 The rest of the session is titled, Introductions. But these are not introductions of all the participants. This introduction of the people who are going to help us conduct this workshop and who have been helping us. Some of them you know already. I'll request them to stand up as I take their names. I would also like you to be introduced to the computing facilities which are unfortunately spread in about five places, thankfully in two neighboring buildings, the old computer science department building and the mass department building ground floor which houses one of the computer science labs. So first let me begin with my team, the workshop team is coordinated by Dr. Mukta Atre. Mukta was here somewhere. Can you stand up Mukta? Yes. Unfortunately, the people who planned the sitting arrangements, I forgot to request them to keep the one row free in the front so that all these people could sit here and you do not have to turn your heads. But we made that mistake. So they are all at the back and Mahendra Parmar is there. You might have made some of them during your forage into your empty NL guest house and so on. They have actually a very large team. Many of them are still working behind the scenes. The second important team for us is our video team led by Mr. Sajjan Dixit. Sajjan Dixit is there and his second in command Sushant is he there? Yeah, Sushant is standing right where you can see him easily. These people have been helping us to set up the entire technology for the main workshops where we transmit using AVU and so on. So thank you very much, Sushant. Thank you. We also have a whole lot of other teams. Most of you are participants in the Aakash project also except for a few remote centers which have joined us recently. The Aakash project logistics is being handled by my colleague, Mr. Shaukat Ali. I think Shaukat's team is standing outside as usual handling the logistics. I understand that some of you have some non-working tablets to exchange, repair, whatever, whatever. They will handle all those tasks for you. There are several other projects that are going on. For example, the development of software for the T10KT program as well as for the Aakash project is handled by large teams. So three of them, one is headed by Rajesh Koshalkar. Rajesh is here. Yeah, he is the creator of the clicker device which we designed earlier and the software has now been ported by his team on Aakash. He'll be demonstrating in one of the sessions on how to use that clicker application. Many remote centers are already using it for conducting quizzes in their own colleges. So thank you Rajesh. The other team is led by Parag Tiwari. He and his team is in the background. They sit in the Aakash lab one as we call them and there is an Aakash lab two which runs a school pilot where we try to develop open source content and applications for school education. Both these are neighboring labs. In fact, some of you will be doing your afternoon sessions in those labs. The third development lab is the MOOCs lab for the massive open online courses. The activity is led by our advisor Prasaravina Shouta and there are a large number of people who are trying to adopt the EDX platform for our use. I'll be talking about it later. We have another very important advisor, Prasar Prakash Vaidya. I thought he had come here. Prakash is there. He is a hardware designer but he also specializes in good quality documentation. So he helps us in both the ways. He was the original designer of the concept of clicker and he has helped us for many years for devices like smart card readers which are affordable and so on. But currently he spends his time in ensuring that the end to end documentation and for all processes is done properly. There are many other people. There is a small research group which is coordinated by Nagesh Karmai and Firuza Aibara. Both of them are actually teachers in our co-ordinators workshop so you might have got their names. I think Firuza has been corresponding with you for clarifying how to install simple CPP. I had never seen something called simple CPP becoming so complicated in life. But then that is how technology is. There are many more people. We have a team of about 200 people between these two projects, T10KT and Akash project and other six or seven colleagues of mine. All of these activities incidentally are coordinated by Prasar Kandan Maudgaly. So it is jokingly said that after IIT Bombay government administration, Kannan Maudgaly is the largest employer on this campus in terms of about 350 people and so on. We also provide a lot of internship and there are six months interns. Many of them are working in the MOOCs lab. There will be summer interns who will be joining us for six to eight weeks. Many of them have done wonderful work. Some of you have seen a robo-controlled by Akash last year or year before last that we demonstrated. It was developed actually by these kids. We are keen to prove that anything and everything that is great can be done at any place and by anybody who is sufficiently motivated to do things. You need not have IIT students, IIT faculty. It can be done by students from any college anywhere in the country provided there is enough motivation. We are succeeding in proving that and it is precisely for that reason that I seek all your help. IITs have got a good name but please remember that IIT faculty and IIT students have not fallen from the sky. We are of the same ilk as all of you. There is absolutely no difference. If there is some difference it is probably in the ethos and the environment and which can actually be easily created at each of the places where you work. It is just that sufficiently strong group motivated to make that change has not assembled at your place and you should be catalyst to assemble that. Once you assemble that group believe me rest of the job will be done by the smart students that all of you have. Let me just take 5 minutes to tell you about the 3-4 objective that we must keep in mind in looking at all our educational processes. You would have all read my paper on the blended MOOCs for Indian students. It is interesting that many of us are realizing probably for the first time that good teaching does not necessarily translate into good learning. So first of all to become good teachers itself is a huge task but probably when we look at good teaching we are looking at ourselves and we often forget how students learn. So here are a few questions that I will leave for your thought process. We all have a lecture hour. It need not exactly be an hour it is 55 minutes, 50 minutes or 45 minutes someplace. You agree most of the places? What is the origin of this duration? How did this get set up? Anybody knows that? So why not 2 hours and why not 30 minutes? Is there any statistical study saying that one hour is an ideal duration for a lecture? According to medical science, the brain will concentrate maximum up to 15 minutes. So during teaching there are 3 slots divided into 15, 15 and 15. For the first 15 minutes it should be try to cover all the topics previously which have taken in the previous lecture and next 15 will be the continuation of the courses and the next 15 how to analyze and what to do with this topic which we have covered in this lecture. But that amounts to only 45 minutes. 