 I thank all of you to giving me this opportunity to share some of my thoughts with all the participants. First and foremost, let me welcome all of you to this important workshop. It is important not only because it deals with an important subject of signals and systems, but also because under our T10KT program is the first workshop which had more than 10,000 teachers actually registering for the workshop. I do not know what the current attendance is, but probably it is more than 9,500 which is a very good thing. All of you are familiar already from the material that you have seen on the web and the notices how this training program runs. It is a two week program, actually 10 working days with only one holiday in between that is Sunday. I am aware that all of you have sacrificed a whole lot of important activities at your own places. Many of you would already have colleges running their next semester. However, I would like to request you to be very serious and sincere in attending all sessions of this workshop. I am constrained to emphasize this because in the past there have been instances in our previous workshop for example where the teachers, particularly those who work at the same college which is the remote center were required to participate in some other urgent activities of that college and were unable to attend regularly the workshop. Please note that your respective college managements have specifically stipulated that you are being freed completely for this workshop and therefore I request you to spend the entire time in attending the workshop sessions. All of you have been either teaching signals in systems or have studied it. So it is not that the material that is being covered is completely new to you. But what is new probably is the style in which that material is covered, the style in which the problems are solved, the problems are discussed and perhaps a little bit of the IIT style of pedagogy on how a subject is talked to the students. Something which I am sure all of you will benefit from when you complete this workshop and subsequently try and teach this subject in your colleges. Sorry for beginning with a stern note but I hope you appreciate when I say that unless each one of us participates in such training workshops with full seriousness and sincerity, the net effect of the workshop can be much less than what it ought to be. Each one of us after all benefits not only while listening to experts such as Professor Somna Sengupta and Professor Vikram Gadri but also from the interaction that I have with my own fellow colleague participating teachers from the remote center, from the remote center workshop coordinator etc. This has been a unique experiment. It is worthwhile to briefly mention that when I started the synchronous distance education program in IIT Bombay, planning started in 1998 and we actually launched it in 2000, 2001. The ambition was to connect face to face a large number of people across the country so that we can work together, interact together and learn from each other. Slowly it morphed into a teacher's training program. We started with 1000 teachers at the beginning with about 20 to 25 remote centers. Today we have about 330 active remote centers with another 150 remote center spending. Out of all these, about 250 to 260 participate in any workshop. Last year when we changed the scale of this workshop to 10,000 teachers, many were a bit worried whether this is doable. We ourselves had some concerns but fortunately thanks to the cooperation of all the remote centers, their coordinators, workshop coordinators and of course the faculty, we have successfully implemented this program. I am very proud to say that thanks to all your backing, this is the largest ever synchronous training program that is running anywhere in the world and we are very happy that a large number of colleague teachers across the country are benefiting from this program. So I conclude this part by stating again, please allocate the adequate amount of seriousness and sincerity to this workshop exactly the same as you would expect from your own students when they attend your classes. Continuing on the stern note, I would like to request one more aspect of our lives on which we all need to be very careful about and that is academic ethics. You will wonder why I am taking this opportunity to speak on academic ethics. After all all of us are familiar with the requirements but it is worthwhile for each one of us to remind oneself of how I must conduct myself in all my academic activities so that I hopefully become a role model not only to my students but also to my colleagues. We generally relate academic ethics to the acts of copying and avoiding such instances. Equally important are acts of plagiarism where we are tempted to copy some material from some published work published by someone else, cut and paste it in our own submissions and claim that submission to be our own. These temptations usually arise when we are preparing some research papers to be sent for publication either in a conference or in a journal. It is not always that we do it with an intention of copying but sometimes we do it because we are unable to paraphrase the work of others in our own words. Let me tell you that this is considered an academically criminal activity and this must be avoided at all costs. Again this is not a research workshop but I do expect that many of you who work in signals and systems for example may be continuing your research work in that direction either doing your M.E. projects or working towards your PhD. If you are already a PhD you might be guiding some research students. It is very very important that you emphasize this ethical requirement to your students, your colleagues and to yourself. Please understand that our students watch us every day. They watch each activity that we do. They may be shy enough or not bold enough to say something directly to us but they are as sensitive and intelligent as we were when we were students. They are as observant as we were and we are. Please remember that whatever we do our students and other colleagues know exactly what we are doing and it is therefore very important that we be upright, we be always correct and we therefore become a role model for others so that the others will feel yes this is the way the academic life should