 So, welcome to this last session. I have the privilege of introducing two more of my colleagues who have been participating or who will be participating in the MOOCs activities from IIT Bombay side. Yesterday, you heard Professor Gayathonde and Professor Milindathri. We have two more colleagues. May I invite them here, Professor Vikram Gadre and Professor Supratik Chakraborty. So, as I told you, Professor Supratik Chakraborty is, I am his co-instructor in CS101X and I am also his co-instructor in CS101, which as I told you is being offered in blended mode in IIT Bombay itself. And both of us are doing this for the first time. We have taught umpteen courses all our life, but never in this passion and maybe you can share for five minutes something what you went through. Now, Professor Vikram Gadre is a, Professor Supratik is my colleague in computer science department. Professor Vikram Gadre is a professor in electrical engineering department. He is also currently the head of our center for distance engineering education program. In fact, this particular seminar hall in which you are sitting technically is under CDP control. So, we are actually his guests here. Needless to say, both of them are very well renowned researchers in their own areas. As students, both of them excelled in their batches. Professor Supratik was the President of India Gold Medalist from IIT Kharagpur and then he did his PID from Stanford. Professor Vikram Gadre was President of India Gold Medalist from IIT Delhi and he decided to continue what doing his research there itself. So, he finished his PID from IIT Delhi, but thankfully joined us both of them. And they have been here for many, many years. We are lucky that many people as Professor Gayathonde was mentioning are increasingly becoming enthusiastic to join us. There is a younger colleague of ours who could not come for some reason, Professor Kameshwari Chabrol. She is from the computer science department and before the MOOCs platform started making enrores, she had embarked on a development work on a platform for the online kind of thing, which is actually designed for the blended more thing. It is called Bodhi Tree. This particular platform was used by us in one of the 10,000 teachers workshops on computer networks. So, where teachers participated online using that thing and then in a face to face mode. We have decided that in our platform development work, we will take the best features from Bodhi Tree as well in this. She is not here. She also has the distinction of winning. They coveted excellence in teaching award of the institute at a very young age. These awards by the way are all given based on the students feedback. There is no evaluation by faculty or something. So, students evaluate. Professor Gadre by the way routinely gets that award. Actually in the sense that we have a moratorium of three years. So, if you get an award for next three years, you cannot get. The moment three years pass, he gets it again. So, this is what you got it third or fifth time or something, fourth time. So, we are very fortunate that not only people who are passionate, but who are known to be great teachers apart from being great researchers are available. I would request both of them to share with you their experiences, experiments and their own expectation. Please understand that in the MOOCs game, they are ahead of you only by few months. So, they are as good as all of us here. So, the same repetition whether this will work or not et cetera, et cetera must have crossed their mind. But as I said they dare as all of you are going to dare. So, Suprati. This is the first time I am teaching such a large student body. In the CS 101.x that we are offering on edX there are around 60,000 students enrolled. And at IIT Bombay we are teaching it to around 570 students. So, some of the things that I had to learn the hard way is different when you teach to students in an online mode as opposed to a physical classroom interaction teaching. Is that when you are, I mean one of the things that I am still struggling with is, so we have this 15 minute sort of kind of hard deadline. Every lecture has to be broken up into 15 minute modules. And I mean initially I thought big deal you know I will just take my lecture and cut it up into 15 minute modules. And it turns out that it is not so easy actually to do that. And as a consequence what has happened is that I have had to take several retakes. So, I start recording my lecture and then in whatever you know full flow, full passion I am explaining something and I think I have done it in 15 minutes and the recording team tells me it has gone to 18 minutes. And even with all the editing and all they cannot bring it down to 15 minutes. So, what you have to do is you have to re-record the whole thing again. So, I think this is, I mean it is important because that I mean I think pedagogic studies basically say that students interest span does not last for more than 15 minutes. So, it is a new form of, it is a new mode of teaching. I am not used to it, I am learning it the hard way by doing lots of retakes. But I think that you know at the end of the day when I see the lecture videos which are 15 minutes each, you know one might just think that oh it is just 15 minutes he spoke. But there is actually a lot of preparation that goes on behind it. So, I will tell you the estimates I mean just to sort of you know make all of you aware of the amount of effort that goes into one 15 minute lecture module that comes up there. So, my track record maybe I am particularly bad at that is that I have been taking around one hour and 15 minutes to prepare the slides for a 15 minute lecture. And this is because if I am trying to say something substantial within those 15 minutes I have to put in animations, I have to create appropriate illustrations and all of this eventually has to be open source. So, you have to basically create all of this content. So, my average is I require one hour 15 minutes to one and a half hours to prepare the slides for a 15 minute lecture. And then as I am trying to give the lecture almost 50 percent of the time I have to do a retake. So, it is really more like two hours goes on behind preparing what finally shows up there is a 15 minute lecture. So, it is I mean it might appear to be a lot of work and it is indeed a lot of work, but I think the end result is worth it. So, when I look back at the lectures and see what has I mean what has gone into it, what is finally being delivered there, I think it is worth it. And certainly for the students I hope and believe that it will be worth looking at those lectures. So, I just wanted to say that you need to be aware of this that as opposed to a normal classroom lecture where you know if you exceed from a 50 minute lecture to 52 minute lecture nothing much happens right. I mean you are in a class you are lecturing it is a 50 minute lecture slot and if you exceed to 52, 53 minutes nothing much happens. You do not have to retake the lecture you do not have to start all over a fresh, but here you have to I mean because you know there are some hard deadlines and so it requires a lot of planning. I think it requires very meticulous planning about what exactly you are going to speak, how you are going to cover and maybe now I appreciate a little bit why film actors get paid that much. So, it is a new experience. The other lesson that I have sort of started learning the hard way is the way you evaluate students is very different when you are teaching to 60,000 students you cannot conduct a normal conventional examination. So, it has to be I mean for example Professor Fateh Ghanai are teaching programming right. And so we have to ask these students to write programs, but I mean we are still in the process of developing an auto grader. I mean forget about