5 minutes for the attendance and the rest of the things. Attendance has become an obligatory part of all formal education. Does that truly make sense to you? Sir according to rules we have to follow that whether the students are attentive in the classes or not. You use the very good word according to rules. We all follow rules and it is a good practice to follow rules. But we have stopped questioning as to what is the basis of many of those rules. We don't question it, we don't debate it and therefore rules persist merely because they exist, not necessarily because they still continue to be relevant. And if teachers don't question it, in any society teachers are supposed to be the thought leaders. And if in their own domain of teaching and learning if they don't question these rules. So I have a simple principle. You must follow rules when they exist. But if you feel that rule is not correct you must try and change those rules. And if there is no debate on rules the rules will never change. As I have said in my paper the kind of education that I received from 1964 to 69. It was a good education, it was a good institution. But the rules continue to remain the same and they have got more state jacketed over the last 50 years. And people have not bothered about whether those rules are reasonable or not reasonable. Anyway I digress a bit. The new methodology that I have mentioned insists on making students participate in the sessions and that participation is not possible in the conventional lecturing styles. So when we give a lecture for one hour or 45 minutes or 50 minutes as you say there will be occasions when we will interact with students. We will ask an occasional question which somebody will answer or we will ask people to do some solve some problems for two minutes. What is the total duration in a lecture hour that is spent by the students interacting with each other or interacting with the teacher? You will agree that it's not more than five minutes per lecture. I am talking about an average taken over an entire semester long period. In one particular hour you might spend half an hour discussing. But in many lecture hours you will be actually giving a lecture. We have had teachers who go to the board in the old days I am talking about old days who actually went to the blackboard immediately after taking attendance. While taking attendance he never looked at the class he looked only at the register. As a result it was easily possible for the class to register almost 90% attendance when only 40% students were present. Then he would turn to the board open a old notebook and start writing and he will stop writing only when the bell rings he will close that book and go away. Some of us figured out to do very useful things. For example a friend of mine Arafus and manager taught me to write Urdu during that course and I taught him some maths. That was the only fruitful exercise we did in the entire course. Now I suspect that such things prevail even today and that is because we are never questioned the very method of teaching. Now that is what is being questioned and this workshop is going to be a harbinger of how that questioning will occur. I will talk about that in the first session after the tea break. But before that I must mention that this is the first time we ran a coordinators workshop for two weeks duration instead of a one-week duration. One week is regular face-to-face that we are meeting some of you have participated in such coordinators workshop earlier but most of you are probably coming for the first time. But the novelty here was that all of you were required to do one week equivalent of work as he said physically spread over four to five weeks. I am very glad to mention that majority of the people have actually lived up to the expectation of looking at the assignments trying to do those assignments. Arguably a few assignments are actually submitted with very clearly about 10 to 15 minutes of effort but there have been some very good efforts. One novelty which I tried was for example to ask people to dub the video with one's own voice in an Indian language and write a transcript. Some of the transcripts which I could read I can read and understand Hindi, Marathi and a little bit of Gujarati and not all but some of them are absolutely top class. People have taken efforts to do that. Not everybody has put in an audiophile. I was surprised to get a comment from some of the teachers that they are not comfortable with any Indian language other than English. So that may happen if English is my mother tongue but I would suspect that if I live in a province I would generally be able to speak and understand the language that is spoken in that province by majority of the people. Whatever the ambition by the way as many of you would have realized we will be using this 10,000 teachers training program when we launch the main workshop to get audio contributions of each and every video segment that will create for the course so that when we launch the CS101X in open source subsequently in July the course content which as you know we all release in open source will be available simultaneously in 15 major Indian languages for our students to learn from. So that is the ambition and with your help I will expect that ambition to be fulfilled. Amongst the general feedback on teaching and learning again there have been some very thoughtful submissions. I will single out only one. Professor Pallav Nandi Choudhury is he here? Ah so he wrote a very passionate disclaimer saying why this Professor Aviram Ranade's book may not be an ideal book for students across the country. It takes a lot of guts to come and say that what you have done is actually not very useful and that is the kind of guts that all of us have to develop. In fact this dissent and the subsequent dialogue and discussion is what makes things better. Let me tell you Professor Choudhury that Professor Aviram Ranade and I have spent more hour discussing your paper than what you have spent in writing it. So thank you very much for doing that and we expect a whole lot of critical observations and comments. You see different viewpoints must be brought out must be discussed so that together we all evolve something better to do. I will close this for the tea break. Enjoy your cup of tea and come back. Thank you so much.