We also have staff members from various IITs, so I would like to introduce them quickly and welcome them also. So that you know who they are, Mr. Shivshankar Das, or if you would have interacted with him, you would have probably used him very, very well. He is the main person who runs all operations that I think are called. There is also Bharati Paraji, she is also a main person who runs all the operations from IIT metro for NMT. There is also staff from IIT Delhi, the B, Bru and Chowk. Staff from IIT Ruzi and then also IIT Goa, Hathi. So, the reason why I told them, in case over tea or something you have a doubt, you can talk with them also. So, my address was supposed to be the welcome and I think I will welcome everybody. So, if I forgot anybody, please forgive me. A warm welcome to the team and I hope you have a wonderful day. Good morning. Good morning all and you are welcome again. Good morning everyone. So, today is the event. We are basically dividing into three parts. In the first part, we are reporting of what has happened over the last semester. So, we just want to recap what has happened, how hospital has changed, what we have done. So, the first part of the presentation will be that. The second part will be the local shamsa initiative and what we have done in that aspect over the last six months again. And about the ratings, about what has come and so on. The third part will be of the new initiatives that we have started, again over the last six months. We have opened up that this time. So, we want to make sure that. And after that in between, we are also expecting some officials from the Makaout University. So, once they come and we have a large distribution for the colleges in the north, hundreds as well as the other active colleges. We follow it up with that. We have a play between some time and all of them. And many more with this thing to all the talking and all. So, you have a team play with me then they have a match after this. So, this is the set of events today. So, I call upon Mr. Pratap to start off in the reporting part of the first session. Good morning everyone. Of course, thank you all for joining us here today. As Barthi and I were mentioning, about which report in 8 minutes project are here. And you have the board leaders for 3 to 5 minutes are here. And I mean, Barthi, you have been a very nice opportunity for us to have this kind of a meeting. Thank you. We also have a board meeting for 6 million people. Mixing with each other. What are your thoughts on this? I will put it here. Actually, we do this kind of work now, but we are in the country. We have a board with F.D., U.S., U.S., U.S., U.S. and region-wise to help people who come one year by location and starting to wait in the workshop. So, usually we are only able to gather people and board leaders from that region. But it's our pleasure that today we have an opportunity to have many board leaders and many board leaders from different IITs, and that's part of this presentation. So, having started the meeting, the reporting on what we have done. That's part of here. So, we likely have 15 examiners. So far, completed about 740 courses, part of the IIT because of all this, and you're working part of the activity. In fact, this upcoming semester, we have two more years in the 17 courses. So, actually, we do that right now. We're just out of the course. So, out of the course, we have 26 examiners where we have students all over the country who are active in the course. So, it is one of the largest repositories of engineering course material, and we have got all these numbers which you are familiar with. So, 40,000 hours of video content, more than that, so much of subtitling done. And between our two websites, we have about, I mean, both our portal and the YouTube portal, which is also running free for us. We have 700 million views. At least in terms of viewership, that's already, you know, something like one-tenth of the world's population. I mean, if you count them as individual views, it's not going to be individual views, but just to get a bit of the number and mention that. So, that's very significant for a site, an educational site, higher engineering-oriented educational site. It's not just entertainment site. For that to have, you know, something like this, this kind of number is very impressive. I think that's rain, if I'm not mistaken. Yes, pouring down on us. So, yeah, so we have these 1,500 plus courses, which is a number that is growing. Am I audible to the last row? Is it clear? I know there's a slight echo, maybe, but I'll slow down as much as possible and speak. So, this is what we have. I mean, these are all things you're familiar with. I'm just running through it for a sake of completeness. It won't take too long, but I'll just run through it and get a sense of completeness. So, we do have four, eight, and 12-week courses, very nicely fitting into a one-credit, two-credit, three-credit kind of situation. And for all of this, we run this proctored exam. And that has been a very unique feature of NPTEL as a whole and all the coordinators across all the various IITs, you know, enable this to happen for the country. So, we have 100 plus cities, which is a big operation. So, if you look at, say, JEE or GATE or something like that, you know, we are looking at that kind of scale of activity across the country. 100 plus cities, nearly 120 centers where exams run. And that's very important in the Indian context. In fact, very important from the context of credibility. There are other online sites where to assist their students. So, our main content is something like this. We like with any other MOOC process. Video content is there. We have text transcripts. We have discussion forum, which, as you are aware, enables students to access faculty from IITs directly. We have live sessions through which people can actually directly talk to faculty. So, this is our user engagement. We have three to four hours per week. So, it's not an overload. But it's actually a very nice way to learn things. I mean, even as a faculty, I myself look at some of the courses. It's because very nice and interesting way to learn. And most importantly, although it does not seem like much, the fact that you can rewind, you can rewind a little bit and see, you know, when you just all said and done after some four, five minutes of watching, suddenly your concentration drops. And you can quickly rewind and just see what the person said again. In a class, you will give up. Two, three minutes, you will lose some concentration. Again, this is the kind of impact we have had on certification. You can see the same 90,000 number, roughly 90,000, 85,000, 90,000 number there. 