So you can do only half of a typical four credit course or three credit courses. Fully, completely, by the way. So in case now we have some issues on Sunday evening while uploading, would we contact? I think we have not had any issues on the portal. Absolutely no issues. So far. The first time it was completely experimental. Right now we can ask her. I think the portal just never fails. Only thing that was fail is, at one point I think the DNS lookup from our server here was failing. So invariably it just never fails. So we can give you also the IP address or the other URL. I mean this online courses.nptel.ac.n is just pointing to an appspot.com URL. And we can give you that also so that you can always have access to the portal. It will just not fail. Chances are almost roughly the same as chances of Google failing. So it just won't fail. Those things are, I'm not, so that you ought to still ask. I think they're working on that last feature. It's not automatic. So you have to create the programming assignment and then ask for a Moussak update. So I'll talk about the programming assignment separately. So we have to release two and a half hour, two and a half hours of video lectures per week. Yes. Yes. Total. I mean two and a half average. So you might have a two hour week and you might have a three hour week. So it's a duration of one video lecture. Okay, so two and a half hours of video lectures. What do you mean by duration of one? You can break it up into lessons and we are suggesting a lesson time of 15 to 20 minutes. So, but that's again, I mean, it's completely flexible. Some instructors don't like that. They say, okay, no, this unit has to be 45 minutes. And it's fine, I mean. You can't do anything about it. I'm sorry. Yes. In assignments, what about the numerical problems? How do we handle them when step-by-step marking is required? So you have to split the problem into multiple steps and create multiple problems. That's the way. Must be multiple questions. Just like gate does it. Gate can get for multiple step questions. They break up one question into multiple questions. So you have to do that. Better just to make like MCQ, multiple questions. MCQ is one choice. You can also have numerical answers. So you can check with a range or exact numerical possible as possible. Only one answer should be there. Only one answer is for multiple choice. Multiple choice are possible. Yeah, you can have any number of choices. We have to make assignments like that. Objective type assignments, yes. Either some answer or that. But, okay, so let me step back a little bit. For technical courses, that's how it's going to be. For programming courses, that's how it's going to be. For, say, humanities courses, you can have essays. Nothing stops you from asking the student to fill out an essay. Now then you have to ask, how do you grade it? So there are two options. One option, if the numbers are small, if you see that there are only like, some, say, 100 submissions and you have enough TAs, have a lot of energy to look at the essays, then you can simply ask them to look at the essays and grade, I think. Is that possible? We have to ask them to mark the essays. So you have to figure out, individually they're probably marked. I mean, if it says, I don't know how they mark it. This is complicated. The other option, if the numbers are big, it's gone to thousands or something and you can't expect a few TAs, you have to be able to grade it. The other option is to do peer review. So in peer review, among this thousand, questions are graded by each other. So it's like, say, you have a class of 40, collect the assignment sheets and then randomly redistribute them and get the students themselves to grade it. And each, each question, each order of assignment can be graded by multiple students and you have ways of aggregating this course. And studies have shown that this is a reasonably good practice to get good scores. But I don't know. I don't know what the answer is to that question. It's a very hard thing to say, but yes, you can have the answer as a text box in which a person types an essay or a description or a definition and it's graded on an individual basis. I think it's possible. I have to get back to you with more details on that. But ideally, I think multiple choice questions cover a fairly wide range, I would say, and I would definitely encourage people to have multiple choice questions to at least reduce the effect. But if you think essays are needed, then you have to worry about the grading. We are selling out emails and hard copies on our 80 meters, they want to do them on their groups, their institutes, their reading groups. Yeah, okay. So yeah, so we'll, so for instance, so there are some popular courses for programming and all that, lots of people sign up. It's a popular for obvious reasons, but for humanities courses, for instance, I don't know how many people sign up and those are unknowns. We have to venture into it and find out. And if you have resources, if you have networks, social networks particularly, all right, that's the big push here. If you have social networks where people kind of discuss these kind of things or you think your friends group is big enough, you have a million friends on Facebook, then you can advertise the course on your portal also. So we're going to send what some Facebook post from the IIT Madras Facebook page will