 in one's professional life. Indeed, these topics are relevant in our entire life. However, during our conventional education, in which we pass several subjects that we study in our colleges, these topics are unfortunately not covered explicitly. It is assumed somehow that while we get educated, we will learn about these things on the side, which sadly does not happen and that is the reason why we decided to consolidate some important topics of these subjects and introduce you to them. I suppose all of you are aware that this course is being run in a blended mode. A blended mode means that you should learn from the use of online platform on which the main course material is released, which is IIT Bombay X and you will do most of your activities including assessments using the online platform. In order to provide some spontaneous interaction including live answers to the questions that you raise, we have introduced these AVU sessions, which are face to face sessions, which will be conducted on Saturdays. As you are aware, the timetable provides for six slots on six Saturdays, but we have added one more Saturday after the closure of the online course in order to solve any remaining difficulties that you may have. These face to face sessions can be attended in one of the two ways. One, if you happen to be a student in one of our established remote centres and if the remote centre college agrees to provide you facilities to come together on Saturdays and interact with us, then you will have the benefit of live interaction. As mentioned in the course notifications, we will be collecting questions from all of you ahead of time and we will be answering select questions. In addition, we will always have some time for the spontaneous questions that are asked from the remote centres in the live sessions. I note that there are a large number of students who are not participating from any one of the established remote centres. After all, there are 4000 engineering colleges and 40,000 other colleges from which students may want to benefit and may have registered for this course. For them, we have started the live transmission of these sessions. So, as we speak, the session is being live on YouTube. All of you have been communicated the link that you should use. You can watch the live sessions either from your home or from your workplace or even in groups where only one of you has an internet connection and the other people sit around a PC or perhaps in the classroom and enjoy the advantages of these live sessions. Having said that, I would like to now mention that we have given you a list of topics that would be covered. In fact, we asked a small quiz question as a practice quiz in my first introductory talk which is recorded, which asked you to list which of the topics mentioned are not covered. The idea was to ensure that you actually read the entire course material. In fact, almost all our online material including video sessions will proceed in this manner. By the way, in our internal terminology, we do not call them video lectures, but we call them learning dialogues. You will wonder how a video recorded session can be a dialogue. It is often a monologue from a teacher to the learners. What we have done is that on the IIT Bombay X, we are using a feature called pausing and in-video quiz. We use this feature to pause the video. We ask you to undertake some activity, reflect upon some point and answer a simple question and then proceed. This is very similar to what happens in a classroom when people listen to a talk and the teacher pauses after 5 or 7 minutes asking some question just to ensure that the attention of all the students is focused on what is being spoken. Please understand that learning does not happen. Nearly IIT Bombay or any other institute is able to arrange top quality lecture sessions. Lectures are important because they explain several pertinent points of the topics. However, just listening to the lectures, one may not learn the complete range of activities that are required to cover that topic. In fact, this is true while learning any subject. When I am a student and I am listening to a lecture, I actually learn because I am thinking in tandem along with the speaker and I am trying to absorb not just the words that are being spoken, but the meaning and the implied direction. More important, I must later do some practice on my own practicing or rehearsing the specific explanations that have been given because I learn by doing. It is this learning by doing which we are trying to emphasize. In a classroom, when you interact with me in live sessions, I am able to monitor your activities myself as a teacher. However, in an online connection like this, the monitoring has to be a self-monitoring. I would urge you therefore, to ensure that whenever you listen to either such live sessions or even to the video sessions which are pre-recorded, please use your discretion, introduce a artificial pause yourself if you want because you can pause any video session and then reflect upon whatever has been stated. One very important thing I would like to suggest and I have seen many people benefit from this suggestions is that never ever sit in front of a PC listening to a video with bare hands. Please always carry a notebook and a pen with you. After all, that is what you do in a classroom when you attend a lecture. Why you take notes? Different people would take different notes in different styles, but some writing down or whatever you are listening is useful because that act of writing actually works as a reminder or an enforcer in your brain to firmly implant the idea that is being discussed. So, I will repeat again. If you do not have a notebook, I will pause for 30 seconds, pick out a piece of paper if you do not have a notebook, pick out a pencil or pen and be ready and keep jotting down a few notes as you listen to this and any other session. After all, an important aspect of this course itself, the workplace communication is our ability to write. While the ability to write as a part of the professional activities will be elaborated later by my colleagues, but I