grading it manually. So, it has to be graded automatically, but the moment you say that it has to be graded automatically it puts some constraints on the kinds of questions you can set. It puts some constraints on what you can evaluate through those questions and these are normally not there in a regular classroom examination mode. So, you know when we write a question I mean this is going online right. So, if I set a question and this happens often times in an examination hall that some students says you know but this wording is not clear. So, what exactly do you mean? So, you can walk up to that student and say okay this is what this means. Here there is no scope of doing that right. I mean you put up your questions it goes online 60,000 students are seeing it and now you can't start explaining. So, you have to be that ultra careful to make sure that whatever you're writing in English has there's just one way of interpreting that. I mean nobody from whatever culture this also people from different cultures are reading that. So, you know preparing exam questions itself also takes a little bit more caution care and then I mean we have I mean both Professor Fartek and I I mean of course Professor Fartek has a lot more experience in teaching than me. We are realizing that it is next to impossible to come up with a question paper in which none of the 60,000 students will find a fault. So, this is our goal but we have not succeeded so far in all the tests that we have given no matter how much preparation we have put in at least one error has surfaced up somewhere and yeah I mean out of 60,000 students there will be 20 people pointing out and so but we are learning hopefully the next offering of the course on svayam at least whatever is going to be offered will you know take the lessons we learned from edX and we'll implement those. So, this is what I would like to emphasize that both teaching and evaluation are not the same as it is in a normal classroom. I think all of us are used to normal classroom mode teaching normal exam mode evaluation but here it is different and I guess this is the way of the future I mean in the future classes will be offered online exams will be conducted online if you want to reach out to large numbers of students but this does require reorienting ourselves. The other aspect which Professor Fartek might have already mentioned is that it also requires a very strong and dedicated force behind you I mean you know I can probably teach a class of 200 students all on my own I mean if I if I'm willing to spend some time I'll probably be able to correct all of their papers myself and all but here it requires a dedicated force behind you I mean starting from the you know media team which does all the recording editing transcription from the team which actually goes and looks at the questions and tries to figure out whether there are any ways to interpret them in multiple ways could there be some other way of answering the question. So, it requires a trained force I mean not only do we as teachers have to train ourselves I think our support staff teaching assistants all of them have to be trained and I think Swaim would be a great platform to go ahead with that. The question would I be like it's a kind of an irrelevant question but I'll ask it anyway the kind of queries that you get in a live class vis-à-vis the kind of discussion forums that are raised here are they identity are they different I can answer please you can answer that I have taught this course for donkey's ears is my most favorite course the not the first but the second course I taught in 1973 and since then very with great regularity I've been teaching. I took it in quarter time. Oh you did I see oh when you were a student there was quite some time I remember so I will tell you something actually yes the queries that are asked by our students are similar queries are asked by two very important points this is what we were afraid of that when the number of students increase whether the number of queries will increase exponentially they don't the second important point that we notice is that just as among students sometimes they themselves tell their colleagues what the answer is but that does not happen so well in a classroom environment because they want to come and always ask the teacher here on the forum a large number of questions are being answered by a number of people in fact if you see the discussion forum for a large course that discussion forum itself contains gems of wisdom about that course various people commenting on this aspect in that that is what we notice and questions are very similar in fact sometimes very intelligent observations are made by some people which even our students in IIT miss but a number of them are also very sort of very mundane and very bogus kind of question it is not uncommon by the way to find somebody saying are a lullu why don't you read that in English of course so the other people will advise you are confused because you are not ready this you are not ready that it's a very interesting bag maybe I have the terminology wrong but there's something which you call a blended course and a flip course are they the same thing yeah so when we say blended what it means is that it combines online and face to face okay and the way we blend is that in the blended mode the online portion still remains that means students watch the course videos student do the practice problems student do the quizzes online but they come to the classroom where the entire lecture session is devoted to discussions and problem solving okay so if so I think I've got the idea right it is the flip class right so the so my question begins now in that mode in the blended mode on the flip mode do you think that the overall teaching or learning experience is better than the normal class much better in fact the participation by the students in problem solving in discussions among themselves we also use a methodological thing pair share where Supratik has modified it to say not pair but a group so we have groups of 1314 students who sit together so after a question is answered individually then they discuss and what he and I do is we'll walk up to some people randomly pick out a answer book where they are writing the solution and that is not only quiz ABCD kind of they have to write the longer answers and we'll get those program segments to the front of the classroom and display that to the entire class okay and that way I will tell you in fact the professor Cedar Iyer my colleague actually did a controlled experiment last year when he taught CS 101 in a flip classroom scenario Kamishwari has done the same thing for the network course Cedar Iyer's finding is that the students engagement as opposed to teachers engagement teacher will whatever students engagement which on an average hovered around 40% in the normal course delivery that means only 40% of the students of all students 40% of the time are engaged otherwise they may be attending a class apparently but they are not necessarily listening or they are not doing here they have proven by actual experiment that the engagement goes as high as 80% so is there a flip side the flip side is that can the flip classroom be extended to 60,000 students I had promised that I will circulate my invited paper I will do that that is where I have argued that the best way to use of blended more is that let us say Isar Pune offers a course on physics okay now that course is adopted as a blended move course by 1000 institutions in the country all those students attend online classes of yours give online exams but during the regular lecture hours the teachers engage with them on the flip classroom they solve their problems they solve problems they have discussions I even suggested that online examinations should amount to about 