be. Plagiarism is not necessarily limited to only copying somebody else's work and putting it as one's work. Let me give you a curious example. If in a question paper that I said I repeat a question which was said by a colleague of mine 2 years ago there is also plagiarism. If I repeat a question from a paper which I had myself said that also is a plagiarism that is a self-plagiarism. Basically these kind of instances happen because we do not feel that it is necessary and important for us to spend adequate time in constructing good new problems from an examination. Later on when I speak about the massive online courses the reason for my stating this fact will become apparent to you. So please understand that timely attendance in a workshop like this is equivalent of saying that you expect all your students to show up in time for your classes. Listening to all the sessions carefully and doing all your labs with seriousness amounts to you are subsequently saying that all your students must apply their minds to the problem that you solve in the class, the lectures that you give in the labs that you conduct with the same seriousness and sincerity. This is exactly what I mean so please note that broadly the topic of ethics covers the entire gamut of our academic behavior from small time things like starting a lecture exactly at 8.30 when it is supposed to start at 8.30 and not even at 8.31 is an important aspect of academic ethical behavior in my opinion. Having said this I will now come to another important topic in fact a topic on which I seek your considered feedback and this topic is on this topic is massive online open courses or MOOCs. Most of you would have heard the term MOOCs some of you may not have so let me explain what these are. You are all familiar with online tutorials, online e-learning material, online e-learning courses etcetera etcetera. In last 2 years such courses are being offered in an extremely organized way end to end from registration to actual certification to a large number of participants across the world by a few people. Mostly these few people are not individuals but have formed themselves into company. Three companies which are well known to have offered such MOOCs are one is called Coursera which originated in Stanford the other is called Udacity which also originated in Stanford but it is a sort of independent company whereas Coursera is run by 2 professors of Stanford. The third is EDX which originated in MIT and Stanford MIT and Harvard. The courses which are offered under these headings of under the banner of these 3 companies cover the major courses in engineering and humanities and arts. These are offered by the most renowned professors of the top universities of the world and the courses have caught the imagination of a large number of learners across the group not necessarily students alone but even professionals and other learners. It is not uncommon to have more than 100,000, 200,000 participants registering for a massive online open course from these companies. Just to complete the information about MOOCs in India IIT Bombay has taken a lead to offer MOOCs in collaboration with one of the three companies which is EDX of MIT. Three of our courses in fact will be offered from July onwards this year and two more will come in due course of time. I do expect that Professor Somnath Sengupta and Professor Vikram Gadre would offer the signals and systems course directly to the participating students across the group. There are a couple of problems about the way in which the MOOCs are presently offered. The course is completely online, the lectures are video recorded, participants listen to these lectures, then attempt quizzes and questions online, they give all exams online. In fact they never come face to face with anybody. Technically I can study a subject entirely sitting at home interacting on the computer with the professor who is offering the course with the teaching associates whom the professor has gathered and more importantly with the large chunk of these 1, 2 lakh participants who are participating in this course. I have some reservations about how effective these MOOCs could be in the present form in which they offered. As I said they are offered completely online. This causes two problems. One is that if there is a student from our regular university system who registers for one such course, the student also has to do his own examination for that course in the normal university system. Consequently the student is taught between either doing this course well or that course well and often gives up. That is one of the reasons why the completion rate in these MOOCs is hardly 5 to 10 percent for courses with large enrollment. The second and more serious problem is that the MOOCs in their present form completely disintermediate the entire university system. You do not need a college, you do not need a university, you do not need anything just the internet. Of course one positive aspect of this is the best course from the best professor in the world becomes extremely inexpensive. Consider the kind of tuition fees that our students are required to pay today for let us say engineering education. Per course fee if you calculate it would still amount to a large sum. Most of the courses currently are being given free in the terms of U.S. and European economy. The certified courses would not cost more than 50 dollars or 100 dollars. However while they become inexpensive they disrupt a very very important activity which is part of our education system and that is the group activity. When I as a student attend a course let us say in Coimbatore I am not just listening to the lectures given by my teacher but I participate in discussions. I benefit from the answers given by my teacher to another student to ask a question. I work together with my colleagues students to solve problems, discuss problems. I do sometimes course projects which are given by my teacher locally. In short I learn a large amount of my knowledge from such group activities. MOOCs being completely online remove this group activity totally. I have suggested a blended model of MOOCs to be adopted. In this blended model the regular students do only the MOOCs course and their universities agree that whatever grade they get in the MOOCs will be adopted by the university. So, that