come. The other IITs, it will have Facebook. But if you are friends with the IIT Madras, how many of you are friends with the IIT Madras? Nobody gets updates from IIT Madras. You should become that. So IIT Madras, whatever official posting they make, you will get that. And then you can like it and then all your friends will see it. Facebook page, you should ask them to post it there. They do that here. About 1,000 colleges, we are making a print of all these 10 courses and we're sending it out to them. So if you all have specific mailing groups, for instance, Professor Rajesh was telling me that there's some group wherein you have these and you can send it out to them. Or you have the other colleges, you can do that. You can ask us for brochures, which is print also and if you want to mail it out, you can. Or give us the addresses we can send it out from there. Yeah, the most colorful poster that was ever made. So enrollments will close on Jan 16th. Yeah, so that's about 45 days. So typically for very popular courses, we average about 1,000 a day, right? Raffi? For computer science courses, that's how it goes. So you're looking at those kind of numbers. So numbers are big, but you know, not everybody who registers will participate very actively. So the forums are dominated by a few people and it's nice to see them. Okay, anything else? So let me see, just show off hands. You have TA4, you have TA4, which course? Which one? Oh, cheers, okay. You are from Kanpur, sorry. What about you? History of English language and literature. I'll show you that. Oh, from the humanities, yes. Same. You are the instructor for the same. Yeah, I know you, I've seen you. I've seen you in church for all these years. Oh, okay, what about you? Oh, that's the chemical, Arun Thangira. You guys are in computer science. All of you, all four of are Nareen. Okay. Oh, okay, the same way people are not here. Okay, okay. They had exams. So does that cover all the courses or? I think it roughly covers all the courses. So you guys are comfortable with what has happened here? No, I mean, if you want some more time, I'll be happy to have someone sit with maybe just the three of you, or maybe you can even catch Chitra, right? Do you know where she lives? Sorry, extension. Sorry, extension, oh my God, it's tough. You were probably in here, was it? Sharav Chitra. Sharav Chitra, okay. We have a office staff, she's Jainthi. We have sentin, Naveen, who are all attending. They'll all be familiar with the entire backend. So in case you need help any day, you can just walk into her office. They're all smiling at me. So you can walk into her office and they'll be able to help you with the initial things, you know, if you have anything. So I think it helps to sit down with someone. We are hopefully going to make a video of this thing and put it up also. So you will have that. And on top of that, anytime you need anything, just walk into our office and Bharati is always in our office, 24 hours. So you can catch her and ask her, she'll guide you through that. Okay, so the first few weeks, like she pointed out, it'll take more time, right? Definitely it'll take more time, but after you go through, it'll take less time. You have just one TA for the courses. One more, I think it's good to have two. You're also one. Okay, I think it's good to have two. Just for the reason that, you know, one person doing the other person checking is always better. Like I said, today was the selection of new PAZ MS and one more will come. Might come. So maybe we should supplement these guys with some people from our office, just at least for the verification and things like that. It'll help. I think having one more is very, very important. One person doing one person checking is ultimately better. You had two, no? For the first three, four weeks, I was doing TA, but then I got to more. But Chitra is a super TA, sir. She can do everything on her own. Hard for the second, I can tell you. Particularly in CS, I mean, you have four. Four is a good number. I think the effort is much more intense for you guys than for these guys. They are programming assignments, which is much more painful too. So there are like million things that'll go wrong, as opposed to you guys. Next, the thesis will be coming on. So in case of question formats, now that you know what is available, please let us know what you want to see here. If you need assignments from the Google thing, you have to tell us clearly what you want. As a question, as an option for the answer, for instance, the uploading of an image with the description, how do we incorporate or something, we'll check with them. We'll need it before the course starts. At least we'll have to tell them now, give them three weeks time to see whether they can tell us yes or no, whether they can implement so that you can change your formatting. And then we'll go to it. And second, the same thing has to be shared with thesis also to say that we need it in the final exam. Can you implement it for us? Otherwise you have to change your question pattern. So if you could give it to us, you know, ASAP kind of, then it will be easier for us to do it. Maybe I should repeat what you wanted. So if you know that you're going to ask a specific type of question, both either in the assignments or in activity or in the final certification exam, and if you think that format is not being supported