80% of the total credit grade and 20% of the grade should come from the local teacher who gives them long assignments a set of assignments gives a mini project for the course and evaluate that course there locally so this is the model which actually we are doing now for example we have TAs in a programming course people have to write program so this write programs and submit them in the labs those are evaluated by TAs they do a course project which are evaluated by ascent TAs and there will be marks for that portion in addition to the online equivalent I personally believe that that may be the ideal model where students get the best of both the thing that may take some time in fact this year there were at least 10 autonomous institutions and some universities who are willing to experiment they were waiting for me to announce CSO no one in this mode but we said we will first experiment with our own students and then extend but this is a model which is likely to spread quite fast because then those universities and those autonomous institutions will accept the MOOC grade there is one more advantage is weekly online examinations will be proctored by the local teachers in their own college so there is a sanctity for online exam sanctity for a week that is the next step so so you are asking is there a flip side to this so I mean I am new to this but I think as professor Fartick said that I think the blended model I mean if you just say see the lectures at home and that's it you know I mean we'll just solve problems in class because sometimes some students seen in a normal classroom what happens is that let us say I plan to let's say I've come to class and I have planned that I'm going to teach topics ABC in today's class but while teaching let's say in the middle of topic B I realize that a lot of students have some questions and maybe at the end of the class I end up only teaching topics A and B right whereas here what's happening is we are telling them beforehand that look up the lectures for ABC and we'll come to the class and do that now while looking up the lectures for ABC it is perfectly possible that some of the students are maybe a large number of the students I mean I'm trying my best when I'm giving the lecture but it's not in front of students right so I might have misjudged on what I should have stressed more or stressed less and so this when the students are coming to class maybe they've tried to see all the lectures on ABC but maybe they didn't understand much of B and therefore they didn't understand much of C now if we just say that okay ABC is done you should have seen and now we're going to just solve problems on ABC and next day please read up please look up the videos for DEF then there is a problem right so therefore in the class I mean this is what we are we have also learned and we have sort of we actually figured out that in the class there are some students who are lagging behind because they didn't understand some of the lectures which we had put up some two weeks back okay and then we realized that maybe you know we need to do these revision sessions in class so I think what is important is put the lectures up there let the students see them maybe once twice thrice as much as is needed but give also them the control to decide the pace of the class about how fast topics are going to be covered in the class if you just say you know I decide how fast the class goes and we'll just discuss problems and whatever is done in a day so it has to be the thing is that if B is not understood yeah then you should be able to give a break in your course schedule and start then so so I'll tell you this actually happened in a particular class which was recorded two weeks before when we actually ask the students to give so we recorded it we thought we have covered everything and then when we went to the class we realize that there is a lot of problem and so I had I went back and re-recorded something some additional material and then we put up that we did we give some handouts and so because this is feedback coming from the class that whatever was there in the lecture I mean although it is correct it is right but it wasn't sufficient for them so these additional mechanisms must be there to sort of insert extra material give more elaborations I mean so there is this module of 15 minute lectures which covers the whole course but these additional things I think are absolutely essential and these are sort of governed by the feedback from the class particularly the weaker students yeah I mean the I mean in a large class you know if you take the percentage as more or less fixed there'll be a large number of weaker students and the weaker students may not feel you know I mean they may not feel up to like raising their hand in the class and saying that you know I did not understand those three lectures so I think there as teachers it is our responsibility to gauge the pulse of the class and to figure out that okay maybe we have gone too fast and stop it there and say okay I mean that's what professor Fatik and I had we were forced to do so we said that okay now in these two weeks no further lectures there's no new material we are going to so we just did revision of all of those how did you get the feedback that oh you see the students no they are not able to solve the problem but it's a live class yeah had it been a completely pure I will answer the comments we propose to do something very similar for the online course as well which we will experiment with the swam and with the new e-rex thing whatever if the decision is as follows the decision is that we will have we will stick to this model but just as what we are doing in CSO no one live what we are doing is I am taking one or two problems which whose solution will explain certain concept better and I am actually giving a lecture so for 45 minutes I am explaining just two problems which explains some concept better and the feedback from the faces and from their immediate question that I ask is that they understood better now what I have decided is even on the book site whenever there are feedback because there are feedback in multiple ways quiz is not answered correctly by many people is one feedback what we have decided is we will do exactly the same thing we will record additional 40 minute 45 minute lecture 30 minute lecture 1 hour lectures if required explaining certain concepts more in a more elaborate fashion taking some examples and working them out and put those videos as additional material so the better students may not need those but the other students may benefit from sorry I'm just there is this flip side of MOOC which I have sensed in one of the ordinary engineering colleges which I would like to share with the audience yeah firstly I mean all that we have heard till now we are putting a lot of owners and the student now in one side we say it's a learner sending education but that means we expect certain motivation level from the student to see all these videos before actually they come to the next class I went to a small town engineering college I would name it with this particular I talked to the students and they have come from the lower cut-off kind of category so they are not very good students they said we don't like this because we pay fees and we expect students to teachers we want to be spoon-fed I'm just sharing this with the audience so I think this is this is an issue for we have to evolve so either the complete online thing is not the solution for this but at the same time just the classroom level thing it cannot scale up right so I think there is a middle ground somewhere in between and particularly I mean unless the students have some say in how the pace of the course is going to go and what topics need more stress I mean I might feel even with you know whatever