have Thursday events, but still the connect was missing at some level where we can see face-to-face and at least say, hi, hello, how are you? We don't do that otherwise. So we are extremely happy that you all could make it here today and we hopefully should have a fruitful interaction over the next four hours that we'll have the event. Schedule of the event will be, yes, we will start with presentations from our side on whatever NPTEL has been doing over the last couple of years and specifically this semester of Jan 2022. And we'll talk about the new initiatives that we have that the colleges can make use of. We'll also have an interaction time where you all can bring out either concerns, suggestions, recommendations for what you think we should be doing and how we can improve and improve the effectiveness of the delivery of the program as well as anything else that you would like us to be doing from our side. So that also we will have. And of course the most important part, the distribution and recognition of the local chapters who have done very well in Jan 2022 specifically for today and the top 10, top 100, the local chapter special category certificates that we'll be giving out. So that will be the layout of the program today. Our team is all here for help. I think all of them are wearing tags. If you have any queries, you can reach out to them in the tea break or lunch. We'll all also be available here. Like to introduce the coordinators who are here, Prasad Uthangraj, most of you know, I think he is here today to be with us. So he's there. Then Prasad Pratap Haridas, all of you know as the coordinator, like I said, he's now dean, academic courses in IIT Madras. He's the vice chair of the NPTEL program implementation committee. So still takes care of NPTEL. We don't let him go at all. We keep pulling him back to NPTEL anyways. Prasad Vignesh Mutawijain from Department of Biotechnology who's joined as NPTEL coordinator. Prasad Ramakrishna, who's from Department of Electrical Engineering who's again joined as an NPTEL coordinator at IIT Madras. Prasad Nikit Kaisare is also a coordinator. He's on sabbatical in the US. So he's not able to join us today. And very, very happy to have with us Professor Mangal Sundar, who is in the Department of Chemistry and started the entire NPTEL initiative. What we'll have today, the seeds were sown by him. He's logged it out for about 15, 17 years to see that this whole thing was through and he actually handed it over on a platter to us. So what we did was nothing compared to, I think, what they all did in those initial years. So we'll have some words from him initially. So I invite Professor Andrew to start off with the presentation now. He'll run through a few slides, then have Professor Mangal. Good morning, everyone. Very, very warm welcome to IIT Madras. The weather has been unusually pleasant this week. So I hope many of you are from Chennai or from outside? How many of you are from Chennai? Very few, okay. Maybe Chennai is not too bad. I guess people are coming from, anyone from Kerala? Oh, so maybe you feel the heat a little bit more. I guess Reigns have started there. Welcome, warm welcome. And like Bharti said, it's really great to see actual people in a meeting so far. We're just used to seeing, so used to seeing virtual people that it's been a while since we've had this. I think the last one was 2020, January, right? More than two years ago, we really missed this workshop, okay? So that much is definitely true. We used to look forward to it every semester, catching up with everyone, sharing numbers and then seeing how to improve everything, all of that. So the first few slides I'm gonna talk about are more or less a recap of what has happened in this semester and also I think a few previous semesters in terms of numbers and all that. So it probably sets the stage for the discussions that we'll have later, okay? Let me get started. Okay, so that's the portal. All of us know about it, nptl.ac.in. It's one of the leading portals in the world today in terms of amount of content we have and the amount of usage. And the numbers you can see are quite staggering and we are increasing every day as you know, right? More and more new courses keep coming. We are at 2,400 plus, which I think is a huge, huge, huge number for us and 1.4 billion views and look at the numbers in 50,000 plus hours of videos and 4 million plus subscribers in YouTube. All of these numbers are growing at a healthy rate and we're very happy to report these kind of numbers. Definitely, I think if you look at hardcore engineering content, nptl is definitely way ahead of anyone else and we don't have such numbers for the portal so we're not able to really compare. Nevertheless, it's definitely one of the largest in the world today. And more than the count of the numbers, I think the usage also is very high, so that's very nice. Okay, so now the effort that is a bit more recent than nptl.ac.in is this online certification effort which started sometime in 2014, long back, eight years ago. I don't know, maybe some of you have been with us since 2014. Can I see a show of hands? How many of you? Ah, see, I know him. Yes, I can see familiar faces. We started in a small way. I remember the first meeting we had with 10 colleges in this very building upstairs. Then we talked about how to make this better, et cetera, et cetera. And today we have done wonderfully well. You can see the numbers of more than 4,000 courses we have run in the certification mode. Every semester we run these days 500, 600 plus. I think the next semester some 600 plus courses and 1.82 crore plus student enrollments. Eight years have passed, I need my glasses sometimes to see these numbers getting old also. So nearly 20 lakh people have written exams. I think that again shows how things have worked out quite well and then 620 courses. I think overall, to me, these numbers show that every stakeholder is sort of happy with what's going on. Stakeholder meaning not just students, I think colleges are happy, faculty are happy, teachers are happy. I think the people who teach these courses offer these courses on the platform, they are happy and overall it's working out quite well. Okay, so that's about the online certification effort. So I think this, most of you know, I'll just go through very quick. Our course content is reasonably standard in terms of what we have on offer. The lecture is the most important part. We have assignments of various types, text transcripts today, multiple languages are beginning to show up. There is a discussion forum where you can ask questions and live sessions. I think there are many new initiatives, particularly in live sessions. Last semester we tried something new. We want to talk about that and let's see. Let's see what more we can add. I think we can always add more things. There's always talk of more interactive content, more interesting content. If we have any clear ideas, we can talk more on how to improve the content as well. In terms of engagement, we expect that the good learners will engage with us about 10 hours a week per course. I think that's what ends up happening. There's watching the lectures, there's assignments, questions in the forum, going through transcripts and maybe other material that's given to you. So about 10 hours a week is a pretty good estimate for doing one course. Okay, now credit transfer is one more thing. I think some of you might already know about this, but if you're new to it, UGC of course allows credit transfer from NPTEL courses, from SWIM courses, NPTEL courses, definitely. And the way the split goes is 14 hours of learning is about one credit, roughly. This is the way we can do that. So if we do a four week course, we recommend one credit for it, that this is our recommendation. And I think many board of studies and academic councils have interpreted this very differently. But most of them sort of go with this recommendation. Four week course is one credit, eight week course is two credit, and for a 12 week course, we recommend three or four credits. I think always you can do one more extra credit if you think the student is working hard enough or maybe you add something to the course that then it's on offer. So credit transfer is a huge reason why this continues to be popular across the board. So many colleges have opted for this. In fact, it's interesting that the number of students who declare that they're doing it for credit transfer has grown to huge numbers. But we don't seem to get data from colleges and universities on how exactly they're implementing this. This seems to be a difficult data for us to collect. Every time we have a meeting in the ministry, the secretary will always ask us for this kind of deal. Can you give me more precise detail on how universities are doing credit transfer? And all the time we say is we have numbers, but we don't really know how they're doing it. So I think if we can brainstorm a little bit and figure out how to connect and make that gap go away, how do we know how it is that credit transfer is happening? This is important because at the level of the government, they want to see how effective these things are. So this is quite an important thing to track. Okay, so the process has been detailed. Like I said, various universities or colleges or autonomous colleges or university departments, they all do it very, very differently. IITM, for instance, does it in its own way. So many things are possible. And one of the interesting things I think that has come recently is domains, NPTEL domains. Instead of doing one course, you can do multiple courses and pick up a domain. So that gives you this added advantage of mastery of a subject, which you can use here. I believe some domain scholars have been invited here. Maybe we should have them say hi to everybody. Can we have domain scholars who are in the audience stand up and say hi? Yeah, see, you see so many of them. It's great. Let's have a round of applause for them. It's great to see them. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Please be seated. So a domain is defined as a set of courses curated in a particular way for you to become an expert in one area. And all these areas are listed. There are some 50 odd domains, I think, now. So there'll be more details coming up later. So to me, that sounds like a very nice way to do credit transfer, sort of letting students do some random courses. If you let them pick, they'll pick the soft skills and courses of that nature, which is okay. I think it's all right, but still maybe they could try something more interesting like this. And I would urge you to please keep it flexible. I know your world looks different from how I see it, but I think making it mandatory for students, compulsory for them to do those kind of things, I don't know, I'm not a big fan. I've always said you should keep it flexible. Definitely not in their final semester. Don't make anything compulsory in the final semester, because if they don't do well, then it's very hard for us to deal with that situation. So I think I hope you work with us. We're happy to work with you. In fact, we have people here who can help you on giving information on how other colleges are doing it and what works, what doesn't work, et cetera. So this one, it's okay. I think this is just how much UGCACT allows. It's about 40% now. Used to be 20, it's become 40%. Many IITs do it. Increasingly, more and more IITs are signing up for credit transfer here. IIT Madras, of course, does it. Many of the newer IITs also do it. So the IITs do it in a certain way also. We're happy to share all this information with you. This information we have, how the IITs do it, it would be good to get more information from others. So some more examples. So should I talk more about this or is it okay if I skip this, go through a little bit faster? You can see quite a few universities, the technical universities do it in a certain way. If you look at autonomous colleges, they like to do it in a different way. If you look at affiliated colleges, it happens in a different way for them. I think, for instance, JNTU, if you're under JNTU, I think JNTU has very strict rules on what courses are allowed and what semester for what students. So I think different flavors are there. But many universities also do it very openly and freely. They just say you can do any course you like. So that also happens. Okay, some more numbers. Maybe I should wear my glasses at this point. So some more numbers that are coming up. So all these numbers are nice. I think I don't know when we'll reach a point where we'll stop putting up these numbers. We've been tacking it from 2014 and you can see it's increasing, increasing, increasing. I don't know if it'll ever saturate or if it should saturate or not. The one of the questions the ministry asks, which is very interesting is, in any discipline, what is the maximum number of courses that are there? Okay, this is a question that gets asked very seriously by I think maybe somebody in planning commission is asking this question. I don't know. What is the maximum number of courses you can have? So my answer to them also always is any self-respecting academic will say the answer is infinity. How can you say what is the maximum number of courses in particular discipline? So, but anyway, so I think we will saturate eventually because I think I'll be alive and streaming. So I should be politically correct. Be very careful. No, I mean, I think it's a valid point. So I think we will eventually saturate at some point. Maybe about a thousand. I don't know. Maybe we'll get there. So we are growing. That's a good sign. And if you look at by department, I think this is something that we are extremely proud of. If you look at courses in any discipline, right? So if you want civil engineering courses, mechanical engineering courses, it's really difficult to find any other source. Our portal provides it. You can see the numbers are quite even mining engineering. We have 10 courses, ocean engineering, textile technology. Difficult to find these courses elsewhere. And we have all of these lined up for you. And of course the popular ones, I think RCS and Humanities, these end up being extremely popular in terms of takers. So who is offering these courses? You can see this number is also increasing. Used to be only the seven older IITs in ISC Bangalore. And those still have a very large number. But you can see the newer institutes are coming in. And we are working very closely with them to get more and more institutes into offering of courses. And that's a nice sign. And some of these courses end up quite well. We do look at quality and things like that. Our NPTEL PIC controls this thing of who can offer courses through NPTEL. There is interest from the Ministry for NPTEL to offer more and more interesting courses targeting others as well. So that 817 plus 332 that you see is 332 is not IITM, but in all these other institutes with whom we coordinate. So all of these are top institutes in the country, as you know. Okay, so now there's also health science, which is becoming a little bit more prevalent in NPTEL. Are there any health science, dental, medical, college type representatives here? Pharmacy, maybe? They always ask us that you don't have enough courses. That's true. We are trying our best to come up with something. I think it's tough to do courses on health science. Some very few that we can route there. And you can see this number is also growing slowly. We've also had a few teachers from outside the country come in and offer courses on NPTEL. Okay, so one interesting thing, this has gone through a very sharp change. There was a time when new courses used to be a lot. When we offered 500 courses, more than 300 or so would be new and then 200 would be rerun. Now it has completely reversed, okay? Overall, even if you see, if you look at July, December, 2022, which is upcoming courses, more than 500 are reruns. Only about 110 are new. So again, that points towards the saturation that is happening. Maybe people don't wanna create new content anymore. So we'll see where we end up. So now rerun is always good because you have the past information, right? You can go and see, ask people how they've done in the past and that information is always useful in making this decision. Yeah, so you'll also have assignments from the past which is available on NPTEL.ac. And if you go to NPTEL.ac.n, you go to the course that you're interested in, it'll also have tabs to show how many times it has run in the past. And you can go there and download the information about what happened in the run, right? So you can look at even, even the assignments are available, right? So you can really practice all of that and that's quite useful. Okay, so another interesting thing which is very different in our portal compared to many other portals. So quite often, if you go to a generic ATIC portal, they'll have eight hours for one course, right? So you can see many of our courses end up being 12 weeks. 