think we can make a good beginning to learn to write precise short sentences or phrases encapsulating the main ideas that are given out during the lectures and you can do that real time online while listening to the lectures. So, rule number one, never ever sit in front of a PC or a screen while watching the lectures without a notebook and a pen. Rule number two, when you have a notebook and pen, please use it. If at the end of a session, if your notebook is blank, then you are not benefited from that session as much as you ought to and please note this entirely depends on you. As a matter of fact, whenever you attend a massive open online course like this, in spite of the fact that we have introduced face to face interaction, which is a very novel feature of IIT Bombay courses in blended mode, the fact remains that there is no external supervision or external audit on what you do. There will of course be assessments, but assessments will merely test your preparedness for answering those specific questions. The general understanding of all the topics will come only by your active participation. I repeat only by your active participation. My colleague, Mr. Shukumar often reminds me that while we would like to work on our own, there is always a benefit of having some external audit in our life. After all, what is their examination or what is their test or what is their test? Is it not something like an external audit? Sure, at the end of all such quizzes and assignments, we actually compile your performance and give you a certificate and very sure most of you will work towards getting that certificate, but because you cannot get the certificate without appearing for those exams and quizzes, you take those exams and quizzes seriously. And therefore, what I call as an external audit turns out to be a useful feature to make sure that you do undertake certain activities to assimilate whatever is being taught. Should such external audit or external, let us say, suggestion to enforce activity on your part, be always in the form of quizzes and tests, that is not required. So, here is another suggestion and this I call it rule number three of the engagement. The rule number three is while you are of course, welcome to work completely individually and alone, it would be advantageous if you form small groups of people or if you are friends. Just two or three people watching the same video together will actually create a similar atmosphere to a classroom where only three students are attending and one teacher is speaking to you. What is the advantage of these three students working together? Whenever you pause, you can actually have some internal discussion among yourself. If nothing else, you can compare what notes each one of you has written. So, look at the advantage that I would get as a student. Suppose, I am watching this video, I have a notebook and I have not written anything and I have two of my colleague friends who are actually close friends forming a group. After one intervention, when we compare notes, both my friends find that my notebook is blank and if my notebook is blank, which means I have not written anything while watching the session. Perhaps these two friends of mine being friends will remind me saying, hey Fadak, what are you doing? You are supposed to take notes and this perhaps will force me to start taking notes in subsequent session. Such is the great power of the peer pressure, which we ought to create for ourselves. It is true that we are trying to enable every individual to learn on one's own, but he or she may not actually undertake all the activities either because of the boredom or because of somewhere else that the mind is floating, but if I have a small group of people, then the group acts as peers to each other and it helps. So, this is one easy form of external audit that we can create for ourselves. I strongly suggest that from now onwards, if you are not already in a group, from now onwards please work in a group of 2 or 3 people while watching the thing. Of course, there is a danger when a group of people collaboratively work. The danger is that when it is quiz time and you have to answer a quiz, which is a graded quiz, then you may be tempted to collaborate. Well, this is a polite way of saying that you will be tempted to copy. Now, that has to be avoided completely because the ethics that needs to be built in your body and mind needs to start from such simple acts of appearing for a test or quiz, which is required to be done by you alone, then you must do it alone. Even if 2 of your fastest friends are sitting next to you, you shall not take their help as a matter of self-discipline. We have tried a few things such as randomizing quizzes and so on, but by and large let me tell you that appearing for a quiz or a test on one's own, even though I have my friends who are ready to help me, is an extremely important quality in ethics that one must develop to face professional life. You compromise it once because you are tempted to do so since you are sitting at your home with just 2 friends and Professor Fatak is not there to watch you, there is no invigilation. So, you are tempted to ask your friend for some help and that causes the beginning of your downfall. Once you do that, next time you will do it because you realize that there is still nobody watching and you can get away with it. Of course, you can get away with it and that is because the quizzes and tests here are actually designed to be undertaken by each one of you individual. We believe in you, we trust in you. That is why the final certificate which is given by IIT Bombay X is called Honor Code Certificate. Please understand that Honor Code is extremely important in real life. In fact, we shall be spending some time in this course to discuss various aspects of professional ethics, but the beginning has to be made by ensuring that you appear for each one of your individual tests individually, no matter how tempting it is to take help from the students of your group, particularly when you yourself have set up that group in order to help you in assimilating and understanding certain