experience I have that this topic needs more explanation but in a particular year maybe the other topic needs more explanation so this is something that has to go on as the course is going so we have some material but then in a particular year maybe this needed more explanation and another year that needed so that interaction feedback which comes automatically in a normal classroom I think we have to very consciously build that in over here because otherwise there will be a part of this considering that we will be working only on MOOCs for quite some time let's restrict our restriction to MOOCs rather than blended MOOCs but Professor Verma had one observation no but my my comment is relates not to MOOCs but to the blended classroom that you were talking about I sat through actually a class here at IIT Bombay taken by Kannan yes and the thing that I really liked when we were talking about feedback all classrooms here our Wi-Fi enabled yes Kannan like you know I had distributed the Akash tablets with clicker on it and so he had given his videos out students saw those videos came to class as soon as they came to class he gave a quiz and based on the answers of the quiz he knew immediately because answers are collated what needs to be covered he knew immediately what he has to cover we are doing precisely that exactly that's we are doing at the beginning of the of the class yes we are conducting a quiz yes and we get to see those answers the instant feedback that is the key unfortunately we did not use Akash tablets in the class because when I have 250 stores in a batch the Wi-Fi breaks down but we'll do something let us let us now listen to some comments from Professor Gadre I of course I'm in a few phases behind Professor Bhattak and you know I suppose is Suprati because I am just in the phase where I'm recording the lectures at the moment but still there are many educative experiences I've had well as Suprati also said this is you don't require to reorient yourself in terms of how you plan for each I mean I call it a session you know we can call it anything but I call it session so I what I've done is you know I'm going to create a course on signals and systems so signals and systems is a course which I think many of some of you may be aware it's also a very fundamental course in electrical engineering in fact it also happens to be a fundamental course in most disciplines of engineering where they talk of system level development I mean you know system theory I'm saying control systems or of course in electrical engineering is our foundation for communication systems for anything to do with mobile communication or wireless communication or control systems or well system design system theory this kind of a course is required so that is the background of the course that I'm creating it's called signals and systems now there were several decisions to be taken when I started creating the course one is should we think of this as one course as we do at IIT Bombay for example a semester long course and the decision I took was not to do that after consulting professor Bartek of course and some of his staff I decided that we should break the course up into two courses and if I'm not mistaken that's also being done in computer for the COS 101 it's being broken into two courses well roughly speaking in the IIT sense it might be what you would cover up to the mid-semester examination and what is covered beyond the mid-semester examination and in fact in the course that I'm creating on signals and systems this also happens to be a natural break because there is something that you know you need to teach up to the mid-semester examination and then the concepts that follow after the mid-semester examination are naturally a little more advanced so it was also fortunate that this was a natural break and roughly half and half get covered in or get talked about in these two parts what I've also done is to break each part into two modules because that's also a natural break there are four aspects to this course in my in my view I mean people may have different views but in my view there are four aspects which are roughly one fourth of the course and the first two aspects take up the first first course you may call it and the second two aspects take up the second so this is how I'm just sharing with you how I've kind of sort of plan my course now I'm yet at the phase where I'm creating the what I call embellishments to each of the sessions but I could share with you in a course like well here this course requires a lot of what you might call derivation you know in the sense different courses have different characters now this is the course where you actually need it has a lot of concepts and a lot of mathematical ideas and what I decided is perhaps akin to what I do in a classroom traditionally I have I'm going to ask the student to in some sense work with me so I have used what I call the extension of the chalk and talk but you can't actually do that here but I'm using the framework where I actually write down a derivation in a certain way and I speak along with it so it's almost as if I was standing in a classroom facing students and doing a derivation in front of them I did not prefer to use the slide model because it just I mean to me it did not make sense for derivation somehow I mean it's a personal maybe people can do it I mean it's not that can't be done but I found it much easier and much more meaningful to actually write down the derivation step by step and sort of ask the student to work with me and I'm hoping that that goes well let's see how it goes now a few things that I want to share with you here I in fact I agree now I probably will really experience this issue about 15 minutes and 18 minutes and to some extent I've experienced that already but it'll also come up when this course is actually delivered you know how whether we've done justice in 15 minutes have we gone too fast these are issues which I don't know at the moment because I'm just creating them based on what I think is is really is reasonable for one session and so on you know but that issue will come up but more importantly what I also realized is that it's very important within that 15 or 18 minutes I mean 18 minutes of recording that comes down to 50 that's what I understood because in my case a lot of writing so that gets cut so what is very important is also to round off an idea now you know for example sometimes a derivation can be quite involved but you know you have to decide whether you should complete that derivation in in that one session or you then break the derivation up reasonably into two sessions you know this is a very I mean for see otherwise in a one-hour classroom you if it's an involved derivation you can take the whole hour and do the derivation here you have to take a conscious decision you don't have an hour and you do have to convey that idea you really have to take a conscious decision on you know whether you should break the derivation into parts or whether you should give a sense of the derivation in one module and then break it you know then explain I'm just sharing with you some of the things that I've encountered so far otherwise I mean as I said I'm few phases behind because I'm still creating the material and I also welcome questions or inputs from you on what you think if some of you know about the core signals and systems I would welcome inputs because I'm keen to have this course started particularly I believe this is for an Indian audience also so for the Indian audience I would like this course started as soon as possible I mean maybe possible in December itself so you know that's these are the few words from me I'm very glad to announce that apart from the two courses which will be announced by IIT Bombay both of which will start from 2nd October