75,000 people got certificates. And it is not just getting a certificate. I think that is the thing that we would like to emphasize a lot. And that's part of the reason we are having this workshop. Our emphasis is quality. Our emphasis has always been quality. And therefore, the 76,000 people can feel satisfied that they have, you know, when they receive a certificate, they can feel satisfied that that certificate represents quality. And if they show it somewhere, people will respect that certificate. I think that's the mission that we have. And we have been very particular that we should, you know, persist with it. Incidentally, we have also been joined by Professor Gandhi from IIT Roorkee. So we are happy to welcome him to this gathering too. So this is the number we have, and we expect to build on this. But as I said, all the processes we put in place, whatever new process we discuss with you, whatever new ideas we discuss with you, our back of our mind, our purpose is we should improve accessibility. We should maintain quality. These are the two things that you will always see somewhere in the background. That's the idea. Based on those two thought processes, we come up with some procedure. That's really what we are trying to do. So we have done a lot of different analysis. So we, for example, how many people submit the first assignment, and then what fraction of that end up writing our exams, what fraction of those people. We compare it with enrollment versus exam registration and assignment one versus enrollment. I don't know if the legends are clear here. The light blue is this enrollment versus exam registration. So you can see that number being about 8% for a lot of courses. Whereas the people who submit the first assignment to the exam registration, this is very high. So you can see 45% of the people who submit the first assignment more or less go ahead and do the registration. So, and usually the first assignment is a sign that the person is actually participating in the course because this whole process is free. A lot of people enroll without any particular need to participate in the examination process. Maybe just to check out something that is going on. So first assignment indicates that from their side, they made a step into the course, and that's a very good indication of what is going to happen. Yeah, so this is the numbers we spoke about going on. Ongoing is about 269 courses are running, and we are already 9 lakh plus enrollment. In fact, some of the courses are yet to start. We still have some few days ahead before we have some starting on 6th of August, some starting on 27th of August, I think. And so we expect this will cross 10 lakhs quite comfortably because invariably the numbers begin to climb as you get close to that start date. So that's the kind of number that we're looking at. Okay, so as you can see here, all the major disciplines are covered. If an engineering institution is there anywhere in India, or in fact, anywhere internationally, chances are they have something in the subset of this, and we have courses pretty much across the entire discipline, 1,000 plus courses. You can see institute-wise also. All the institutes are represented here, IAC, IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, Karakpur, Roorkee. Lots of courses coming from all these institutes. So you have a wide variety of experts from across the country who are participating in the process. And we also have some other institutes of national importance who are being coordinated by IIT Madras for their presentation. So ISERS are there, triple ITs are there. Some of the newer IITs are also there. So pretty much, I mean, good experts in their respective fields are being available in this process. We also have one course from National Institute of Epidemiology. Okay, so type of course offered. So you can see here, in the 740 courses that got completed till now, the new courses were a large number, 483. Repurposed were these red column, 49. And this one is the rerun. This is the rerun set of courses. And you can see as you move towards the July, October run, this is the current run, almost increasing numbers are reruns. We are approaching 50% rerun kind of situation. This we think is good. The reason it is good is then we can more predictably offer courses. So even for as faculty in your respective colleges, when you talk to your students and encourage them to participate in this process and utilize this opportunity, you will have a better sense of what is going to be available. And we are hoping that we will have a very stable set of courses which we can consistently offer every semester. And we will also always keep adding new electives. But like the core courses, we would like to ensure that it becomes available. So we are heading in that direction. Duration of course, you can also see here that the 12-week courses were initially only a small fraction. But increasingly the 12-week courses, which is the full semester course, so to speak, is heading towards 50%. And I think part of the reason is a lot of students are taking it. Now credit transfer has become possible. So I think there are a lot of other aspects which impact the student thought process as they take courses. And therefore these full semester courses start becoming more interesting to them. But we do have the smaller, I mean fractions of smaller courses because those are specialized courses and definitely there is a strong need for those kinds of courses. And particularly in these four-week courses, which are chances are they are advanced electives, particularly they are an expert in that