12 weeks and it's like 35 or 36 hours is quite common for a particular course that we have and that's because we're really targeting a college audience and this is for college credit. So I guess it's okay. And you can see 12 week courses are extremely popular and then come the eight week courses and finally the four week courses. And there's a big request coming up for people to offer 12 week courses and that's nice to see. I think it's good to see that. Okay, this is a slide with a lot of numbers. I'm gonna ask all of you to by heart all these numbers and repeat to me. It's not what's going to happen. So one thing that's very interesting is the number of new learners who join the portal every term, okay? So I think that is the main number that I want you to focus on. Well, I'll come down to the other numbers and that's the only number that's being reported here. Okay, so out of the total number of people who sign up for courses in a particular term, you take for instance January, April 22, more than 22 lakh learners signed up and out of them more than nearly 12 lakh are new. New meaning they came in, created an account and then registered for the course. So I don't know, I mean how do you interpret that? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? So it's a good mix because about half of the people are coming back again, which is nice. So they're not going away, but half are going away. So it sort of represents the way education works, I think. Maybe about half the people are really interested in learning, half the people are just interested in the certificate, right? I got one certificate I'm done, which is okay. I think it's all right, that's a good thing to see, but it's a good mix and we're getting newer and newer people. And if you look at 11 lakhs as a number, right? Newer people are coming in. I think about seven lakhs and that will be engineering. Is that correct? Roughly, six, seven lakhs. And if you look at the number of engineering seats in the country, it's about eight to 10 lakhs. So it looks like a huge fraction of engineering students at least are coming into our portals. Now here I want to raise one interesting observation. Eight to 10 lakhs is the number of people who join engineering colleges in the country. What do you think is the number that joins arts and science colleges? B-A-C-B-A-B-Com. More than that, yes, good, but how much more? Is it 12 lakhs, 13 lakhs, or is it much bigger than that? Any guesses? Nobody wants to guess. These numbers are available. You can go look at A-A-S-H-E, All India, this college education survey that the ministry does. You can go look at the numbers. There are like some 60, 65 lakh students who join B-A-B-A-C-B-Com every year. That order, okay? So from there, from that segment, for some reason, at least in NPTEL, the numbers are low. I believe even in Swayam, the numbers are low. There's, it's a big challenge. You have seen arts and science. I mean, are there many arts and science colleges here represented here? So maybe that's the brainstorming that we need to do. What is it that we have to do to have, let's say, I mean, maybe not half, at least one third of those students. That should be like 20 lakhs, right? So if you say across the country, maybe even not across the country, maybe across the country is very hard. Let's focus on the states in the southern side, right? If you look at Tamil Nadu, Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, Maharashtra, I think the significant, there's quite a high population of students in colleges here. The enrollment ratio is very high here. So you have people going to colleges. And even here, I think the number of people from arts and science colleges who come in and take these courses is low. And we don't know what to do. In fact, in the previous swayam board meeting, the secretary asked us specifically to focus on this as a, those given the numbers, this number is much bigger. I mean, even though on engineering side, we're able to make an impact on the arts and science side, we have to make inroads. And maybe that's one more topic we can bring up for discussion later. Okay, so this is another very interesting number, which is how many people register for exams and how many people are present? So out of the 21 odd lack, which registered enrolled, nearly three and a half lack registered for the exam. So if you were to just divide that blindly, right? Three and a half by 21, that's I think some 17% or so. That's pretty high. Considered really, really high in particularly in the online course world, where you can just sign up without any money, right? So I think it's considered quite high. So this is another number that we track. These buildings are becoming bigger and bigger and maybe we should have a clever way of, maybe we should stop from 2014 and focus more. We don't like to do that. So one of the interesting things that we track here is how many people submit the first assignment? Because I think that's a very clear indicator. A lot of people click and join. Nobody will come to the portal after that, not nobody. Many people won't come to the portal after that, but even if they come, they look at the first week's lectures and run away. There's a crowd of that nature also. And then there's the segment which is able to look at the lectures, look at the assignment, and able to answer the first week's assignment. So if you look at, let's look at Jan April 22, the right most thing in the graph, about 36, oh, this is percent. Okay, I was thinking, what is this Y axis? Okay, so about 36% of the people who enrol submit the first assignment. That itself is a reasonable number, it's not that bad. And if you look at exam registration to assignment one submission, that's close to 50%. About half the people who submit the first assignment end up registering for the exam. So that's a very good sign. And we can be quite efficient with these kinds of things. It's not very random. It's not like people are doing things randomly here. So this number also is something that we track. Discipline-wise, what is going on? You can see computer science and engineering is the largest. Maybe we should sort this by descending order. It's easier to read out. And then you have humanities and then you have, I think, management, then civil, et cetera. So different disciplines are interesting. And it's not like the smaller disciplines are short-changed either. They do have a respectable number of people doing courses. Attendance has always been huge. About more than 90% end up in NPTEL exams. And that's a very nice indicator that people who register for the exam feel confident enough to come and write. That's a nice thing to see. Reminder on the past percentage and how to pass a course, right? So this is the latest we have for non-programming courses. It's a bit different for programming courses. It's a bit different. There are two, three criteria. I haven't kept up with it for a while. I think I hope I'm right here. So basically for the average, for the assignments, you need to have some sort of average of 40%. It's not a direct average. There is some best something out of something. All of that is calculated. And then you need to have 40% there. If you don't have 40% there, you will not get a certificate, okay? 25% of your overall marks comes from the assignments, but you need to have 40% there. And of course in the proctored exam alone, you need to have 40%. If you don't do that, then you won't get a certificate. For programming courses, there is an additional requirement that we will conduct a non-proctored programming exam. And for that also, you have to pass. You have to get more than 40%. So now when we introduce this, there was a big hue and cray about will students pass, what will happen to them, will they get certificates? And all of this is not a problem. The past percentage remains healthy. I think we introduced it in Jan 21, right? That's when we introduced it. So it's been dropping, dropping a little bit, not too much, not too much that we have to panic, but it's about 70%. I think 70% seems to be the past percentage. Earlier it used to be 85 when we didn't have the proctored exam minimum requirement. Now we have the proctored exam minimum requirement. It's about 70, it's not bad. I think 70% is reasonable, but we are trying methods to improve this. How do we get this 70% back to the 80, 85 is an important point for discussion. We tried something in the last term, last semester, the live sessions by some PhD students of IITM. For instance, they came and did some live sessions. I don't know if that helped. So we are looking at this percentage also. In fact, this percentage, if you look at it, I think if you look at it discipline wise, it's very interesting. And you can see that also dictates how many people sign up for the discipline. So I think if you take electrical, for instance, you can all guess what do you think will be in electrical. Do you think it'll be 70%? No, no, electrical course is always tough. So you'll see the past percentage is very low and then humanity is ends up being very high. So naturally students go towards humanities, but we don't want that entirely to be the driving factor. So we will think on how to increase this past percentage across the board. So submission of assignments has been quite healthy. Programming courses, non-programming courses, there is tens of lakhs of assignment submissions and that's also very nice to see. So these are split across four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, enrollment, registration, total submissions of assignments. Okay, so this is I think an interesting question. So we always ask during the exam registration, why did you take this course? What prompted you to take this course? So these are statistics from those answers. Okay, so these are just learners responding. Some learners might really know why they're doing, some learners won't really know what they're doing, they'll just click it. I know, but I mean generally this shows a good trend. I think the trends are very, very, very interesting. And you can see credit transfer has really increased in the last semester. Huge increase compared to before and a lot of students are doing it for credit in their college. And you can see the next biggest reason is updating themselves in the area, which is nice to hear. And then getting jobs and internships. So people are increasingly seeing this as being valuable for getting jobs and internships. So these three seem to be the three big reasons why people are doing these courses. In terms of gender, we've been at the 60-40 ratio. I don't know if we'll ever cross this boundary. We'll see if we can work on that. So this is something we can think of. In terms of faculty participation, it's been really good. It's been about 20% of students who enroll have been faculty and that's very nice to see. There are some FDP and other things that faculty get out of it. So it's quite valuable for us to see that faculty are participating in very, very large numbers. So by the way, 20% of three and a half lakhs is quite big. So in terms of number of faculty. So I think the reduction is just because the total number of registrations is so high and the number of faculty is not that high. So you don't go in any other way. The numbers have been increasing definitely. So you see it goes from 34,000 to 41,000. Just that the fraction is lower because total number of people registered is higher. Okay, so this is how the certificate looks. It's a standardized format and eight years, I don't know, should we change the format? No, no, shouldn't change the format, okay. Anyway, so it looks the same. It looks a little dull, I think. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Okay, the backside has a QR code and some information about what the certificate is. So now the exam process is a huge operation and once again, I wanna thank all of you here. How many of you go as exam representatives for NPTEL exams? So you see a show of hands, it's fantastic to see. Thanks a lot for your help and I hope that is okay with you and your college and your administration and everything. We don't want any unpleasantness here. Of course we ask for consent from everybody but I think it's good. I think many of your students are writing and this is for credit transfer. I don't see any conflict or anything here. I think it's good for everybody but still I think if there are any issues with you personally going, you think we should do something differently, please let me know. We'll be happy to address that. The number of cities has been growing, number of centers has been growing, number of IRs have also been growing and without your help, it'll be really hard for us to conduct exams. It's very nice to see help from everybody. We are now doing exams outside the country. So there is remote proctored exams for really far away countries where we can't find centers but in the Gulf, for instance, there's interest increasing. We are seeing a little bit of interest in Sri Lanka. We are trying to Ghana, okay? That's also a bit of interest. So the number is slowly increasing. Let's see how far the international numbers go. So top 20 exam cities. You can see Tamil Nadu is like way ahead. Coimbatore is a huge increase and that's a big challenge for us. I think how many of you here from Coimbatore area? That Salem Coimbatore, it's very hard. I know your students have to travel way outside of Coimbatore sometimes and 26,000 is huge. There's no way we can find people. And last time, I think we ended up using a very new college center. There was a difficulty there with people and we had to apologize to them and I think that ended up being difficult but we are quite helpless. I'll be frank with you here. The numbers hit these kind of numbers. We struggle to find centers. It's very hard and one of the things we are thinking about very seriously for the next semester is increasing the number of exam days. It looks like we have no alternative, particularly for colleges which are coming in a large way. I think there's some colleges in Trichy. For instance, 1,500 students come and write exams. So I think when such large numbers come in, we're gonna talk to the college and ask them for a during the week exam. So it's very hard for us to find a comfortable center for you. I think last time, I think the exam part was saying the Trichy students can go to Terminal Valley and write exams. That's what they were saying. I couldn't, I didn't know what to say. So we were having this difficulty. So I think if a large number of students, I mean, 1,000 of that order from your college are writing exams, please get in touch with Kamala or Bhatti and then we'll see if we can work out extended