points better. There will be some activities which we shall be detailing as the course unfolds. One of the important activities will be a initial entry level survey and an end survey. I would like to mention that this survey which will be released on IIT Bombay X is compulsory and obligatory, which means that even if you score 100 percent marks in all the graded quizzes, but you do not complete either one of these two surveys, you will unfortunately not be given a certificate because these are integral part of the course assessment. So, there are no marks for the survey. The survey essentially like any other survey will attempt to collect information from you as a matter of feedback which we will use in order to enhance this course offering as well as subsequent course offering. So, rule number 5, take all your quizzes, assignments and surveys very, very seriously. There will be deadlines. The deadlines will not be extended under any circumstances. That is how we work in IIT Bombay. Once a deadline is announced, the deadline is stuck to. However, we have ensured that for every graded quiz, you will get almost one full week. For example, the quizzes will be released for the topics of a particular week on this Saturday after face to face interaction and the last date for completing the online quiz will be next Friday. This will give you ample time to solve the quiz or assignment at your own pace, at your own time, but remember alone without any help. The last thing that I would like to mention is that please use the online forum as effectively as you can. As you know, we are not meeting face to face and there will be thousands of students across. The only way in which we will know about you, about your existence and about your queries is through discussion forums. Please make sure that you ask every question that raises in your mind about any topic. Second, please also feel free that if you can either answer a question raised by someone else or you can add to the answer provided by our faculty, colleagues and teaching assistants, please do so. The discussion forum is to be treated as a very large canvas for the collaborative community that consists of all of us, all of you students, the faculty members here, the local faculty members if any helping you from the remote centers and our teaching assistants and this collaborative community will be most meaningful for each one of us only if each one of us decides to participate actively. I notice that in IIT Bombay X, all students are still not enrolled. Please note that the enrollment is by invitation which means that once you confirm your registration on IIT Bombay X, our core staff will enroll you for this course. Then and only then you will be able to view all the sessions and all the quizzes and everything. Before introducing my colleagues, I would like to mention one more logistics issue. I was not aware that several colleges in the country begin the session not on 1st January as we do in IIT system, but around 15 January and so. As a result, many students studying in these colleges did not get adequate notification to register for the course. We have received a large number of requests to extend the date of registration. We have initially extended the date to 29th which is just two days from today. However, we have further received request saying that can we extend it by a few more days. We will be taking a call at the end of this session and you will find a notification on the website which will provide for an additional extended date. Most probably it will be till 4th of February. So, please take this opportunity to tell your colleagues students in your college and other colleges that because the date has been extended, people are welcome to participate if they so wish. This puts pressure on the timetable of quizzes and assignments that we had so carefully chocked out. Ordinarily, we do not change the dates of quizzes and the dates of actual submissions that are put as hard deadlines. We will not be able to change those dates. However, for those people who were not able to register early and will register late, they should remember that the eventual total assessment of the course is not based on taking the marks of all the online quizzes together, but we will decide to take the performance in best four or five quizzes out of the six or seven quizzes that we will conduct. This will permit the late registrants, even if they miss the deadline of the first quiz to complete the assessment of the remaining quizzes and still get adequate performance in order to qualify for the certificate. With this, let me introduce my colleagues. As you know, the course on workplace communication and soft skills has emerged out of years of similar topics being taught in IIT Bombay itself by a large number of faculty colleagues. Two of them who have been spearheading and coordinating this effort for many years in IIT Bombay are fortunately available to this course as lead faculty. Can you switch over to our lead faculty? So, may I take this opportunity to introduce Professor Viren Seti? Viren, can you say hi? Yes. And Professor Parsarthi. So, let me tell you the enthusiastic response from these two teachers. So, amazing. Both of them are very busy like most faculty members here. In fact, Professor Parsarthi will be going away to Europe to probably Amsterdam or some place. And he has agreed to participate in these life sessions from his hotel room or his college where he is visiting. Such is the dedication. And I thank Professor Seti and Professor Parsarthi for their contributions to this course. And I hope these contributions will come in all subsequent offerings of this course as well. So, with this I take your leave. Just to remind you number one, try and work in groups. Number two, never work without at least a notebook and a pen in your hand and learn to write down, jot down some notes. Number three, participate actively in the discussion forums raising questions. And number four, please ensure that you respect the deadlines of quizzes and assignments doing them diligently and doing them entirely on your own. Thank you so much. Over.