by the current version of course builder, you have to tell us today, tomorrow, yeah, so somewhere very quickly so that we can get going. And we do have people who are quite smart about programming get back quickly, but it takes time, this process of changing a live portal takes time. So you have to tell us exactly what type of question you want or in some other new feature that you need. Sometimes we'll come back and say, sorry, not sometimes, most of the times, we'll come back and say, sorry, maybe, but not immediately maybe, but yeah, but it's possible. In the past we have had, we've managed to, for instance, Nagendra asked for a matrix type question quite late and that got pushed into the course quite quickly. So it's possible to do those things, but keep that in mind. Oh, they are going to say something, okay. We have, our exam partner is TCS and we have Praveen and Gautam here who would brief you through some of the steps that have to be done during the course and as preparation for the question paper for your two different exams, March 22nd and March 29th. There's also an intermediary, this one, where it is called a static question paper or a mock, where people, once they start going through the course, students would like to know how the question certification exam would be. So there is a dry run kind of, where they would like to see and then only register. From the past experience, we find that people who see the mock test, they feel, okay, this is something I can do, then they register for the exam. So in between, by around Jan 20th range, we would probably need to have this static mock also ready. And then we will work towards the question paper. So TCS has their own processes for the question paper creation and certain templates and lists that you will have to give them. And this registration we planning to open February 2nd and closes February 28th. So that gives about one month for students to register for the certification exam, which is for anybody who has enrolled in the course. Anybody can take the exam. And so they will just walk you through the process. Exam is 50% of the total score. Let's say it's 100. 50% comes from the certificate examination. 50% comes from the assignments course. We will bring it down to 100, yeah. Assignments course also, this time we gave some. I don't think that's a constraint. Okay, keep it as 15, give it as 50, or stay there. 25, 25, yes, yes. Anything. Actually, you can even say, I don't care. No, I don't care about the 50, 50, maybe I want to make it 70. That's right. I'll try and do it. I'll try to do it. I'll try to put it in just a guideline so that we don't be too much across courses. The person who's doing safe two courses and last we can do this. Every time if we keep changing the framework, he'll also get confused, what is this application criteria over there? So we're just putting in some guidelines, 50 or 50 of this, 50 of that, so that he at least follows the course and you know. All that's the portion I was interested in. Is it in 50 mark paper or 100 mark paper? No, that can be anything. You have a 10 mark paper, we knew it was going to make it 100 mark. We just bring it the piece. Also from the NPTEL office perspective, so I think we would be contacting you, teaching assistants to help us keep on track with this eight week schedule. So we will send you reminders to give us back certain things with the deadlines. We will be sharing that with you and we will share the templates in which we would want certain things from you. And for the announcements also, we have standardized templates in terms of when the registration is opening. Where is the registration links? All those things, which we will be sending it to you and you can post it on the forum. And for any difficulties with respect to the course builder, you can contact our office. It's just one more thing. On the videos that you're hosting on course builder, we would also request you to put it in the drive. The email ID, which is your faculty login for the course builder has been shared with the faculty. So we request you to put the videos, the final video, versions also there. We would be hosting that videos on the NPTEL server also. And as the course goes on, this also becomes a part of the NPTEL repository. So we will keep picking it at some regular intervals so that there is also a backup to the course builder. You can put the highest resolution of the video that you have. And if you have the assignments as PDF also, please drop it in there. Your Google account comes with a lot of other things. You have Google mail, calendar, something called drive. Keep the video file and put that on drive. So good evening everybody. So this is Praveen Sridhar from Tata consultancy service. And we are specifically from ION, which takes care of all the online assessments. And I have Mr. Gautam Kathigen, who is going to handle this project as a whole. He's going to be the national project manager. And so we take care of the assessment as a whole and he will be the national project manager for this assessment. So where do Tata consultancy service ION pitches in for this course is like? Our job starts once your course builder thing is done and once all your courses have been put and evaluation starts. Your certification, 50% of your certification value is from an assessment, which is a proctored exam. And for that, they have to come to