exam days so that it's comfortable for your students to also write and for us also to find centers. So yeah, a few cities at least, these kind of big cities, smaller numbers, okay. I think even Trichy is a problem, right? So when it goes to beyond a certain number, we don't have just, there's no enough centers in these places for us to do these exams. Please work with us on this. We will write to your college administration for leave, et cetera, if they are writing an exam of this nature. So a few cities, we will have to do it in the next semester. Okay, so live sessions are slowly becoming Yeah, so these are live sessions conducted by faculty. We want to make this a little bit more interesting, a little bit more meaningful. We've seen traditionally that it's difficult to conduct live sessions well. Okay, so even if there are thousands of people in the course, not everybody comes in and the people who come in seem to have a good time. You know, when they interact with the faculty, it's very nice and some of the live sessions go on and on for like hours and people enjoy it but still I don't think we have really figured out how best to do it. Some faculty do it. You can see thousands of courses, but about 436 is the total live sessions that we ever hold, right? Should we do it more seriously? Now there is an opportunity. The opportunity is there are research students here on campus and IITM and various other IITs and other institutes. These are called Prime Minister's Research Fellows. I don't know if you've heard about it. PMRF, it's a scheme. There's the next slide. Good. Okay, so this is the one. So it's a scheme by which people can join institutes like IITs and other top institutes in the country as PhD students. In fact, they get paid a lot of money. The stipend is much higher than what a typical PhD student in IITM gets, but they are required to teach outside of the institute. They are required by the scheme itself to teach outside of the institute. So this is a requirement that the government has put in for these scholars. Now this can be them teaching in another college nearby. They could go physically to a college nearby and teach, but that somehow did not work out very well for the students, particularly during COVID, but also even otherwise, I think many institutes found it hard to find a college nearby that they can go reasonably to teach and come back. But those who can do that continue to do that, but some of the PMRF scholars, PhD students as we call them, are now doing their teaching job through NPTEL. So they are offering live sessions for NPTEL courses. And this is being scheduled in many courses and it happens every week. And what they do is they are solving problems that are in the assignments or not exactly in the assignments, but close to what is in the assignments, am I right? From the previous term, whatever. So what do you expect in the assignments? So one of the things we thought would be useful for students is to see someone solve assignment problems in detail with them live. So in a live session, these PhD students of IIT Madras and various other IITs solve problems in the assignments. Now we did it as a pilot in the last term. It worked okay, I think. We have not looked very closely at the numbers, et cetera, but this time more than 500, I think 540 or so, 540 students are going to be doing live sessions in courses in NPTEL courses, okay? So this is something that we want to do a better job of. Get some feedback from you on what's working, what's not working and see if we can do this better. If there's something else that we can do here, that also is something we can work out. Like for instance, yeah, yeah, yeah. So for instance, if there is one course for which there is a PMRF scholar in IIT Madras and if students near some colleges they can come together somewhere, we can even have this student go there and physically do a class, it's possible. But this has to work out in so many ways, right? First of all, that student has to be somewhere near you and you also have to be able to justify that the number of students who are there is enough. It cannot be like two, three students. It has to be at least some 50, 100 type students and we can work out even a physical class, okay? So I think we want to think of how to make this better if you have any ideas you can share with us also. So we did several sessions and this number is going to go through a huge increase. The only like more than 500 courses are going to have this kind of live interaction. Okay, so I think I'll stop here. I hope this gives you a glimpse of what happened in the previous term and some of the points I highlighted. Let's discuss a little bit more. Those are issues that we should address. Thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you once again for coming here. We'll keep talking. Yeah, so I think Professor Mangal said you had to leave a bit early. So I'm going to ask him to now come. Please, you have to come sir, there's no option. Please come. So Professor Mangal, as you know, many of how many of you have seen him? No, many have seen him. Good, great, see, famous. So he's the one who recruited me into NPTEL, okay? So he started the whole thing when nothing was there. I don't know if you've heard this parlance in management and all that. Going from zero to even 0.0001 is a big non-trivial increase. After you've gone from zero to non-zero, you can increase very easily. It's not, it's very well known. But starting something from zero is very, very non-trivial. And he's one person whom we can credit with for having started NPTEL from zero. So I think that's a very non-trivial thing. So let's hear what he has to say. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew, thank you very much. The nice thing is that we had Andrew and we had Pradap. You have to find such people in your system to ensure that these things happen. Now we have a third generation. I would say if Professor Anant was here, actually we would have been four generations of NPTEL coordinators because Professor Anant recruited me first to NPTEL in the ministry of, at that time it was called the Ministry of HRD. First of all, I wanna thank Bharati and all of you and faculty, colleagues and my dear NPTEL team for the wonderful workshop and for the invitation. I did not intend to speak. I just wanted to drop in and sit in the corner to see that I'm still alive to see what is happening, what we all began about 23, 24 years ago. I'll take about five minutes. Yeah, so it's in the very same hall, 1998, about 25 first year BITAC students joined with me and supported them by the director at the time, Professor Natarajan, who later became the AACT chairman and also then the deputy director, Professor Muthukrishnan, they sanctioned me a project called the AIT Madras Courses on the web. This was 1998 and the volunteers and the people who would develop the course contents with me were about some 10 or 20 faculty members from AIT Madras and 25 first year BITAC students who had seen an online version of Chemistry 101, which I was running for about 300 students using what was known as the WebCT at the time, which was the first ALMS learning management system that was developed commercially and then Blackboard and other things came. So from that to NPTEL and today to MOOCs, the journey I have seen all along, I have not been very active in the last four, five years, but that's because everybody else around me is very active, so I really need to learn from them how to pick up things. And my own course, I don't say, is the most popular course. The Chemistry course on atomic structure and the chemical bonding. Many people complain that it's a very difficult course and I have no qualms about making, I mean, I don't want to make it any easier than what I think it easy, it is already easy. I think it's important for you to learn. Therefore, I think the project is doing what the project should be doing as a program. Now it has become a national program. When we started, we had only five letters, N, P, T, E, L. We didn't know anything else about it. And Professor Paul Goodman, who was then the Carnegie Mellon Management Faculty and who had published a book on TEL, Technology Enhanced Learning, with some of the top notch experts in the world at the time, was our sort of an internal advisor and was my mentor for many years. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2013. He and everybody else has been teaching me what TEL is all about. It's like this, you go and say, I want to do this and then there are suddenly so many other people decide and say, no, no, no, you should not do it this way, we should all do it this way, and so on. And when the team started, I was the youngest, maybe in this audience I may be the oldest, but I may be among the older people. When NPTEL's team started, I was the youngest coordinator. Everybody else around me was an older professor and therefore the infinite amount of learning that I could get from, very large amount of learning I could get from all of them, was something that kept me going and I'm very happy to speak to all of you and wish you well. Please take this up as a challenge. We did not intend NPTEL to substitute the actual learning during COVID, even though it happened in many colleges, that was not the original intention, but it has helped you and it is up to you to make this project your own home project, your own project to build teaching and learning in this country, and I wish you all the very best and I want to thank Professor M.S. Anand who was the former director of IIT Madras. NPTEL is his brainchild, and myself and Professor Kushal Sen at IIT Delhi were the two national coordinators appointed by the ministry at the time. The offer has not been withdrawn, but I assume that I had surrendered it in 2015 to you. I'm very happy to see all of you. Please encourage more students to learn and learn well. It's not enough that they study or they read or they do the exams, but they should learn well and they should ask questions and in live sessions, please ask them to express their whatever difficulties that they have asked them to join. Live sessions are very important and I hope that this project, I would continue to be around to see that instead of the 25 lakh students that we have, every student in this country eventually registers to one or the other course in NPTEL. I hope it happens and I hope to live to see through that day. Thank you very much. I wish you all the very best. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Mangal. So I think we'll skip a few slides. The next section actually we put local chapters, but I think we'll come to that a bit later. So what we can do is, I now invite Professor Ramakrishna to present on the NPTEL initiatives that we have currently and we can take it on from there. Yeah, so we'll go through the initiatives that we have and after that we can have the interaction because once we do this, I think all of you will get an idea of what we are planning for in the upcoming year and based on that, you can also give us feedback suggestions. I think this will open up the floor for better discussions than going through the local chapter. That we'll do after this. Okay, good morning everybody. My name is Ramakrishna. I'm a faculty here at the electrical department and also NPTEL coordinator over the past nine or 10 months. Okay, so I'll be presenting a little more of the newer initiatives at NPTEL. So the growth is not just in numbers and courses, but also the spectrum of services, but the courses or workshops that we offer and also make things a little easily accessible for different kinds of audience because it's not just that there are people who just come for career transfer. There could be people who may want to do a couple of courses very quickly in summer just to prepare for campus placements or somebody from the industry who may not have the appetite to sit through 12 weeks of assignments and all. So one of the initiatives we launched recently about six months ago is this thing called the NPTEL plus. So it's the URL is here e-learn.NPTEL.EC.in. So the nice thing here is that courses are now offered in the self-paced mode. So not all courses, but there are a good amount of courses about 150 to 200 which are already in that framework. So essentially these are the more popular courses, more job-oriented courses and so on where people can just log in and finish the entire course in a week's time or maybe you can essentially binge watch all the videos so that we can finish the assignments and say, look, I'm ready for a certification and the certification will be in an online proctored mode. We also have a provision of short-term or long-term programs, live and blended courses like workshops which could be in a hybrid mode. So any one of the NPTEL institutes or industry, they want to offer a short-term workshop on some say hands-on session on some say FPGA or things like that. So all these things are offered over here. You can just go through this website of e-learn.NPTEL.EC.in and there's also the regular MOOCs courses which are on offer in a self-paced courses. Much of the IIT Center for Continuing Education programs are also offered here both in a purely online or even a hybrid mode. So at the moment we have say 149 courses which are offered in the self-paced mode. So the data points are good so this is still very new and the courses are being transferred into the self-paced mode. So we have a total enrollment of 601 across all courses and how many people, okay, so 63 attending the exam. I don't have the past percentage here, right? 46, okay, our certificate eligible is okay. So and then there are people, okay, there's still people coming up for the exam but this is not maybe well-known so far so I thought this is a good platform to tell you a little bit about the new initiatives. So then there are also a second initiative where we have in-person lab certification courses.  