students do not have to do double work. In addition I have suggested that the teachers in the local colleges should use the flip classroom model. The flip classroom model says that I would not waste my time in delivering lectures. The lectures are prerecorded either my lectures or somebody else's lectures. Students are supposed to listen to those lectures before coming to the classroom and the classroom engagement is entirely devoted to discretion session problems solving session. Many of my colleagues have used this model in IIT itself and some sister institutions have tried it with great success. In fact the feedback uniformly is that the students learn much more because they get far more time. The teachers who have contributed to this flip classroom model say that they are now able to spend more time and attention to let us say weaker students who need hand holding because now they can talk to them one on one since they do not have to waste their time in lecture. They can also challenge the smarter students by giving them more difficult problems so that their learning goes one step up. It is this flip classroom model that I suggest where the teachers in the local colleges spend their entire engagement time in discussions, problem solving, explanations, hand holding, mentoring. I have written a series of papers and given a series of talks on this blended model. It is likely to be adopted by University grants commission NAICT and on a pilot basis this blended model may be implemented in some of the universities and affiliated colleges which will accept this model from coming semester. The reason I considered spending some time describing this is I want your feedback on what you feel about the entire MOOCs and the blended model approach. Of course I do not want you to be judgmental only on the basis of what I have just shared with you. For your benefit I am uploading latest version of my thoughts which will be appearing as an invited talk in an international conference. You can consider to be a pre-pinned. It will be uploaded on the moodle by third evening. I would request you to get it downloaded, may be get it printed, spend about an hour reading it. There are a set of questions on which I seek your feedback. Those questions are also included in that write up. Please read those through those questions. Record your opinions on pencil and on the moodle please give your feedback. I request you to give this feedback on sixth or seventh. I think by sixth evening if you can complete that feedback session I would request the course organizers to kindly provide a lap time to conduct this feedback. This is not an examination so people can give this feedback as and when they are free. Why it is important for me to get this feedback from you is because the University grants commission has appointed a subcommittee to finally take a call on whether to recommend acceptance of MOOCs at least for some courses for the regular engineering examination and the final meeting of that subcommittee is going to happen in IIT Mumbai on eleventh of March. I would like to present the feedback received from 10,000 teachers which will be actually a very very useful feedback for all of us to consider. I will not take much longer. I think I already exceeded the time that was given to me but I would like to still take one minute on coming back to the main theme of this workshop which is signals and systems. Contrary to popular belief we say that I am actually a computer science professor dealing with information systems, databases and so on. Like all of you I was actually a signal processing person in the early days of my career. When I was working towards my PLD and working also as a teacher I had the fortunate privilege of developing the first digital signal processing course in IIT Bombay jointly with my guru Professor Kekre and my colleague Professor Sastra Bundy. At that time there was only one book, Gold and Radar which was published in 1968. Two more books appeared I think in early 70s. One was Oppenheim and Schaffer and what was, well Oppenheim and Schaffer is what I remember and Rabin and Gold and Rabin. Curiously later in 1985 Oppenheim gave a course in digital signal processing under the open course where in IIT and the entire video recording and the complete course material is still available on the web. Although the technology has advanced significantly and the way the digital signal processing is done today is completely different than how it was done in old days. At the cost of some additional time I will tell you an exciting experience. A student of mine who later became a colleague Dr. Sunil Sherlecker was writing a paper for an IEEE contest. It was based on a research that we are jointly doing on identifying certain parameters of ECG signals. In those days we used to get the ECG signals as printed strips from our hospital. We had to hand sample those signals then we had to punch cars to put that data in, put those punch cars on our famous Russian EC-1030 machine to get the analysis done. In fact one of my colleagues Riley commented that by the time you predict that there is a heart problem the patient would die. Fortunately the signal processing of modern times is completely different. I will tell you one more thing. The two people who are conducting this course Professor Somnath Sen Gupta and Professor Vikram Gadre are amongst the best known experts in the country on this subject and perhaps some of the best known experts globally. I am very glad that you will be benefiting from their lectures, the material that they have put together. You already know that we intend to put all the learning material in open source so that all of you and your students can use that in future. Just remember one thing signal processing or signals and systems like any other subject is not something which is confined to one course however exciting and however great that course may be. There is a whole lot of material including old background material including new thing that is happening that continue to happen and therefore apart from studying this material well I request you to keep your eyes and ears open on the new research that is constantly being done. Keep on adopting and keep on improving your own knowledge so that your students become better signals and systems people. Thank you very much.