a center where they're going to write an exam and it's going to be an online exam and they will be graded using that as well. So that starts from the application management part of it. So Tata consultancy service ION as a whole, we start coming inside from the application management part of it and our work goes till the results processing part of it. So and as a TA as a faculty, what are the responsibilities that you need to do? Because we have a couple of things which we require from your side as well for the complete process as a whole. And so there are around four diversifications which comes in as a responsibility of a TA or a faculty and all this will be clubbed into one thing called as your question paper. So for question paper, it is your responsibility to give us some of the data which we want and majorly we use around five jargons or something from our end and we will explain you what the jargons are because we don't want to go with saying the jargons like metadata file and we have something called as IAAC and we don't want people to scratch their head and say what it is, first explain us what it is and then go into it. So we'll start with giving you a simple term on what these things are exactly and then we'll tell you what IAAC means or a metadata file means and all this stuff. So this is like more of training the trainer's part of it. So this is a complete flow on how we are going to take this session forward. We are on five basic things what we follow here. First we start with the question papers software installation in your faculty system and then we go for the basic assessment template. We'll tell you what it is exactly. Then will be the metadata file which we'll explain you in a simple term what it all means about and then we'll be discussing about the IAAC software as a whole. This is ION assessment security center software as a whole. We'll tell you what it is also about and then we'll go for the timelines and thanks Dr. Andrew for alerting people on the deadlines as well because we work with a very strict deadlines because when we miss deadlines it is going to be giving us a very bad damage on the assessment part of it as well. So we want people like TAs and the faculties to adhere to the deadlines so that we give a very smooth performance on the operation sites as well. So we'll start with the first slide. So question paper software installation we call it as IAAC. So it's ION assessment security center. That is the software's name and a pretty large name as well. What we do is we will be installing this in your faculty system and that is the place where you need to key in your question paper and because we don't want to key in a question paper in just an Excel sheet and float it across and say this is going to be a question paper and all this stuff. So this is going to be a secured way of conducting an examination where we convert your question paper into a encrypted mode called as .igx format in our SLAM. And so we need this software in your faculty or TA system so that we convert the question paper into an unreadable format. So this software is all about that only. And what we do is we will be giving so a step by step procedure document we'll be giving it to you all and your faculties as well. And we'll be conducting a demo on an accepted date and once all the faculties accept on a date and communicate that to the NPTEL office we will be in close touch with the NPTEL office and they will be communicating the same thing to us. So we'll be arranging for a demo and I guess there will be three places where we are going to arrange a demo. And so that will give you a hands on on what this software is all about and what all steps you need to follow for converting a question paper into an .igx format. And the first and foremost thing what a faculty or TA has to do is fill this assessment basic template. This is nothing more than a basic fundamental data about your assessment. It has number of sections which you're going to have in your final assessment. Number of sections, number of questions in each section do you want an option shuffling for each section each question you want a question shuffling as a whole so that a candidate A when he's going to sit next to candidate B gets totally a different not a set of questions but different numberings. So first question here will be the fifth question there. So this is one type of option so this is a format which has to be filled well in advance before we start off with any of the question paper module. So this has to be clearly filled and you need to decide well before your question paper module starts about the data what you're going to put in because this is going to be the final data. This is the same file which you're going to use for both the mock that is the candidate hands on mock which is going to released in the forum as well as for the final assessment a part of it as well. So this is a decided where you need to decide on number of sections you're going to use for the final exam, number of questions you're going to use whether you're going to shuffle the questions whether there is going to be a negative marking all these things have to be decided and has to be put here. And once it has been put here it is frozen. So once it has been put here and we send it to our technical team for converting and for generating a metadata file which is a configurator type of a file