So this is also something very new. So again, a little enhancement or from the usual MOOCs platform. So there are NPTEL lab workshops. There are also this NPTEL plus workshop which as I said, the idea would be to cater to a large set of or a wider set of audience coming from industry, faculties and so on. So this could be either both online, in-person or hybrid mode these are offered throughout the year and these are any, so duration could be any like a half a day workshop on say, training kids on TensorFlow till a one week workshop on say, a full-fledged program on say, machine learning or anything like that. And of course these are, there will be lots of live interactions in this again which is a little more features than the existing NPTEL MOOCs platform. So we have had a bunch of workshops already. So with a good amount of participants and if you see 2022, we had few in-person workshops at Bombay, ICER and Kharagpur. Okay, let's skip through the statistics. We have just numbers, right? So it's just to give you an idea of, yeah, so as I said, so these are a few workshops which we are partnering with industry. So one, I think which really is going well is a workshop by Neelit and ARM where they have a bunch of programs on offer through their virtual labs, especially training learners on various FPGA tools, very log, embedded C, ARM and so on. And we have, we started off with a small number of keeping the registration capital 160, but these have been all the time over subscribed. So we have already run three batches and I think, so more on these, more programs of this kind will be offered. So we're also having interest from, say companies like Ansys, which put up courses on NPTEL plus, which are targeted to, so maybe audience who have a bit of exposure on CFD, just to teach them a bit of computational tools and then so on. So we are also now having in the regular MOOCs platform where industry is offering some kind of supplementary material like say IBM or Google would say, maybe you have this set of lectures, can you just add on to those, to the existing ones? We are also in a process of co-offering courses with Ansys where in addition to the regular lectures, you are taught about the existing computational tools which are useful for the course. We already collaborate with MATLAB and everybody who have taken a course would know that MATLAB offers free services for us, but there are more and more companies like that who are willing to collaborate with us. Okay, same thing we are enabling certifications and this of course, there's some details that are still coming up and the modalities will be shared by our team who handles the local chapters here. The third initiative that we have an MOU with AICT for NPTEL courses as FTP. And this has been around for a while, right? So, this is also something which is going quite well. And of course, the certificates, they all, the texture all looks the same, maybe it's slightly different than the, yeah, okay. So the signatures change, everything else seems the same. Okay, so you have certain criteria for the FTP certificate. So you have, so this are again just some numbers which are easy to follow. So about, so it should be 12 hours, 24, 36 hours of engagement which we usually do even in our standard MOOCs course. So we have in the July to December we have about 517 FTP courses. In the January semester we had 491 and so on. And there was, this number is pretty, pretty good. So we have 20,000 people who applied for FTP in the January, recently concluded semester. Ah, okay, how you can find out it's, okay, this is, yeah, so this is, okay, this is new to me also. So you can find out which course is allowed to be an FTP course is, okay. So you will see in the summary page that this is actually a FTP course. Okay, now these are initiatives which have been around and more initiatives being added is the possibility of having internships for toppers. So we coordinate with the faculty if he or she wants to take up an intern. So who is essentially the topper of the course. So we have a mechanism where NPTEL funds the entire stay and like, stipend of 5,000 per four weeks of internship. This is good because for me also, it's nice because I get to interact with my course topper. Like I was teaching a course on linear systems. So the course topper happens to be my PhD student now and he's also one of the PMRF fellows whom you might see in live sessions. So it's really nice to that this initiative helps even us to get better students for our higher level masters or PhD programs. So of course there's a little process of we send the resumes to the course instructors. They shortlist maybe there'll be a quick interview and then so on. Okay, so the numbers are good. So of course kind of COVID was a dampener. So most of the time we would get them in campus. So now we have about, so all these are online internships. So numbers look small, but I think since the initiative started and it was the message was spread. So we had this dampener. And I hope from the next summer onwards things will be a little, the numbers will look much, much promising. Okay, so the another thing with how we associate with our industrial partner. So I think when I was just walking in at 9.15 I thought I was already late because Bharti already started presenting something. So there's something going about soft skills and also there are some industries which train the learners on soft skills. I think it was capture many or something. And then of course you have industries which give CSR funding for examinations, for a special set of people. Then of course industries also said also co-offer courses. They are very active in offering internships. A good amount of things also happens in the recruitment from NPTEL courses. And of course industry people come to us for upskilling and reskilling of their employers. Okay, so the numbers are big. So we have MOUs with 70 companies from government, private, PPPs and so on. And eight MOUs signed in the last five months. So there is the, so as the numbers grow in the number of enrollments you see the other participation also grows from support from industry and so on. So there are people as I said who have got jobs through our partners, a bunch of recruiters here from capture many to L and T defense and so on. And you see, it's across the spectrum not just traditional IT companies. So we also had started during the COVID times some NPTEL lecture series. I think we had about 170 live lectures. I think a couple of them every week from experts from all over industry, academia, policy makers and so on. So that was not just talking of technical content but in general about technologies and career opportunities, what does the industry look forward and so on. And that was kind of very, very well received during our COVID times. So our CSR support partners are six partners here. So they support exam fee waiver for, so these are good numbers. So about 120,000 people got a total free waiver via this CSR partnership. And we also have, as I said, soft skills training to NPTEL learners and we have close to 2,300 people who have been trained under this program. So we have, okay, these are some numbers. I'll just skip this. These are the, okay. So this is, oh, this is new for people new, okay. But new for me also in a way. This you do support for SPOCs, attending conferences. Yeah, okay. Okay, so this is about, okay. This also maybe, don't get the same.  Okay, so another thing which we are working on and something we started during the COVID times is the NPTEL portal, NPTEL gate portal. So during the live sessions when we used to conduct the, there's a pointed technical questions would be less but people would ask, can we do more problems and that kind of got addressed via the PMRF online sessions where, so the regular platform maybe doesn't really allow us to maybe post a lot of problems and so on. But through this PMRF we can now interact with them a little more regularly. So that is one thing and they also would ask, okay, is this enough for gate or how do we prepare for gate? What are tips and tools? So what we thought is, okay, we have this little sponsorship from this company called Amidus where we have, so we have a very large content of all courses across all disciplines. So can we make a little, you know, some kind of a gate crash course kind of stuff or a gate course where you just log into that portal and you see all the gate relevant material there.  So a couple of features that what we have already implemented is, can I link the entire gate syllabus to the existing NPTEL content? Say I go to say some topic on metallurgy, I just click on that and it just lands me on the appropriate video. Another feature that we have here is we have video solutions to previous 10 years gate questions. What currently we have material or video solutions and syllabus mapping for these courses, what is upcoming soon is we'll have what I said as a gate cluster course, you can just log in, it'll just, the entire gate EE or EC will appear as NPTEL MOOCs courses with different subjects, say signal systems, networks, analog circuits and so on. And each of those subjects will have its own set of assignments which you can keep taking randomly. And once you're ready, you can take a practice test and of course you'll get some feedback on that of which subject to improve, which subject you're doing good and so on. And of course via the PMRF, you know, we can possibly have this online mentoring and discussion forum. Some of the PMRF will also in addition to providing live sessions for the regular courses, we'll also participate in mentoring the gate students. So we are also getting a little more subjects, especially mathematics, physics, instrumentation and so on. So one of the complaints when we launched this portal was about, so EE, EC, you know, there are several other platforms which offer this. So what about, you know, courses like chemistry or metallurgy and so on. So we are slowly, slowly getting there. So I think that from June, you will see a lot of initiatives on this. So the portal is just called gate.nptel.ac.in and you can see it's kind of very pretty interactive. So I'll let Professor Patap take up. Translations. Good morning. So I think we have quite a full house here. I believe there's a shortage of seats. I apologize for that. So we do have a translation, active translation activity that has been on for a while now. And you can see here more than 222 courses have been translated into various languages. So this was started mainly because we wanted to ensure that more people can utilize this, utilize the NPTEL content. And also to, you know, particularly when they're coming from various schools where they have learned in their native language, they may have more difficulty settling it, settling into education in English. We find that here also in the IIT campus also, we have some of the undergraduate students who come here first year. They find it very difficult because they're learning a lot of new content plus they're learning it in English, which is not how they learned it in their school. So it helps for them to see this. The basic courses in their mother tongue so that they can at least, you know, it becomes easier for them to slowly start learning in English. So we have a process by which you can apply for being a translator as well as a quality checker. So we have multiple things that we have done. I mean, the process has evolved as you can expect with the most things in NPTEL. So we do count on you, the faculty of various institutions here to help us with this process. The idea is that you are also an expert in your domain plus you also understand your native language very well. And so that's the best combination we can find. There are many commercial entities who do this translation activity, but they are mostly focused on entertainment industry. So the kind of translation they would provide for technical content is not very satisfactory. So they will do something, in principle it is done, but it is not good enough. Similarly, a lot of effort has gone into creating the automated language translation processes. So even here in campus, we have faculty who work on it. Of course, Google has Google Translate is there, which so you can just feed anything to it and it'll do some translation. So all of that is there. But what we find is for technical content, they are still not good enough. They are still quite some distance away. There's a lot of issues with respect to technical terms that are used. And also the fact that our classes are not scripted. So there are places where you can do very good translation if it is scripted. Our classes are not scripted. So it is very conversational. Whatever we say is what is there in the class. So it is not so easy to do it. So we have a process through which you can apply to be a translator, you can be the quality checker. The quality checker is somebody who has done some work with us before. And it's available in the form of PDFs that we have. So PDF of the lecture in the native language is available. This is available for download, of course. And some in many cases, we have converted that to books. You can see there are 743 of those available. And we also have these SRT files, VTT files which will play below the lecture. So either as a subtitle or it will play below the video as a block. So you can follow. The block is much more convenient because you can kind of keep track of where you are in that lecture. Sometimes in our native language because of the sentence structure, the exact current sentence translation may not be what is relevant to us. The immediate preceding sentence, immediate next sentence might help us understand that content better. So therefore we have that system where one block of text goes below. We prefer that also because then it doesn't hide anything from the video. So when we recorded the video, we didn't really plan for a subtitle. And sometimes one English sentence may end up as like two or three lines of sentence in Tamil or Telugu or Palyalam or whatever. So it will block up a fair chunk of the screen. And so you can't really see if the faculty has written something on the board or they're showing some slide. Part of the slide is hidden. And you lose that, I mean it becomes difficult. You're now searching through that text to understand what is going on. So all that is taken care of. More recently we have also started having this put out in the form of audio. So right now we find the best way to do the translation is to actually first do the audio translation. And then from that do the, create the text. So actually our current system is we ask the, and it's even easier. So this means if you wish to volunteer, you don't have to learn how to type in Malayalam or Kannada or any other language. You don't have to learn how to type in that language. You should know how to speak in that language. That's really all that is required. So your speech to text is much easier. On Google Doc you can do that. You have to just, even on your phone you can do that.  So all we say is you look at the PDF in English. You see a sentence, rephrase it in your mind so that it makes sense to you to say that in your language that you're speaking and you just speak that sentence. That's all. You just speak that sentence. The sentence by sentence you just speak. You speak like you would be teaching that subject in your language. That's all you do. So you can even read like two sentences if it turns out that sentence was half a sentence for some whatever reason and it doesn't make sense. You'll read that in the next one or two sentences. Make something that makes sense in your mind to say and then you say it in your native language. Then that text will come. You'll see that text show up correctly. So then it is, this really removes a lot of problems because when you do sentence by sentence otherwise, you can have sentences in your native language which don't make complete sense. And or they are not really in any coherent sequence with respect to the previous sentence and the next sentence. But when you do it like this, when you rephrase it in your mind and say it, it comes out very smoothly. So this process we have put together. You can see here overall status, huge number of courses. You can see across languages, of course Hindi you have a lot. We have 179 courses that have been translated. I think Tamil also we have a lot, 151. So totally we have over 700 courses that have been translated at least into one language. Okay, so at least one language. We started off with a target of eight languages. So these are the eight languages that we initially targeted. We've been, the government asked us to add three more languages.  