we're giving a one-week period any of you who believe that their course can be ready or whatever it is the earliest start date is 2nd October because we need to advertise to the students to register as Mr. Praveen Prakash had told you the start date could be anywhere from 2nd October up to next February or March so depending upon how much time you decide but the third course that will be offered on offer that list from IIT Bombay will Professor Vikram Ghadri's course I'm still trying to convince Professor Kamishwari to give her course but she may or may not be ready there is one more course I'm announcing and I'll be requesting Professor Parshuraman to take the lead anybody from this so this is if you recall yesterday we talked about a course on blender with the intention of training people as a vocational training for animation and for educational animation so Samir here yeah so I'll be writing to Professor Parshuraman I would like this to take a lead IIT Bombay can also take a lead but logically the what you call vocational kind of thing is best done by this what do you say Professor President so our team can of course support you you have one here I will tell you why I am keen on this because one of the objectives of the entire national mission on education through ICT is to expand this higher education segment initiatives to high school education and vocational training and vocational training is actually perceived as the greatest need of the country today large number of people who need to be trained for getting jobs and so on so that is why if we have at least one course on vocational training made available immediately then it will give a flavor that yes this firm platform is like this there is another thing which I don't know whether I mentioned on that there is an initiative to start this kind of MOOCs for high school students including and not necessarily Akash but a low-cost tablet or a low cost excess device and even hardware experiments on on those devices for the science so a lot of interesting things are happening here I would request Professor Jadre to do one more small present duty we have a tradition of distributing course certificates for every workshop so we have these certificates here as head of our incidentally in IIT Bombay operationally all online and distance courses including our MOOCs operations including our EDX MOOCs participation are operationally controlled by head CDP so in some sense he's my boss so may I request Professor Sanjay Kumar, Nagesh Kumar, Dr. Shatrudha, Dr. Jyotsana Dixit it is not well known but many many years ago perhaps more than a decade ago or more than a decade ago 13 years ago Jyotsana used to be a staff member or one of my projects like Virunda is today so Virunda I can see you as Dr. Vrinda sometimes ten years later yes Arindam Bhattacharya, Professor Manju Jayaswal, Professor Pritam Basu, shall we decide on which management courses the one which you presented that itself we'll expand or what don't know maybe something right Dr. Basbapad and one of his colleagues was a student here a B.Tekh from IIT Bombay, Anirban Hazra, Dr. Anirban Hazra, he asked me, I sir had a very great combination of faculty members he's the coordinator he attended all the three days one of the lead faculty attended the first day and another lead faculty was supposed to attend the third day but he didn't come at all Mr. Saurabh Botolia, Dr. Jai Kishan, Dr. R.K. Vyas, Professor Muhammad Kaseem, Professor F.B. Khan, Dr. Kusuma, he's also from Jamiya Mubiya, Mr. Sanjeev Kumar, he's from JNU, Dr. Sri Ramakrishna, he's from NITTR Chandigarh, he and his colleague, thank you and Pradeep Kumar, Paramjit Singh, so did you enjoy Paramjit? Yes, good. Dr. Madhusri Sekhar, Sameer Sahasrabudde, you see he was the one who created the entire audio-visual setup for our online education in 2000-2002 when he came here where nothing he started synchronous distance education essentially with him. Mr. Vihan Pandey, Professor Atul Negi, he actually made it a point to appoint him as a coordinator and send him immediately to a very short notice. Dr. S.N. Oja, so he wants to know because the tradition is to have classes under a banyan tree so how the cloud can be kept under a banyan tree. You know I wanted I forgot to share one thought which I had in the creation of this course with all of you and that is I want to replicate since you know he talked about Vishu so I want to replicate the idea of the Upanishads in this course you see the Upanishadic style I call it essentially where you have a teacher sitting with students around and you know Upanishad one some people interpret it essentially as sitting near so the idea is you know when a student just sits next to a teacher and asks he learns more than trying to read a book or you know that's the thought in Upan. Now what I'm thinking is in this kind of a course one very good way to do it is encourage students to ask questions and record them and have a system by which you know one can actually try give those interactions as a part of the course material so I'm planning that in the signals and systems course you I call it the Upanishadic style. I would I would like to use the remaining 10 15 minutes to collect some reactions from you on two topics one the general comments on this initiative and if you feel that there could be some tweaking or modification that could be done for the strategy and second about this workshop itself what has been your experience. Just like comment on this Upanishad part so in department of physics PHU we are running a discussion form which is called PLUT and the full form is physics learning through the Upanishad trend. So it is already going on we have a group of 30 students and three four teachers used to sit, questions from the students and we just discuss it is not pre-decided and the tradition goes on this way. The second thing which is slightly means of course I like the workshop very much I was a little bit curious it is suppose means from PHU side if suppose two of my colleagues wants to float this course within a month or so is it possible that I can send him here because you have the infrastructure they can record in a two months or one and a half month time the full lectures is it possible. Asking a very difficult question I will first answer my difficult part and then tell you their difficult part our difficult part is that while our team as you have seen is extremely dedicated and competent but we have lined up activity in fact most of suggest team for example ends up working on all Saturday, Sunday and Vrindas team also ends up working on all Saturday that is the current load. But I will tell you practically it is it is not very easy to do so you see our recruitment cycle we also have the same problems as you have to advertise we have to wait for scrutiny we have to conduct tests our tests are very rigorous and then we interview them and then they take their own joining time so it is two to three months before we can get used up. Now we have an additional dilemma my advertisement cannot be released unless the number of people that I am asking for are as per some sanction later of the project and money is there without money no appointment later is issued because the salary has to come from real money not from hypothesis. Today the ministry has said go ahead without any money they have said go ahead without any formal sanction later the later says the process of approval is on but you are requested to start the activity now our dean is considering we started this activity but it will be sometime before we can prove support what I can do best is if you have any staff members technical staff members does not matter if they are working in some other area let me tell you for example Sajjan who leads my entire video team is professionally a programmer