which is a simple Excel sheet but that is the format which our software reads. So that will be configured from my technical team. So for that we need to first fill in this and give it to them. And once it has been configured we cannot change anything there. So please discuss with your faculties and if only TAs are here please discuss with your faculties and when you're filling this this is going to be the final thing which we're going to take it for the final assessment I'm just reiterating it again. So be careful in filling this and once this is done the first phase of your question paper creation is over. Then we go for this something called as a metadata file which is a very simple Excel sheet. We'll show you the Excel sheet as well. We'll be floating a procedure manual where we'll be having step by step procedure on what the software and how it works and also about this metadata file and we'll show you a metadata file if you want from here as well. I think it's another laptop. So yeah. So this is going to be a simple Excel sheet which will be floated to you but it will be configured with the data which you give in the assessment basic template. So this sheet will again be floated down by the NPTEL office to you and there are going to be two separate sheets what you need to fill. One is going to be for the mock test and one is going to be for the final assessment as a whole. So on the process flow first comes the mock test which has to be released on the day when you're going to plan releasing your application for enrolling for that exam. So that has to be released here. So mock test goes in line with your final application from a go live date. So that is the mock test thing. So what you need to do is in that metadata file you need to put in questions which are going to be seen by the candidates. The candidates mock hands on is going to be like every candidate we cannot expect them to have written this ION exam. So what we release is we release a mock test kind of a thing which will be a hands on on the UI front of the ION solution. So that is the exact screen what these people will be seeing when they come for the exam on March 22nd and 29th. So that we will be releasing. For that we need some data like what all type of questions because once you fill in the assessment basic template you'll be deciding on types of questions what you're going to use like questions like you'll be having a lot of questions. I will tell you what are the list of questions we already put in. You will be having multiple select questions, multiple choice questions, long answer, short answers. So any type of things you need to first decide and at least for this mock each and every type of question what you're going to use has to be in this mock. Like once a TA or a faculty plans yes I'm going to use multiple choice and multiple select question for my assessment final assessment. Then for mock at least one question has to be on multiple select question and one question can be a multiple choice question. And once a faculty decides that this time for this assessment I'm going to have only 25 questions. What we can do is we cannot have only two questions for the mock. So we need to act the actual set of 25 questions but for a mock what we can do is you say that I have one question with multiple choice question which is a multiple choice question and a second question which is a multiple select question. You can repeat the same question again for 25 times for at least for the mock so that you give us 25 questions which can be repeated because this is just an hands on for the candidate for a candidate who's going to come for the exam on 22nd and 29th on March. So for that you can give the same questions as well because we are not going to grade them in any point from that mock exam and we are not going to show them the marks as well. We are not going to key in the right answers as well. So because of that you can give us some dummy questions and you can repeat the questions as well but each and every type of question what you're going to use for the final assessment you need to have them in your mock metadata file. And then is your actual QP metadata file which is very similar because this is going to be one hands on for the people who are going to fill in the metadata file. You would have already gotten hold on what metadata file is all about and how to question, how to key in questions, choices and all. So once that is done actual question paper metadata file you need to start keying in and this we'll go on the flow. So once you fill in the actual question paper metadata file we'll go for the next thing. You fill in the metadata file. We'll be installing as I told you well before the start of this session that we'll be installing a software and we'll be showing you a demo rate. So that comes here. So ION as assessment security center is that software's name and our people will be coming in giving you a demo and a process manual on how to use it. There'll be basically three people involved in a question paper creation for any online assessment as a whole. And for this assessment it is going to be two people. One is going to be the continent manager who creates the question paper. That might be TAs who will be keying the question paper and we'll be checking on the choices, number of choices given the correctness of the question and all this stuff. Once that is