It's more a question about finding people who would help us in this process. So we have no real restriction from our side. In fact, if you find, I mean, we have many more languages, at least another half a dozen languages more we can attempt, but we had to find the people both for doing the translation and also hopefully an audience that needs it. So we have traditionally gone with the languages where we seem to have a larger learning community at this point. So that's really all we have done. You can see a large number of courses, large number of hours where it has been translated. You can see more than nearly 17,000 hours, 16,500 hours of translated content has been completed. This is available for you to download and use as is. And this is ongoing. So this is a very active process. And we really seek your assistance in this to do this in a very proper way. We have an entire team that does this translation. And of course, we... Yeah, for every activity here, of course, as part of this activity, there is an honorarium associated with it. Exact amounts, I think maybe Barthi would be able to show. I don't know if it is there in a slide here. No, I don't have it, I don't think. But there is an honorarium that is, I mean, the people who work with us. So you can see here, the number of people working with us on this translation process, you can see it's a fairly large number. And they are all quite happy with the kind of honorarium that is being provided. And so this is a very good activity to participate in. Like you say, it uses all your strengths, your language knowledge, your domain knowledge. And this is something you can do at your free time. I mean, you can come home and whenever you're free, you can spend one hour on it. Progressively, it adds up. It adds up to something very useful. Only thing is we do expect that when you sign up, you stay on the task because we have now assigned a course to you. And so that course is now blocked. So we have assigned a course to you in whatever, you know, if you're doing it in Punjabi or Telugu or whatever, so that course is now blocked in Telugu. We are not assigning it to somebody else. So it is now sitting with you. So we need it completed from you for us to put it on the site. So once you commit, we do ask that you stay on the commitment. And like I say, it's a steady piece of work. So it is not like, you know, we are not giving you the entire 40 hours and expecting it back within a few days. You can steadily work on this. So even if through a semester you complete it, it is very nice. Through a semester you complete, and that's very doable. You can do one hour a day or something like that. You can definitely do the translation and you get something for that. Quality checkers are people who have been with us doing this translation enough number of times and have done a very good job. So then we, so when you submit it, it has to go through the quality checker. So the quality checker has to satisfy himself or herself that what you have submitted is good quality. If it is not good quality, it is sent back. It is sent back to the person who has worked on it. So we do occasionally have people who, even though we have told them not to just, you know, do a Google translate and hand it back to us, occasionally we do have people who send it to us. And our quality checkers do catch it, send it back and say, this is not acceptable, you have to do it the right way. So this is some of what we have. These are sample books created from English transcripts into other languages. These are all, you know, you can download any of these. They are available under that, at that site nptel.ac.in translation. We have one table so you can see in one or more languages, you can see across, so civil engineering has 20 courses that are translated, capital sciences 35, 36. So first of all, this is there. So I think one of the things that we would like to do is to inform you about this. You may already be aware, but all the more draw your attention to it so that if you have students in your college who have, who face some difficulty learning, this is a, you know, this is available. They can use it as they see fit. It is available to help them. Not just for the nptel course, for any other subject that they're learning, if they want to understand a concept, this may be a good place to look at it. That's all I want to share. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Pratap, for that clear explanation on the language translation part. I just want to round up a few things that I thought we might want to emphasize about the initiatives. So yes, one is the self-paced course portal that we have started. These courses are available. Currently there is a payment for enrolling to a course in a self-paced mode itself to access the contents because we are giving you assignments you can do again and again, and then separately you can register for the exam. We are also evolving policies for local chapters on if students have registered to swim exams, but they have not passed it or they are absent. In that case, how do we facilitate something for them that policy is yet to be finalized? We'll let you know once it is done. But there are certain colleges who are approaching us for support and we are doing it on a one-on-one for now, but we'll come out with a policy on how local chapters can access this. If the students have completed the course, say the assignments and all on Swyam, then what can we do for them through this portal? So that is on this. The in-person lab courses, lab workshops that we have, like I was saying before, a lot of workshops are opening up. We are opening registrations. They are happening at ISA Bhopal, IIT Madras, IIT Bombay and various other institutes. Online too, we have a lot of workshops going on. So we are sending out posters, we are sending out emailers to all the local chapters. I hope you are receiving all of it. Please circulate it amongst your students so that they can get the hands-on experiences or whatever we do. For instance, Ansys did about five sessions on their various tools that can be used and there is a free license for students also that they can download and use those tools. So some things like that might be useful when they go in for recruitment interviews and so on. So please do follow when we send out information on workshops and see whether it's relevant to your students. You can do that definitely. That's about the workshops. Microsoft certifications, I want to emphasize here that we have been working with the Microsoft team on enabling certifications for free, for all students. So there is a lot of courses that Microsoft offers in various areas. It is in programming areas, data science areas. They have some grouping of courses and all that. Microsoft just last week, about two, three days ago, we finalized that we will give it for free for the students of local chapters under NPTEL. There is going to be a modality and a procedure that we are going to do as part of this. We will let you know on that. And they also have a project component. So that is something where we said normally only if you do a bookie of courses you get to the project component. So there we are trying to negotiate with them that domain scholars and maybe some of the stars we will try to identify who have already done a bunch of courses with us can directly bypass that, go to the project component, do it. And that project component, I think there is visibility to industries who want to recruit and so on. So we want to put some of our scholars there. So this is something that we are doing with Microsoft on the side. On the same front, we are also in talks with Google certification too. So that should also be coming up in the coming months. We'll keep you posted on this again. This is all free. Normally the Microsoft courses are about three to 4,000 per course for the certification but they are giving it to us for free. If your college has a partnership already you're doing it no problems. But if it's not there you can use the NPTEL route to kind of go through for Microsoft certifications on this. So please watch out for notifications on this. Also from us it will be a very, very useful add-on for your students. If they are doing say some programming courses with us and maybe doing some add-on from them the resume definitely does get stronger for the students. We just heard as we were messaging JK was telling me we just got a message that for faculty members and educators also they might be coming out with a plan that we can pass on and there'll be something for y'all. I don't have the full details but we'll also share it with you as soon as we get the details. So that is this FDP. This is the certificate. The constant question again we still don't have an answer what about teachers who don't come onto the AICT scheme and UGC scheme. I hope y'all have an answer by now but this is the MOU we have drawn up with AICT and every semester we send them data on how many faculty have completed the complete list of faculty members who have taken FDP certificates from us, the details of the courses and all that. We do send out to AICT. The MOU is still live and valid with us. So this is an additional certificate that faculty members belonging to AICT colleges can pick up from us. After they complete the regular NPTEL course in the usual manner. So faculty also have to submit assignments, you have to register to the exam, come to the exam you pass it and then you get an additional FDP certificate once you do it for the FDP enabled courses. So this is the process that we follow. You get two certificates and one of the constant questions or confusions that comes is the minute we put FDP course is it only for faculty? No, this is for all students, any learner who wants to learn from this course. Faculty in these courses who belong to the AICT scheme can get an additional certificate. So your students can do all these courses also. These courses are not like what knitter offers for teachers or something like that. These are open courses to any learner. We are just enabled some additional certifications for faculty here. So this is the thing. This table is a four week course is equivalent to half FDP of one week. So if you'll know the conversion metrics is the conversion that they have given us from AICT. Eight week NPTEL course is equivalent to a full FDP of one week and a 12 week NPTEL course is equivalent to one and a half FDP of one and a half times than FDP course. So this is the conversion when you're going for your career points or when you're showing it. This is the equivalence that will come in at that point. So that is on that internships for topers. Yes, I think we want to scale it up to at least 200, 300 per semester. We'll work with more, you know, we'll try to, I think we are still struggling with the way the process works. So we'll probably work on simplifying that better. But alert your topper students in your college to say there is such an opportunity and they should be utilizing it.  If they are a topper, it might be really good if they can capitalize on this apply because we do send out mails to the toppers and say please send us your resume, please apply for the internship and sometimes they just don't even respond, you know. So it might be good for you to also alert them that now that you're a topper, you know, look out for this opportunity, you might want to use it. So this is on the internship. The industry associate, we have a lot of partners, like I said, they are also giving us requirements for people from the NPTEL pool that they want to hire. We are passing on resumes, so we do have a resume database. I don't know, Balraj was here, I can't see him here, but we do have a resume database that we are maintaining of NPTEL learners. Ask your students to kindly fill up that resume database with us because we take out only from that policy in NPTEL when they register, we do not know the 10 standard information, 12 standard information, what degree, what CGPA, we have no such information. But when a company asks us for a requirement, they'll say 10 standard, I want so much, I want only CS, I want CGPA more than that, and then we have to give them profile. So for that, we need also data, more data on the students. So please ask your students to fill up the resume database so that we can send out more profiles to these companies who are coming to us with requirements. So that is one thing. The other thing is fee waiver support. This time we got a huge number of requests, we are on 12,000 plus requests, I think for the JAN semester, we really have to scale up our CSR part, I think we are running out of money, we have to really work on NPTEL CSR this time, but 12,000 is the request that we have gotten. This time we'll do it for the JAN semester, definitely, July we'll have to look out for money requirements for NPTEL, so that's something that's happening. Soft skill training, I want to spend just two minutes on this. This is something that we are doing from our side for local chapter colleges that do not have any in-house training or soft skill training for your students. If you have a very good placement and training center that does this already for your students, there's no need to utilize the service, but if there are colleges where this is not happening, please reach out to us. This is a completely free initiative from our side, we are not charging anything for this. We only want time commitment and attendance from the students, active participation from them, completion of the workshop properly. So it is a seven-day or a 14-day training that we are providing. The choice is up to you whether you want seven days or 14 days. There is a fixed schedule, what all activities we will do during that. There is also a homework component to every day that the student has to do based on whatever session happened that day. So there are interactive sessions, there are group discussions that happen one-on-one, mock interviews that happen, every student gets feedback on what they have to work on, what they have to improve, how they are presenting their resume and so on. So I think it is really important that you put your students through this if you do not have this actively happening within your college. My associate Geeta has been reaching out to all the colleges here. We've been sending mails regularly. We can scale up to even 50 colleges per month or even 70 colleges per month. We are currently doing about 20 or 30, I think which is quite less. We would like to do more. So please contact us if you're interested. We can do batch after batch of training for your students. So this is something we'd like to do. There's an employability test also that we are doing for the students to see how they will attempt, say aptitude and logic kind of tests and this is what we are doing. 