he is not a video person it was Samir Sastra would you converted him into a top class video person in turn he has taught people Sushant who is his second in command now ask him what he was when he came here all of them have learnt on the job and we pride ourselves in having luckily an environment where people who come in may not do absolutely anything about what they want to do what they have to do but they pick up very quickly and the environment is so conducive as Jyotsana what she knew when she came here as a project now this is also your responsibility try and build that kind of thing nurturing people without it it would be difficult my request would be that you please wait for hiring your people or if you have existing people what I can promise is we will do a very good job of conducting a training workshop for such technical people whether it is video whether it is Vrindavan like thing and so on so forth and as I promised they will be lectured not by me and professor Supratik and professor Gadri but by Sajjan by Sushant by Vrindavan by Kalpana by Mukta if there is a coordinator at your end who handles logistics Mukta's team can train them to handle logistics in two days by simply making them handle logistics here you have you have seen our style of training you just do the work on the behalf of the participant I propose a vote of thanks for you sir and for your team member use round of applause thank you thank you very much we have a very good stay over here and we have learned a lot thank you we are taking back a lot of things I'm thankful that you say that because I have always maintained that great jobs are accomplished not just on the strength of funding not on the strength of infrastructure and equipment but they are accomplished by people and as you have seen our team I mean can you imagine I can't imagine any other place in this country including very competent institutions like ours who are told that in four days time you have to conduct a training workshop and in four days time with whatever they could they could organize that much I'm really proud of it I would like to thank also my own workshop team I think they've done absolutely marvelous same thing is true about everybody else Vrinda and Urmila who have spent considerable amount of time with you they have to make up for it by working late in the night and on Saturdays and Sundays to cover up the transcription and uploading of the recordings which people like Supratik Fadak and Vikram Gadre will be giving them because that pipeline goes on there is a deadline for that so everybody is able to do that and I'm I'm very happy about it I'm happy that you liked it so thank you sir I will add on it on the day one when we landed here we were really reluctant to and we were thinking that such an heterogeneous genius group when sitting together what they will carry after three days but on the last day when I see I think all of us has really not only gathered the technical part of the orientation program but the motivation which you have given to us to work at our own institution that is just add and color to this orientation program and as Dr. Krishnas says it is really thankful to you and obviously our great persons sitting at the back who has really helped us till late nights whenever we have called them and thank you very much so first of all thanks to the entire team for doing this wonderful job of guiding us through these three days of learning through the MOOC idea and the MOOC platform and all this has happened at a very short notice so I think there's been a lot of repetition on our part and probably on your part also but we have probably come out of that after these three days but I still have a few concerns which I would like to mention here and these concerns are out of the observations in the last couple of days I find that most of us are are overwhelmed by the the technicalities of the platform itself and my my own view is that we should not be worried about this and leave this to more competent people who have the technical finesse to do these things so that's my appeal to all of you it's not just just an observation it's my appeal to all of you and we should rather concentrate on how best we are going to improve the content of these courses taking into account the fact that this is a completely different medium a medium that we are not used to a medium that has many strengths and probably many weaknesses or perhaps some weaknesses we don't know yet but let us be aware of this difference this difference from normal classroom transaction and let us concentrate more on improving the quality of our slated courses and leave the technical details to people who are more able so are I think I mean if if I were to draw a plan for myself and my institution is what I mean I would focus primarily on getting the outline of the course in a good shape in as short a time as possible and as you say believe that the technical details will be taken care of somehow in the desired time so with that note I would stop once again by thanking the entire team and wishing all of us good times ahead yes we do wish we do need good luck all of us we need I just had one suggestion I was just talking to Pradeep Parma we have this notion for sponsored projects to have a principal investigator and to have co-PI now whenever we have done projects with other institution for example IMPI of a project or Kannan is PI of a project there are co-PI's in the partner institution would it make sense if we decided that the coordinators from each institution should be named as co-PI because then that will in my humble opinion give them a little bit of a nomenclature authority at least that if they are co-PI then they are not only governed by the the processes of their universities but they are also accountable to MHRD as being in charge of these projects from there sir I really congratulate you and the team we have not only learned the things but also experienced the IIT system and the way it works and it strongly gave us a message that's very enriching I have a couple of questions which are may be different one is the the verified certificates which may not come now later I mean after your later after later coming in the things are unfolding we have get to see things so suddenly I saw this very very very verified certificate thing I bit demoralized in terms of the free access of education and the philosophy behind it well the sustainable the outfit may be for a for a private organizations like our mission I mean I have our mission is towards a free education this is one thing and anyway we without money we can even give the verified certificate and the other thing is about the the courses which are which which which are to be offered can be I mean or must be what I understood what we are teaching in that what is more I mean I mean interesting for me is whatever the rigor whatever the content that we are teaching should be there but some courses if we prepare maybe from say we have animation we have development communication we have photography we have mass communication if we take two three modules and we are taking a course something like a common course which actually every student is interested and these modules are actually taught I mean to say that by very much I understand the idea behind it like accessing the same professor of IIT or MCRC by I mean many people will be interested to look at but by restricting it exactly the courses which we are offering papers to be presented there this I felt kind of a restriction we will put the same rigor we'll put the same content we'll put the same kind of assignments this is what I would like to say some kind of a I felt a little bit of you know thing and sometimes we can even start something innovative which our own students which are studying in the first semester