done I guess you will be forwarding it to your faculties for review, right? So that will be a reviewer part of it where they will be once you key in the question and you see the candidates view on how it is going to be seen on the candidates screen. The faculty reviews proof reads it and signs off on the question paper saying that this question paper is right it can go on for the bundling. Bundling part is like because we have 10 subjects here we don't want to have individual question papers floating around. What we decided we will bundle all the 10 subjects into one bundle which will be IITM NPTEL March 22nd exams bundle. So that will have all the 10 question papers and for a student who is enrolled for one exam he sees only his question paper. So that is the bundling process I will tell you about the bundling process later. So once the faculty signs off on the final question paper saying that this is my final question paper and pulls in a metadata file out of our software they will be sending it to the NPTEL office because we wanted to do it in a secured way so that will be sent through we will decide on how it is going to be sent and once that is done the NPTEL office will be having 10 metadata files which will be for 10 subjects. So once that once they get all the 10 data metadata files what they do is the simple process called as a bundling process where they will not be checking on the they will not be checking on the correctness of the question they will not be proof reading it they will not be signing off on any of the question papers because it's already been done by the faculties they will just take them put them into the software seal it and bundle it they need to give a password here and that will be trained on the NPTEL office part of it will they will get trained on that on bundling part of it because your process gets end with the reviewer thing where you sign off on the metadata file there ends the process of question paper creation for any faculty. The bundling and the sealing and the bundling part of it will be taken care with the NPTEL office. So this is a brief just on what is going to happen on the question paper creation front. There will be a lot of questions on what exactly has to be done and when it has to be done. So this is the activity flow which I've already discussed in this session and this is a step by step procedure what has to be followed and please don't worry about the UI front of the software or the metadata file or for instance about the assessment basic template as well for each and every thing what for each and every jargon what I have uttered here we will be giving you a process flow diagram on how to fill them and how to take them into the software and you will be individually getting trained on this as well by our people. So they will be giving you a demo on how to use the software as well. And so we'll start with just reiterating this slide and for people who are sitting in the back it's like the question paper software installation and demo to faculties it is the ownership of the Tata of the TCS and we have decided the deadline to be on December 20th and these deadlines might change this is highly, highly tentative deadlines they might get changed but for an idea on when it starts and when it gets ended we are just giving you a deadline part of it but the final deadline will be circulated by the NPTEL office to each and every faculties for each and every subject and once we get that basic assessment basic template we'll be giving it to the NPTEL office and they in turn will be circulating them to the 10 faculties or say how many faculties for each subject and once that is done we request everybody like to decide on number of questions you're going to use number of sections you're going to use all the options which has been possible there and once that is done fill the basic assessment basic template and please send them to the NPTEL office well before Jan 10th because this is going to be a deciding factor for both your mock exam as well as for your assessment final assessment so once we get that we'll be generating our solutions team or the technical team will be generating and metadata file as I told you which is the format which our software understands so that has to be configured for that at least we need at least a weeks time so because of that once we get this assessment basic template we'll configure them immediately and we'll be circulating that metadata file to the NPTEL office in turn they'll be circulating it to you so that is the place where you start keying in your question paper for first for the mock mock, I think sign up on the mock metadata file it has to happen before 22nd yeah 22nd January so once because I think we need to really work fast on this once Jan 22nd we get the metadata file we'll start working on the candidate mock link as I told you before this is going to be exact screen word a candidate is going to see when he comes for a March 22nd or 29th exam so when he's going to come and see he cannot come and complain like say in mock you gave me only two sections now there are three sections so this is the place where that's why I just wanted to reiterate saying that the assessment basic template is going to play a very important role because for mock and for the final assessment we are going to follow the same pattern blueprint whatever we call it so once that is done