90 colleges have so far completed the training with us. I would really urge that your current final year students, please put them through this particular training program. I think it would be useful for them. Yeah, feedback from trainers. We've had very good feedback and they have found difference in students as they have moved through the program that is there. The learners also, a lot of them thank us for putting them through this program and they learned a lot of things which they have never ever heard of before or they've not been told. Even certain mannerisms and all when the soft skill trainers pointed out, they said, yes, I have to work on this and they have really thanked and some of them have even gotten jobs and they felt that this really boosted their confidence after the training program that they ran. Sparks too have given us good feedback. These are just samples of what we have. Rating wise, yes, the sessions are rated quite high from the student side. This is one more thing that we've started, digital skilling course. So initially in our team, in our office, we used to put all staff who come through, freshers who come through through a set of skills that they have to learn to be part of the office ecosystem. So basically how do you handle a Google doc? How do you handle a Google sheet? How do you handle emails? How do you do attachments on it? Bulk emailing, MS Word, MX Excel, PowerPoints, presentation, some image capture and all these which are like regular things we need when we onboard people and they have to work in the project. And then we were finding out that this is really useful probably to just put out as a course that students might want to learn. This is basic digital skills that anybody can acquire and just like we were talking to some of the Sparks here, some of them are new to a computer. They said some of them don't even use a computer. They were saying they don't know applications. This might be the first course you want your students to be in if they have never used a computer, they are fresh to it. They are kind of not very comfortable with it. It's a free course that we are giving to all local chapter students. You can enroll them here. There are exercise, there are videos, there are exercises they can do. And we do an exam for them post that passing which they get a certificate for it. So for local chapters, we are doing this free for the soft skill sessions, two of us undergone also, they are putting it as part of it. I think it's very useful to learn. At least they will know all the small applications when a company has, do you know what, do you know Excel? At least they will know that on a basic level that they have to know for working in an office. So this is a course. It's on elan.nptl.ac.in. Our office will also send out more reminders in the coming weeks. Please ask your students who are absolutely fresh to computers, absolutely fresh to any use of applications to go through this course. I think this will be a nice way to start off. Support for, just one minute sir, let me just two more minutes. Support for SPOCs for attending conferences every month, first to 10th, we open a form where you can apply to say that I'm gonna attend this conference, either you have a paper there, mostly only if you have a paper there, we are supporting. So you should give us some proofs and these conferences need to be in the IITs, NITs, Triplitis and some other institutes that we have identified, CFTS. CSIR labs, so there is a group of institutions. If the conference is in any of those, we are supporting SPOCs who have papers and attending those with travel and registration fee costs. So up to 25,000 is the support that we are extending from our site. You can apply, fill the form and then we will process it. We will check the details and we will approve. Once you've attended it, give us the bills and we will reimburse it for you. So we would urge lot more SPOCs to kindly use this initiative. We actually thought we are gonna run out of funds and there'll be so many, but it's not really come to that. We'd be really happy if we are stretched to a limit and we are gonna say, my God, there are so many applications we have to process and we'd be very happy to give it to a lot more people. So please do make use of this initiative. Every month, first to 10, the form will be open. You can apply through this particular scheme. Translation, Pratap Sir, I think gave all the details. The only detail is on the website, there is a form that you can apply to become a translator, okay? So this is some information you can take back to all faculty in your colleges. Whoever is interested in being a translator, ask them to apply. We have a process of, of course, short listing, vetting, and finalizing whether the work is satisfactory enough for us. We will do that, but we would really like to thank, again, all the local chapters who have helped us. Otherwise, that 16,000 hours you saw would have been impossible. We just cannot do it with any of the machine learning, you know, automated stuff and all. It gives really poor translations many a time. So it has been the local chapters that has helped us in this initiative that we have been able to do so much work thanks to all of those who have been participating, but this is not enough. We are just on 200 courses and NPTEL fuel languages. It's just a drop in what we have and what we have to translate. We'd like to update, definitely. So please apply. Please pass it on to faculty in your colleges. Ask them to apply and we'll take it forward from there. Yeah, so one thing in the book that we prepare, your names also come in. So the main faculty name comes in as, of course, the person who created the course, but the person who translates also, we say translated by and put the name of the faculty with the college in that book. So the good part about it is we are able to create books now say on electronic circuits or programming or something in Marathi in Gujarati. There is a book that you can actually read through with snapshots and kind of as a textbook equivalent in so many languages we are able to bring out. So this is on translation. I think Ramakrishna sir gave a lot of information, but we'll send out detailed emails to y'all on whatever needs to be done. And this is the revamped website. So just two features I'd like to highlight. One, we integrated all the logins. So we had like six, seven types of login on the portal. Go to this page, you please log in here for this. Go to that page login. Even for us, we had like six pages where we had to log in for different data. We unified all the logins into one in the new website. Of course, we cleaned it up and made it a bit saner in terms of color, like I was saying. Now we don't have 20 colors on the website. We probably have like three colors on the website. That's something we changed. And for every course, there is a tab called statistics.  It might be a quick check for you to see whether your students want to take this course. How is the course performed in the past and all that before you actually get them enrolled and register for exams also. I think that's a good thing. Topos is also there. That's a good tab, I would say, to check out on which college students are top, you know, being topos in this course. Maybe reach out to that college, ask them for feedback. Also, that might be a good way that you want to start interacting. I think we'll stop here for now. This is, we are on 11 a.m. Should we break now for tea or 10 minutes, y'all want to start, 11.15? Shall we break for tea? Sir, you wanted something. Maybe we'll just do about two questions. We'll come, 11.15, we'll break for tea. We'll come back by maybe 11.30 or so, 11.30, 11.35. One hour we'll have interactions. At that point, we want to open the floor for all questions, discussions, suggestions, up to maybe 12.30, 12.45. Then we'll give the rundown on the local chapter interactions that we've been having. Maybe some insights. This is the part I like the most, which is about the interesting aspects of the learners and some things that we do with learners there so that we will do. And then we'll go in for the plug distribution at 1.30 today. So a little change in the program now. Yes, sir? For digital skill training program, only those who completed successfully the soft skill training program cannot attend or what, madam? No, no, currently we said that if they completed the soft skill training, digital skilling is also a good course to follow up on and complete so that you have like this part and that part. But we'll also open it out to all local chapter students, I think. Going forward, we'll just get that enabled. OK, madam. Whether there is any separate web portal for digital school program or you are going to give any link? So that SelfPacePortalElearn.NPTEL.AC.in, that has a course on it. So there, that's the, it's just like a Swayam your portal, right, where you enroll to a course and go in and see contents, put in assignments.  That's all. We have, students has to solve assignments. Yes, they have to do assignments. And there will be an exam. Nothing in NPTEL is without exam, sir. So there will be assignments and exams. Oh, OK, madam. And then regarding the conference sponsor. Yeah. Only the conference conducted by IIT, IACs are sponsored or other conferences. Yeah, so organized in some of these institutes, IITs, IAC, NITs are there. No, no, no. They have to be organized in some of these institutes. OK. Thank you. Maybe two more questions and we'll get the, can you check whether everything is ready there? These notes. Is there any criteria for selecting the students for soft skills course? Whether he has to do any NPTEL course previously or without doing that also, is eligible for doing it? OK. See, normally we did want to do it that students have done NPTEL courses go through the soft skill training. Because we know that they have gotten certified with us. And this is like an add-on so that they can attend interviews. But what we found was in many colleges, the NPTEL students who have done our exams are already so good they don't need a soft skill training. You know, so when we started going out, first we started with toppers, we started with elite and the goal students. None of them actually needed this.  So we started this then as a general privilege to local chapters. We will try to accommodate, we would prefer NPTEL certified students to be there definitely. But if it is not possible, we can also extend it to other students in the colleges. Depends on the volume that we'll have to handle. So 4,500 colleges depends on volume we get. We'll have to see preference will be for NPTEL certified students. So basically, if you have a student in your college who you think is academically good, but is not able to interview well, is not able to talk well, does not know how to do those things. And that's a good way to filter these students. So have something like that. If you have, you can identify a few like that. That would be OK. Thank you, sir. Yeah. This is public. This is not for good colleges which already have... Yeah, I know, but primarily this is aimed for colleges where maybe they don't have too much of soft skills training already built. So then, yeah, yeah, sure. We'll give it to you. We will give this slide to you. Madam, it is the overlapping of the exams. It is that it is the same day which is the overlapping of the exams. The student must be clear that it is the need to clear that it is the three courses. It is not possible that it is exam date. It is then October 28 or 29. So that it is a having to the no scope. For that, you need to complete that it is a domain certification. There it is a feeling the problem because the course it is not offered to that in the next run. It is taking to another year so that you can accommodate that it is one more extra day for such a type of the course. Anyway, you are planning to conduct that. It is the exam one more day, one more day so that you can give in that it is a leverage so that it will be the better. And also share that it is the best practices of that. It is a credit transfer. The problem it is a coming that it is the, we are encouraging to the courses of the NPTEL. We are having the Vignan University. We are giving to the nine credits. The problem is that it is the 80% of the students it is getting the nine credits. So what should we do that it is the remaining the 20%. So what we are the best in the academic council we are going that it is there. We are taking that it is those who scored that it is the greater than the 20 and it is the less than 29 and it is we are considering as the 50 masks as the internal and 50 masks it is there. An external exam we are conducting. Suppose you can share that it is there the best practices to us so that it is enabled because of the NEP we are trying to increase that it is a transfer of the credit. It is an option from the nine to that it is 33 credits for the credit transfer for the student to get that it is a main motto it is that for the domain certification. So there it is that we are thinking to that it's a fright to convince that it is an academic council. So what should you do that it is the if you are promoting this so if they are fail it is a larger number larger number. So that mechanism also we are working out it is the that checks and balances where it is the which semester it is that your practices can be the share. So then it is options of that it is the to re-take to the examination as it is there you are mentioning to that in the self-faceted course. Those things can help you thank you. Okay so I think the point is making is about 80% pass 20% are not passing in NPTEL courses and if you have to do more credits then more people will fail then there is a problem of how to deal with them. I see that you will work that out the exam dates are a much more difficult problem for us. So we do announce our dates I had of time we try convincing everybody that they should look at our calendar and then schedule exams but it's hard you know I mean universities also have a lot of demands on date and time they can only some window for exams so it's very hard that I think will not be able to solve that easily. So NPTEL plus is also started keeping that in mind. All these problems that we have of people failing not able to find time for the exam. So NPTEL plus is a way in which we can easily do it but it is costed I mean it's not free. So it's not because it's something that we ourselves are running so we don't get funding from the ministry for it. So it's costed it's not too much but there is a cost associated with that. So that it's always a trade-off you're not able to do the ideal easy thing. Exam dates is always going to be tough. We'll see what's the best we can do. I'll add on to this point and you said there is a problem for you to conduct or identifying the exam centers. The solution to that is having two dates for the exam you can use the same examination center for two times so that at least 50% you can able to solve those problems. So that's what we do. We do actually morning session and afternoon session every day. No, no completely different dates. Two different dates you can plan. See initially you are planning. You are conducting the exam. Not necessarily the same course can be conducted. Same course need not be done in two days but at least 50% of the course can be done in one day and 50% of the course so that you can utilize the local chapters, the facilities in a more effective way. Two times you can use the same facility. We are thinking of something like that, we'll see. That one more problem what I faced in our college around the 600, 700 students writing the exam and at least 25 different colleges this time and normally we send buses for the hostel students but 25 different colleges and we face only one or two or less than 10 is the various parts of Chennai. Chennai? Chennai. Chennai. Okay. I am from, see actually the last is 20% of the students are not able to go to the examination center. They just stop writing the exam. See this is the practical problem. See when we run a bus from the hostel, most of the hostel students are writing the, registering for NPTEL courses. Normally we send buses so that they will be comfortable in writing the exam. They need not worry about the travel. So that kind of a problem, right? If a particular college is allocated for two or three centers, it will be easier for us to plan. Yeah, I think it looks, it looks easy. So on the day, on the day when... I think it is. This is only a suggestion. Yeah, I understand, we are looking at it. We do take, so let me just respond to what he said. We do take all those things into account. But you have to understand that there is a, there is like some 20,000 people who have to write exams in Coimbatore. It over so many days and so many slots and each center has only so many people and it is a very complicated problem. If you take more inputs like, you know, which college the person is from where they have to go, it gets into a much bigger mess. It's very, very hard. We have some sort of an algorithm which runs and gives out allocation. It's a very nerve-wracking time. It's difficult for us to do. We'll try our best to incorporate. Yes. Okay, we are coming to tea time. We are going to come back after tea and then have much more discussions of this nature. We just started a little bit. So let's break for tea, we'll come back. So welcome back. Hope the samosa, pakoda, sweet was all okay. I was not happy with the coffee. I was again complaining about the coffee, but then yeah, that's the coffee they gave. Let's see, we'll start with the interaction questions. And yes, so we can start off, mics, where are the mics? Karthik, get somebody from the team, no? No people around here. Yeah, yeah, we want everybody here. More the merrier, yes. So we spoke, I spoke with a few people during the break. Some people came up and asked me some specific questions also. So this can be an open session, but try to