third semester fourth semester are interested to join and that will be enriching for them and that is again on the way it is new it is free for these students for other students and for other departments in the same university this is one sir the other things I think this workshop would have been also included a half-day lectures on the content like what he was referring IPRs creative commons and all these things and even something like pleasure is in these things would have been added to the those who are we're all going to guide lead faculties or other things which that would have been an enriching aspect of it my last suggestion that I don't know how it is viable like each since it is going globally certain things like if it is a mechanical engineering course or a mathematics course maybe you may not be having much of like professor is telling about we are our courses are accessed across the cultures which may give two different meanings it is not it is very much possible in social sciences so in this aspect we need to establish a kind of a body within the university or a centrally or maybe at whatever level to screen the content before it goes out or it can be a subject-wise expert committee something like we have a noddle body wherever whoever makes in the same mass communication let us send it let us review it we will give a feedback it would be an expert I mean we can assure more you know better quality in terms of the examples this is what sir thank you very much thank you I think there are some questions they are a common concern so let me answer some of these questions very quickly first of all the certificate that you talk about the verified certificate portion may not do it is verified certificate in the current sense globally means that every student will have to have a webcam enabled machine for every interaction he or she does which is not possible will be actually discouraging we are giving honor code certificate and that honor code certificate will be based on the evaluation that you do for your course based on how many exams quizzes etcetera mark and that is being given free of cost no charge that is being applied for that however in the long term the principle is that if a student seeks knowledge it is free so there is absolutely no problem for any student of India to register for an audit course and go out if a student requires interaction then that interaction requires time from faculty and some team that faculty and that time of the TA team is currently being made by government grants the government is planning to spend huge amount of money just for this experiment for next three years it cannot be perpetuated there has to be an ecosystem which will take care of it we have recommended that when the body like a not for profit company will do it it will not do it for profit but it will have to recover the cost it incurred and there will be huge cross subsidy a course which is taken by one lakh students and if I have an interaction charge of 300 rupees then that course alone will earn 3 crore rupees my cost of creating that course has been 20 lakh rupees my cost of running that course for one lakh students is another 20 lakh rupees for the TA team and may be another 10 to 15 lakhs for the actual infrastructure usage bandwidth usage there is a huge extra money that is generated this the section 8 company will utilize to cross subsidize running of smaller but important critical courses and increasing the number of courses increasing the number of packet so there has to be a revenue model for a realistic one finally the credit recognition by a university is like a student who is enrolled in the university for a degree the student pays fees to the university that you and I don't think is wrong all we are saying is the student will similarly pay a fees if the credits are recognized by that you know and that fees also we are recommending should be of the order of 750 to 1000 and we have done some survey we will do more survey when the students come but you would agree that 1000 rupees fees for my credits to be recognized by my university is not uncommon there also we are saying that that university which accepts this recognition we will say since you are not conducting the examination for that student on this subject the examination fees that you collect from that student should be paid towards this so these are some of the early thoughts of course the larger issues will emerge but you are absolutely right we are all committed so I will say giving best quality education in the most affordable fashion not free but in most affordable I will also tell you something sir that if you give something free people do not value it much if they have paid even 5 rupees they will value it better this is a human psychological psychology global so I will I will close there but currently there is no charge for anything on a certificate will be made for innovative course content of course it is true and let me tell you what the current thinking is of most of the senior educators across the world who are much more advanced in using these moves they have much more data and feedback the general opinion is that the conventional papers which are one semester long or one year long and with collection of so many papers constituting a degree is going to disappear very fast from the entire higher education system in the world packaged modules which will do a certain thing and a sequence of multiple modules defined across disciplines will constitute the future degree Berkeley and Sanford are experimenting with this right now as we speak where a conventional BS degree in engineering which used to be given after four years of study as per this syllabus etc. etc. is now being offered by doing certain basic credits from science certain basic rates from this certain basic rates from something else and these basic credits can now be done through MOOC modules which are not one semester courses but is your one month long course the training all kinds of vocational training that we can think of need not at all be a regular course as I mentioned a course in animation does not exist as a normal degree course today but we are recommending it because it helps vocational kind of now all this will happen currently however the scheme that is approved by the government of India is to experiment with the best available signature courses from the well known universities which are currently learned by students across different universities so this scheme has a limited objective and that is the reason why we are here talking about these but there is enough leeway just as we just took a decision that we will have this animation course any one of you or other members will come suppose somebody comes as you say innovatively I have a four week course it is not part of my university syllabus but I believe that it will have tremendous value now if in the judgment of many others that has tremendous value as long as IIT Bombay runs this program that course will run because that is the freedom given to us to to run programs like but it cannot be the case that all universities will offer only specially designed one week programs only for every that is not the objective that is the second point IPR I think we already mentioned and professor Pradeep Parma has clarified this we are again the scheme does not talk of global presence in fact you will notice that in the registration page you are required to give your pin code and state and town the government of India is very clear while they would very much like we learners all over the world to learn but this scheme is being funded by government of India primarily for learners in India if government is not insisting that the person must be a student but it is aimed at student however any professional any person without a job anybody who has