we'll be giving that mock link to each and every faculty through NPTEL office and so once the mock link is being given you can test on the mock link and see how it works whether the questions you are given is rightly working whether the because there might be instances where short answer question will be given and there will be MCQ question coming for the same so please test them on all this correctiveness and you can forward and you can sign off on the mock link the faculties can sign off on the mock link on 29th of January and we'll be going because I don't think we are going to change this date February 2nd is going to be the final date all the other dates are tentative but this is the final one February 2nd we are going live with the application form so when you are going live with the application form we want our mock test should also go live on the same date so that is how it is so that's a target what we are kept so and for the actual question paper once you fill in the actual question paper like on March 9th once you get comfort hold on the metadata file and once you start really quick on working on this actual question paper part of it on the metadata file you can share the metadata file on 9th March to the NPTEL office so that I think the faculties will take care so once they share that with the NPTEL office and once they get all the 10 metadata files with them we are ready to bundle it so once we get it we'll be coming because we don't want to do it on an internet based way so we come here there'll be one system which is isolated from the internet connectivity and we'll be using that system to seal the question paper with all the 10 seal the bundle with all the 10 question papers and bundle the question paper into one and that for the 22nd exam will be happening on 6th both bundling can happen on 22nd on 16th March for both the 22nd and 29th exam and there is one thing called as the VPN connectivity where we tunnel the question paper which has been created from the IIT end to the data center of Tata consultancy service so that has to happen at least one week before the exam so for the 22nd exam we'll be doing it on 16th March and for the 29th exam we'll be doing it on 23rd March so and that format which is going to be sent from the IIT office to NPTEL office to the data center is a unreadable format it's an IGX format which cannot be it's an RSA algorithm what we have used and so people cannot easily hack on this and get a question paper so easily so that is one thing so these are the brief timelines and tentative deadlines what we are given so and this is the process flow what we are going to follow and please it's our personal request from the TCS ION front and from the NPTEL part of it so we want you to adder to the deadlines which is going to be fixed by the NPTEL office because if we are going to miss on each and every deadline from this activity flow which has been given we are going to have very bad damage on the assessment operations part as well so that will increase more headed to Gautam I guess so that is the complete flow of it so if there is any questions the forum is open for questions okay okay as it was on the exam centers and on the brief we are actually opening it out to the students to be able to write the exam and at least 100 cities across India so that is what we try to open the centers up to them but then we found that this time actually what happened was for the two exams about 75 only they had chosen out of the 100 and even in the 75 there were many cities where there were just about one or two candidates were applied so since I didn't make economic feasibility for us we kind of clubbed them to the nearest saying that within three hours or four hours if they can reach the next center which is closest where we can operate the exam we move them to that ask them again to the concerned, done some defense and stuff so this is a process we will be following every time so ideally we would like the exam to run in 100 cities across India if we have reasonable numbers so that is what we are targeting for the exams since there are 10 papers we expect maybe it's better next time so that is one thing this December 20th thing is another thing that we push for once the courses are open we will ask you for some dates as to when the DC's people can come to the faculty room where you all can also be there and probably install the software and get a handle of that creation of metadata by looking at the question of how to install it and stuff so that is another date that we will get through so immediately from our end I think we will create a group first of the email IDs which we have given collecting email IDs from the other people who have not attended here make the thing and we start pushing data on that group saying that okay this is coming up that's coming up please follow and start the process so that is something number 20th we would like you all to ensure that the papers are up and give us a sign of that yes our course stages up if you can go to the faculty, I think I will be able to do this these are the two immediate things the remaining I think is just one and so forth our phone numbers are there I think all our emails are carried email will send you its MPTEL at IIT, Nodaisy, Nautil regular thing we work from Monday to Friday 9, 2, 6, 9, 30, 2, 6 we are here but otherwise also we are contacted anything else?