keep your question short. There's a lot of people who want to ask a lot of questions. So try to keep your question as short as possible and then to the point. Yes, let's start. Sir, it's about resume building database. Yes, yes. So he had a question on how that resume submission works for toppers and all that. Balrajus here, yes. Is it only for toppers or can everybody in the local chapter can? Yeah, so he's the person. So let me introduce him Balrajus, the person who handles all these industry connect for NPTEL and maybe he can describe how that works. Yeah, so resume building, we promote to toppers predominantly, but other students also can fill the resume. Definitely it's possible. And we regularly share a Google form to fill the resume. And sometimes we don't get very good response from Fox. I'm happy you asked this question. Right now I just checked with the team. We are having totally cumulatively 30,000 resumes out of that only 10,000 active pool we have, which means which we can actually share to the companies. So we would be happy to get more resumes. Definitely others can also fill their resume, but when companies ask, they say only share 100 profiles, 200 profiles. We only share toppers profiles. So others also can fill. And this is not just for companies. We also use this for soft skill training. Anything else that we get in terms of information? How do you circulate that Google form for filling? You send it to the SPOC. SPOC, yes. All the SPOCs will get a form with which the students, which you can forward to the students. Yeah, in addition to this, when we get a job requirement, let us say there's active requirement currently going on with Capgemini. Every month they have a target. Through NPTEL they found a better conversion. So they feel that they want to recruit the NPTEL. So every month they will ask, can you give me more candidates? Sometimes they say, we want 300 girls students from all places across the country. We couldn't even give them that number. So I'm happy that you asked. So please fill the resume. The moment you resume is with us, in terms of students resumes, we actually... So it is circulated almost... So generally after the results of the exam, but whenever we get requirement also, we share with the students. So since we have asked this question, maybe from Monday itself, we'll start sharing the form once again for registration for everybody. If the link is used for every time, please give us a link, sir. Yes, yes, it's the same link, sir. We'll share with you. Yeah, we don't differentiate, sir, as long as alumni of NPTEL, we consider everybody, 2020, 2021, 2022. As companies come and ask, we share. Generally, if we don't have resume, also if company says I want 2021 batch, we circulate all the 2021 toppers of that particular subject and say, please fill the form. So in fact, I remembered people getting jobs with around 9 lakhs, 10 lakh packages from certain companies, not many, but some students definitely got jobs through NPTEL with high salaries, which we can add. Yes, we'll do that. Yes, definitely, definitely. We'll add it. In fact, we have a page for soft skills training in the same page, we'll update this. Recommended courses, for cap Germany, they're asking people, the recommended courses, these courses are needed for, that is very important because the students are very... So generally, I'll say what IT companies would look for is, you can look at courses from the domains. If you go look at computer science, there is a programming domain, right? And that has some six courses, three course for electors, many courses are listed there. If you want IT company jobs, I think programming domain is the first place to start. Yeah, data science domain is also there. So those are all very hot areas. Yeah, Java and Python is most common. Python, one more question, sir. Most probably we are a SyLab, like open source software, SyLab, but we are not conducting any such kind of courses for SyLab, that is very important. There is MATLAB-based thing, but both of them are similar structure and syntax and all that, right? Sir, because many students are very lag with their lab, like software simulation tools, that's very important. Yeah, so you can take a course which is using MATLAB and your students can use SyLab. I think most of the courses, in fact, in courses where we use MATLAB, most of the instructors will say, you can do the same in SyLab also. Thank you, sir. Sir, yes. Sir, I am Dr. K. Vijayakumar, spoke of Shanmugai Industries, Arthinjayskali Thiruvannamalai. Sir, every semester, our students registered nearly 300 students registered. And nowadays, we are under Thiruvannamalai University, Chvilur. Nowadays, they send one circular for PG students, M field and PhD compulsory. They have to do one MOOC courses. So, for this purpose, sir, every semester, nearly three years through the writing, they have to go for Vilur or Vilpuram or Pondicherry, sir. From my place too, they have to travel, students have to travel. It is possible to set up one examination center in Thiruvannamalai, sir. Thiruvannamalai? Yes, sir. Because neighboring colleges are also there, sir. Nearly we have 20 colleges are there. If it is center is there, it is very useful to them to move easily. We'll take it down right away. Yes, sir. Please send a mail. Any such request, you don't have to necessarily ask now. Any such request, there is a process. In fact, I don't know if it's there in the webpage or not. We do have a process by which if more than, I think, 200 students can be sort of guaranteed that they will come and write an exam there, we are happy to open a center there. So, you have to write to, I think, local chapter at nptel.itm.ac. Saying that you're the SPOC and there's at least 200 people will register for an exam in Thiruvannamalai if you open a center there. And then we'll open the center and the exam form right away. So, this is a standard process. I think somewhere in the webpage, some SPOC manual, this must be there. Inside the login. You're supposed to, they're sending, sir. They're sending a form there. Inside the login, in your login. Yes, sir. You can make a request. Please do that. Yes, sir. So, another question, sir. Sir, we have M.A. Tamil and M.Phil Tamil PH Tamil, sir. For this purpose, there is no courses for Tamil courses, sir. Especially, for example, if I'm saying Tamil or like that, they want to study. There is no courses, sir. If it is possible in future, sir. Please add this kind of course, sir, for Tamil. Okay. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. We'll try. Thank you. Greetings from Sri Ramakrishna Coimbatore. I'm Varun Spokas, Sri Ramakrishna Institute of Technology. This regarding the duplication of login, sir. Students, while they are studying in the institution, they are using their official mail ID for course registration and all. Once they left out of from the institution, they are supposed to use their personal mail ID. So, when they are going to do like that, there's a problem in the certification, like that NPTEL evangelists, NPTEL superstars, NPTEL stars like that. Is there any possibility to merge those things? I think there is a way to merge it. I think we have a process for merging. Yeah. Come here, no, come here. So, there is a form that we normally share. So, once you all try to support or to local chapter ID on this, we have a form where we share and we say that give us the IDs. But there is something that we'll have to check in those IDs to say that it belongs to the same person and we are not merging random logins and the credibility of the merging, we have to definitely check on our side. So, we do those checks and we do all that. And then after that, we make the same email ID across the thing. After they are certified, within that we do it. At the enrollment stage or during the registration stage and all we are not doing it. In fact, good that this point came up. One thing I'd like to tell all SPOCs is that, still we are seeing not a very big fraction but a small fraction where they will students enroll to courses through two email IDs. First, I don't understand why, but yes, they do enroll to the same course through two email IDs. They submit assignments through one and they register through the other. And then when the exam result comes out, there's no assignment submission on the exam registered ID. So, we say you have failed and we don't give them a certificate. Then the SPOC will appeal, student will appeal, but we will not merge it at that point because we cannot establish the credibility of the two email IDs belonging to the same person. Your friend could be doing it and there'll be no relation in the names also, right? I will be Bhatia and I'll say my alternate IDs and row. How do you merge those two IDs, right? So, we say no and we've been kind of categorical unless the principal writes a letter and the SPOC says and it's really important for graduation and all that, we've taken some proofs and we've done it. But we would say that going forward, please emphasize to your students that they register enrol two courses through one single email ID, register to the course through that same email ID, assignment submission through that same email ID. Otherwise, we will not give certificates. The scoring and all is automatic for 3.8 lakh students who are processing scores. We can't now go back, manual change something, get data and all it really costs us time and we are also prone to errors at that part. So, we would like to really enforce this and not bypass it. So, only in this case where yes, they are shifting out of a college, changing organizations and all, we have done this kind of exception for them. We validate it, there is a process, there's a form they can fill and we'll do that for them. Should we write to the... Write to either support or local chapter, one of the two will help you with it. Okay, thank you. One minute, please wait for the mic sir, one minute, please wait, please wait. Yeah, this is Dr. Kalpana Abhi from Bangalore Institute of Technology. Sir, you said that conference support will be given and many of them they are not using, but you prefer that only SPUs should come and they should give the paper. Others can, if they use it, so we can send the people, sir, who are presenting the paper. I think this, you can recommend, right? I think, did we have that? We drew it, didn't we? You don't, okay, okay. I thought one point we were relaxing that, no, we didn't relax. Okay, so... Okay, we'll see.  So you're saying if you can ask someone else from your college to go, then that might work better. Yeah, some faculties. Okay, okay, we'll look into it. Okay, thank you, sir. Yes, sir? Yes. Sir, last year, 23rd, 24th exam, from Kanchipuram, from Kodiatham, coming soon. So, suffering so much, so too much. So please consider, there are so many centers in Vellore, Vellupuram is there, but they're coming near Bangalore, this thing you just see. I don't know, most of the students, parents, they're very feeling so much. So please, same place. So, I think this problem, I think somebody else also raised, and I addressed it in the following way.  Okay, I think maybe they would have picked Vellore as their original center. So did we have an issue with Vellore also? I don't know if you saw. Some numbers. Krishna Giri was there. Krishna Giri was there, okay. So, first thing I'll guarantee is, every moment of one city to another, we don't do it easily. We don't think that we do it just randomly. We take it very, very seriously. We look at it very closely. In fact, we fight with our exam provider. Ugly fights it becomes. We raise it to all over the place. But frankly, at one point, they don't have the numbers. When they don't have the number of people, the number of seats in Vellore, and we have to do the exam. We cannot say we don't do the exam. Any criteria, minimum students say not in... It's not about minimum also, sir. If it goes beyond the number of computers they have, then we can't hold the exam. So, that's also a problem. So, that's why we are now working very actively in places where we expect a lot of people to register. Definitely, Coimbatore is one of them. Trichy maybe is one of them. There are one or two towns like that where we already anticipate a problem. And if in those cases, we are going to try and do the exam on a weekday also. That seems to be our plan. Last semester, we were taken by surprise by this. Now next semester, we are planning a little bit better. Hopefully, this will be avoided. But once again, you can take it as an assurance from me. We don't easily put people from one city to another just because we want to. We don't do it randomly at all. We try to minimize that as much as possible. Now we'll do more. Thank you. Sir, this is Pradeep Kumar from VIT. So, we have peculiar problems, sir. Every semester after the results come from the academics, they ask me to filter out the data of how many students have cleared certificates so that the credit transfer will be happening. So, that time what happens is, we have students of our outgoing students also. I mean, those have already passed out 10 years ago. They also registered and come under VIT. So, because we give the lifetime email address. Oh, okay. After VIT student, they give VIT alumni. So, they also come and register. So, filtering that whether he's a current student or a prospective student or he's an outgoing, I mean, already passed out student, we do not have a clue yet. But why do they pick VIT when they use VIT alumni? See, they can use VIT alumni email ID and then say, then they don't belong to VIT anymore. Why should they say that? No, but they prefer local chapter ID as 202 and then they select that. But you should ask them not to do that. I mean, like, if they do, this is very difficult. But see, actually the count is huge. It's around 35 plus thousand. I know, I know. So, you should tell the people who graduate. Sir, but I have a suggestion here. In the form here, actually this is one. Another thing is we have staff also, non-teaching staff. Learning is for everyone. See, they're a digital skilling program. Two staff member asked me, sir, the digital skilling program we wanted to enroll because they do office work, MSXL. They said that whether we put student or faculty. At least student or faculty is there. But at this, so here, what I suggest is, is there any possibility to include alumni and non-teaching or something? Well, sir, it's... Okay. We'll look into it. No, just a suggestion, sir. Yeah, I understand. Because every spark, those who have credit answer, we'll have the sure issues. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. That's what I'm thinking. Oh, my God. Yes, yes, sir. They come. Other people will now take it up, will you? Yeah. Hey, I think maybe in the form, in the enrollment form, we should ask a little bit more on if you are a current student enrolled in a program, then only then you can pick this. No, but roll number, usually it's an optional field, sir. They won't fill it up. Yeah, yeah, they won't fill roll number. They won't fill it up. But okay, we'll do the following. We'll look at the form and modify it suitably so that the wording is clear from our side. So we also would like to know that how many alumni are interested in learning. Okay. Yes, sir. We'll see if we can. Sir, I'm Dr. Prasanna. I'm Dr. K. Vijay Raja. So the roles, basically, instead of just student faculty, maybe alum can also be associated with the local chapter. They want an association with the local chapter, but it should not be included in our ratings and other things. So you have to look at it carefully. So I'm Dr. Prasanna from the Onger University from Karnataka. Ours is a conventional university which we offer only the PG non-technical courses and the PhD courses. And when we thought to make a credit transfer for the PhD students, where there are two courses which are mandatory from the UGCA, like research methodology and the research and publication ethics. But when we thought to offer for the non-crit course, but there was a problem like the courses is not in a continuous form and the courses will be running within the period only. And the other two papers which they will be opting, it will be as per our calendar of events. So is it possible to make those two courses to run throughout the year to opt out? So you'll have to do NPTEL Plus for all that. So if you do Swayam, in Swayam there is only a fixed calendar. We can't change that calendar. It's a, when the national level calendar, we can't change it. On NPTEL Plus, you can do any calendar you like. So that is the flexibility, but then you have to pay more if it's NPTEL Plus. That's a trade-off. Okay, sir. One more query, sir. As it is a conventional entity, as I said, most of the arts and other humanity students used to opt non-NPTEL courses. And there were so many grievances and which comes under the Swayam platform. And I hope only the NPTEL people is taking care of the Swayam as well. No, no, no, no. But not the courses. Not the courses. NPTEL takes care of the portal of Swayam. The technical aspects of the portal of Swayam. So the project management of Swayam overall is primarily done from the ministry. Now they've identified IGNU as the agency which will do the overall project management. NPTEL manages its courses. But our courses, I can give you some quality assurance. We are very careful about quality. But other courses Swayam has, its own processes, but some of them take more time. They don't do exams in time. But the grievances are not addressed in time. Yeah. It may take three weeks. I will let them know, so for sure. Please, for all the other coordinates, apart from the NPTEL, if there is only a single point of contact for any grievances. So they are starting one. There's going to be a grievance form. It has already started. We'll publicize that on the platform. Okay, sir. One more thing, sir. As per your presentation, I just shown, the number of students who are enrolled as per the city, the fourth was in a Bangalore. I would like to point out that more than 250 or 300 kilometers student has to travel to attend only in the Bangalore. Our ministry states with the 260 kilometers away from the Bangalore, and most of the students who enrolled, as I was a spark from the last three years, I made to enroll for more than 3,000 students to enter to the course. But for an exam registration, there are only 50. The reason was they need to travel for more than 250 kilometers. So, downgrade. It's exactly in the center part of Karnataka. Yeah, yeah. So there is a process inside your SPOC login. There is a process, if you have... Sir, I already requested, sir. Yeah. Minimum number of students. Yes. So unless we start the, say as an exam center, none of the students are going to enroll. No, I think exceptions can be made. Usually we say 200, but we also make exceptions in some cases. Please write. We'll see. Thank you. Sir, good morning. This is Dr. K. Vijayaraja from KCG College of Technology, Chennai. One request regarding the gate examination. Is it possible to include that aeronautical and aerospace engineering? Aeronautical and aerospace. There are also people from chemical engineering who also add this, this one. But this is a work in progress. So this should start soon. Thank you. Hello, team NPTEL. So, first of all, I appreciate the total effort that you are doing it for making everyone to get certified from IIT. So it was a great... And myself as Ganesh Prabhu, I'm the SPOC for Srikrishna College of Technology Coimbatore. I have a couple of questions. Number one, in the exam registration form, there is an option, there is a question called share info with SPOC. I don't know why such question is there because students belong to us. We are making them, we are motivating them. No, no, no. But still the question is there. Students don't belong to anybody. No, no. You belong to Srikrishna College of Technology. We are not guiding other college people to choose us. So that is why, why such questions? Because we live in a constitutional democracy. I will urge you to please read the constitution. Every individual has rights and nobody belongs to anybody, sir. I think, please, please understand that. Especially in the exam registration, why such question? I know, wherever, wherever, wherever in the world. And inside your own house, your own kids, there are rights your kids have with respect to you. So I think it's... Then my request, please consider them also for the rating. Because the problem is why we are asking such question, they have rights. I agree. But you are not accepting or you are not using them for rating purposes. I know it affects the rating. Yeah, definitely. We don't, we can't take that into account. So this has been, I think, every SPOC meeting somebody raises this question. Because all in the single point, that rating. That is what, that is what. Where is that poster? I think somebody asked for it. They said, you put that, then we will go, we will go and so the problem was finding out who these people are. They wanted that. We are doing that actually. The back end with that help of that hint, we are once again sharing a seat and asking them to get the information over those people. But again, it is in, it will be helpful for improving the rating. That is what. One thing we could do is maybe we can keep that on by default or is that even not allowed? Is it off by default? No, potential employee is different. There's two, two. See, the SPOC is separate. The potential employee is separate. So I'll just tell you that there are students who write to us saying, I want to do this course. I don't want anybody to know about it. At some level, that privacy also we have to respect. So we cannot have the rights of students removed also. So I think that's also important. So given that that is there, we can't do away with this. I mean, that's the real reason, sir.  We can't say anything random, right? So we have to respect the rule of the land in some sense. So we have to accept it. Maybe the default can be changed. That that could be okay. We can put yes by default once they say local chapter and they can opt out. They can come and explicitly change it if they want. That maybe we can do. That should be okay. And also if possible, please adapt them under rating for rating purpose at least. You don't want to share anything to us at least because they are choosing our college, right? They make a mistake quite often. They make mistakes. So the check with the SPOC is what we really use for checking. Just a request, sir. Yeah, they can change it till the rating date. Later on we can, sir. We have to do some backup work, sir. That is what we can sort of those things.  That is you are not sharing that, sir. If you are sharing that, then that will be very helpful. You just tell us the count. Who they are is tough. That part is tough. See, if we share and then we get into trouble, if they start fighting with us, why did you give them, then we have no way of answering that question. So we have to be very careful with this kind of data. So we'll try our best. So maybe there can be a way to send a message to those students. We can do that. We can send a message. We send a message, okay. So we are doing that also. We are trying our best from our side. It's not that we don't want to help in this, but another one, NPTEL courses not having much impact on open source software. Somebody else also made that point. Yeah, like ECM, like Sylab, what's that all? Sylab, Arduino. They are doing embedded system course, but there is no not having that much impact. Even I can say one or two courses may be there, but plenty of open source courses are there. Okay. So we need to look for, we look for explicit courses. NPT Bombay, they are doing it a lot with spoken tutorial, especially with open source software. Why can't, as many students are taking up this, so. Can you take that for credit transfer? No, ma'am, no. A spoken tutorial, they are not having that much clear format to transfer the credit, like NPTEL. So we can have those courses maybe officially, sort of, we'll start talking to them. We will discuss with them, see if we can sort of move it and offer it under our code, but they may not like that also, right? It's their thing. So we'll see, we'll try to work out, we'll talk. I thought that you are giving a way to IED Bombay to explore their course. No, no, each person has their own liking also. They want their name also, right? So it's hard to change that. We'll see. Thank you. College name was really long. Dr. K. Sashikala from Vinaya Commissions, Kripananda Warrior Engineering College, and we belongs to Vinaya Commissions and we are a team to university. And a kind request and suggestion too. So while the students enrolling the course, we have biomedical department. So in the department, why is biomedical is missing? Somebody else also asked me this during the lunch break. Anyway, yeah, go ahead. Okay, while tracking back the students' details, it was very difficult for me to do all those things. Already I have made a query through the mail, but if it added biomedical department, it will be very helpful for me. So while I'm making the query. So you want biomedical engineering, not biomedical? Biomedical. Biomedical engineering. Engineering. So they suggested me to go for arts and science and do it in biomedical sciences there. You just enrolling that. But the students were not following that. They are suggesting that they want under the engineering discipline separately as biomedical engineering. We'll take that up. Somebody else also asked. Thank you. Yes, sir. Good morning, team in Bital and fellow SPOCs. So this is Rakesh Roshan here. I'm from Rajivgana University of Knowledge Technologies, Basar Telangana. So first of all, thank you so much for all the efforts. And I could see that the initiatives that you have taken as shown, there are a plethora of initiatives that has been offered. Compared to earlier, we have been growing and you are also getting to the faculty's SPOC's needs also. So thank you so much for that. My point is regarding the soft skills training. So I just wanted to know if there is a tab on the account of the candidates because I'm looking at it from our university perspective, our students would surely benefit from that. So I'm thinking probably 400, 500 could opt for that if provided. So I just wanted to know, can we accommodate that? Is there a cap? I think who runs that Gita? 30 per batch. They would, they would. I mean, in case it's extended, they would. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. So now the problem is, I don't know why he starts doing it. I don't know. So, see the batch size has to be small for this. See, it doesn't, it's very difficult to do this in very large scale. So batch size is small. Maybe we can work something out. We'll see. There will be, this is the sort of limitation. We'll see how to work it out. I'll write to you on that. Thank you so much. Good afternoon to all. I'm Dr. Mandiraslam, SPOC of Coimbatore Institute of Technology. I have already did 18 NPTEL courses. And in some of the courses during the in-person proctored examination, almost 50 plus percentage of questions are taken from the internal assignments questions. So, scoring the marks in assignments is very easy. Maybe copying from others scores. So, they can easily get 20 plus marks in assignment. If you get, if you ask 20 plus, 50 plus percentage of questions from assignment, then they can easily get 70 percentage of marks. So, it will give more headache to the credit transfer in institutions. Without knowing, without studying the full content of the course, they can easily get 70 percentage of marks. It is not fair to accept the credit transfer from courses. So, please look into this. Okay. I think there'll be a lot of opposition to that solution. If you ask me, so I'll tell you what we track. We do track this very closely. So, the way, the way, the reasoning for the approaches, if the person has completely copied all the assignment has not learnt at all, then in the exam, they will not be able to do well. The fact that in the exam, they're able to answer 70% of the assignment questions means that they know something about the assignments. So, but look at the total marks they're likely to get, right? They'll get something around 40, 50 types, not much more than that, okay? So, if you want to be strict in your college, you can change those metrics. You can say, I will ignore the assignment marks. You have to get so much, you can in fact even say you have to get 60% in the exam. Otherwise, I won't give you credit transfer. That liberty, I think, are you autonomous college? Yes. You have that liberty in your board of studies. You can do that adjustment yourself. In fact, most colleges do the opposite adjustment. You get lesser marks. They do that, but if you want to do it the other way, fine. I mean, no problem. So, if you say only people who get 60 and above will be given credit transfer, it's perfectly fine with me as far as I see it. But our logic for this, see earlier we didn't have any separate criteria for proctored exam, right? Now, we have 40% minimum there. Even if they get a significant part from the assignments, it's okay we felt because at least the assignment questions they're able to solve properly in proctored conditions. So, that is the logic from our side. But is it- If the students know the technology in proctored exam question pattern, then they can easily go through the assignments only, then they can get the scores. So, it's not- So, no, but they should be able to solve the assignment questions in the exam, right? So, we don't, actually, is it, are you saying the assignment questions are exactly repeated- Yes, yes, definitely. No, they are not repeated exactly. Excuse me, excuse me, I did 18 courses. I did 18 courses. I know everything about the proctored exam question purpose. Exactly the same questions from the assignments are taken for the- Okay, so please report that to us. That is actually a violation of our policy. We say similar questions to the assignments, but we expect the numbers and all to be changed, okay? So, it cannot be just copy-paste from the assignment as such. Comprehensive type questions, the same paragraph was- Yeah, please write to us. If you see such patterns, please write to us. We will fix that. So, we expect people to not just mug up the assignment questions and come and repeat, definitely. That's what is the intent of our policy on this, but if you see violations, please report. We're very happy that you're asking this question. Please see this, thank you. Good morning. This is Rosa Chandrasekhar Spock, representing Arvya and J.C. Karaja Vinayari. I'm happy to inform you that we started our journey in 2017 January. From then onwards, we have been performing very well with support of our students. And right now, I can say that students are completely transformed from offline to online, not because of COVID, because of this NPTEL. So, we could see that our intention is also we need to inculcate self-learning skills. That is the main point which we are taking as a slogan to promote the NPTEL courses. Here now, the students' focus is on, NPTEL is offering some diploma courses, particularly on data science and as well as the programming domains. NPTEL. I'm sorry, diploma, POD exams. Oh, that is not NPTEL, sir. Okay, okay. That is IIT Madras software. Yes, I wanted to compare that. Ah, okay. Now in AP also, our state government started offering that minor degree courses. And particularly, we have the different industry tracks and as well as the specialization tracks and CSC for non-CSE students minor degree were offering all this. But our, I mean, nowadays all the opportunities