never studied in a college wishes to do a course as long as the person is Indian from India permitted to do the scheme again defines the scope it is not meant for the global but nothing prevents us from yeah it is they means only we have to do it yeah yeah that we will try and do that but doubtful people can create a fake IP address which is 10 dot something and the fellow may still be in Turkey that's right actually by aiming it to these students who are registered normally for similar courses were effectively saying that look it is primarily meant for us however if you are interested in your welcome the suggestion which was that you know when we create a content for courses like art or other thing aesthetics and other thing or or maybe we quote example in economics and other thing something which is very normal for me to say would not be taken in that split in some part of the country it's possible even the color whatever we Christian bride wearing white is good on the on that day but in Indian bride doesn't wear white on the wedding in a lake UP bride or something so there is a lot of difference things are perceived by people and because we want to avoid any controversy I think somebody who is some kind of experience in looking at these I can volunteer myself anybody else can join and see this on a very superficial level that it does not cause those controversy that cartoon controversy or this controversy or that controversy which need to be wetted it's important I think another similar point was earlier also made I think we have not yet put in place or we don't intend to put in place a precaution of this crime but it would be very useful if this consortium creates a body of people with expertise in different domains who could advise the project execution by IIT Bombay by offering to help in waiting such content from this point of it had not occurred to us so I think we will add in our initial request itself that when you create a course apart from other things please keep keep in mind the following day and get them reviewed and probably certify that our contents do not our contents avoid touching sensitivities across because India also is a multicultural thing you know multi I that's a very good point I have a question so suppose that some course is launched today and runs for the next four months now the person who has created this course and has run this course of four months decides next year or six months down the line that is no longer interested yes what happens to this content nothing that course remains the courses in open source please understand that when we say open source we are open sourcing the content of the course but not the quizzes in the question back okay so the quizzes in the question banks that's right they remain they remain they are there but they are not used by the now the consortium must make its level-based efforts to find out if there is any other teacher who is willing to run that course using the old modifying it or using his own tears or something like that that is the reason why I have insisted on a separate budget for running a course as opposed to creating a course so the same as I said if Professor Gadare takes Nirvana after two years and suppose by that time I have picked up interest in signals and system and I say I've all right I will run this course but you see the major job of intellectual contribution he has done I still have to do the job of deciphering the generated questions of the discussion forum answering them and maybe adding a few more videos etc that is always a danger in fact that is the question when I had made the presentation in the international conference on blended move and everybody club and I asked them this question that when blended move course is offered let's say by Iser offers that physics 101 you offer that and two years it runs and you have Vishweshwara University of Karnataka takes it saying that is the standard course so 200 engineering colleges all students take that course now third year you take Nirvana the courses no more running but the students need that course because that is part of their degree program see one thing we don't realize the significance and importance of a university system or an institution system in IIT Bombay for example no matter whether a teacher who is teaching this course is available or not a course will run it has been approved by the Senate it is a part of a degree program it is the responsibility of IIT Bombay to run that course same thing in Delhi University any university if a BBA program is announced then all papers must run that is the responsibility of the university I might next year say this thank you I don't want money I don't know anything but is enough so there is a real danger and that is why for perpetuating the usage of such courses it is very important that the course be created not only with an angle of creating the best course but ensuring that anybody can run that course in fact this is something that Suprati Kena are specifically looking at that the CS11 course that we create should be run by any professor of computer it should be so delineate this is another aspect you might want to keep in mind while you create a course so it's a it's a difficult decision because on one hand you want the best teacher to bring out the best in that course now clearly that teacher teaches differently from me another that is why the teacher is best but can that best teacher capture the essence of his or her expertise in such a way that anybody else can facilitate running that course that's the challenge we'll answer these questions as time passes by I think it is good that we are raising these questions the point is we have not a river to swim across we have an ocean to swim across and we can't keep standing on the Kinnara and keep saying kheharayaar panee boh tanda hain kya kare hain kutne hain dekhne aage kya hota hain aage uparwala maali sir this is not a question just some information about CS 101 you said there are 60,000 students yeah they register then maybe some 25 30,000 they continue and ultimately maybe slightly lesser than they pass out so do we have some statistics what are their login patterns like weekends we will get we will get that data at the end of the course okay that also I would like to tell you that when your course runs then you are entitled to get the entire data for that course including information about students etc is just like any class but our self imposed privacy laws prohibit exchanging any data for one's course with any other institute or any other teacher the global practices that they are trying anonymizing algorithms so they anonymize data for the purposes of statistical analysis will be made available I am going to attend the EDF conference where they will shed more light on how they are anonymizing it we will add up those algorithms and we will also create the anonymized it but the data belongs to the faculty member and university which runs a course now at the end of the course current as per the current available software the entire interaction data which is created is given out to you in fact there is a nomenclature which edx uses which is called data czar as in the czar of Russia so each university has to have a data czar we have Shweta who is our data czar she is a sysadmin data czar means she is the only person who will be given access to data by the edx global now it is her responsibility to ensure that if it is professor Vikram Gadare's course data he and his research team of analytics have access to it my course or Supratik's course we have it we may internally collaborate to work on the let us say large Hadoop platform to do common analytics or something like that but that is the discipline that is so thank you very much I think we are delayed by almost half an hour for the closing session