area, makes a big difference. And maybe every institution will not have such an expert. So it really helps to have an online way of accessing these experts. Exam attendance percentage. So this is with respect to those who registered for the exam. And naturally the numbers are high. They are about close to 90% through and through. That's because these are people who have finished the entire semester's set of courses, I mean set of assignments, lectures, everything they finished. And so when they register for the exam, they are pretty serious about writing the exam. I mean so they are not just for time pass registering or just blocking up a spot. So therefore they do come for the exam, very large fraction come for the exam, which is good. We see it significantly better than many other exams where people register for their exams. Pass percentage. Again it's about 90% of those who wrote the exam. Again this is good we feel because again these are people who went through the entire course, submitted most of the assignments and that's why they felt ready to write the exam. And having come with that sense of readiness, it appears that they are able to deliver on the exam day. So that is nice. It also means we are pitching the exam at the right level. In fact, let me see if we have that slide here. In our earlier days, the courses, it took a while for some of our first two, three courses to actually settle in with the audience expectation and also the faculty expectations. So we have now assisted our faculty to set up the exam question papers in such a way that it tests the students but at the same time also gives them a feel that this is very useful content that they can utilize to both assist in their teaching process or also make themselves feel more confident about what material they are dealing with that has come up here. Of course now we also have a faculty development program being permitted through this process. We will talk about it as we go along which encourages you to do this and also get some formal credit points for it. So career progression points for it. So AICT has enabled it. We are also talking to UGC about the same thing. So distribution of highest marks. So this is something that I wanted to talk about. So you can see here. So if you look at the number of courses here. So we have about 385 courses. Out of the 740 courses, 385 courses have the highest mark in the course being somewhere between 91 and 100. And then there is a distribution of students who have scores less than this. So which means for more than half the number of courses students did well enough to get into this bracket. So the course was at the level. I mean without compromising any quality in terms of content it was pitched at the right level. Students were able to learn, they were able to perform, show that they have actually learned the marks of this nature. So this is not easy because 75% of the mark is coming from the exam, proctored exam. So this is not only from the assignments. So 75% has come from the proctored exam. Then you have a distribution. We have a few courses where the top mark, in fact we have one course where the top mark was less than 10. So this is from our early days of the operation when we were still trying to learn how to handle this and so on. So we have now given a lot of guidelines to our faculty. So they know how to set up assignments and also set up exams which are reasonably commensurate with the level of difficulty the assignments are presented and so on. And therefore we have a much more realistic split of what has happened in the learning process. So number of top marks. So if you see the number of courses here. So this is number of courses and this is the number of top marks. So for example there are three courses that you have 201 top marks. So now this looks like some skewed number but it is not so because these are the few courses here where you have this large number of top marks. These three, four and six. So you have about 12, 16, 19, 20 courses here where you have more than 100 top marks. Our courses of this nature which are very popular mass appeal courses. So introduction to programming in C. So it is not at all unusual to have you know 10,000 plus students taking it. Top 5% is in this case top. So you have different percentage. Top 5% means I mean only the highest mark. Top 5% is 2%, top 5% and so on. So these kinds of courses which are common interest courses. Technical, English for engineers, program solving through, I mean program solving through programming in C. These kind of mass appeal courses are the ones where you have this kind of very large number of top marks. Of course a large number of courses don't fall in this category. There are more specialized engineering oriented specific engineering domain kind of courses. So there you will see you have 480 courses where you have between 0 and 10 top marks. So that kind of course. So that's our distribution of top marks spread across various courses. So I would like to sort of close this presentation with acknowledging several people. First of all MHRD. Since this program has been on since 2003 NPTEL has been on since 2003. Although online courses has been on only since 2014. All through and through regardless of who was there in the central government. They have been very supportive of this whole initiative. MHRD fully feels that this is a really useful thing. Nation, the people, the students, all of them benefit from this kind of a program. They have consistently been supportive of it and they continue to be supportive of the program. Course delivery. We have had a lot of support from Google who have always performed behind the scenes. We have not really advertised. In fact, we have not advertised NPTEL even that as much. It's only been word of mouth. We have not really advertised Google in any way. They have our portal runs with their support. Their engineers provide us, you know, technical assistance to keep the portal running, fix problems or new features that students want, faculty want, you want. All that they Google team does for us. Our examinations are run with an exam partner. Our current exam partner is TCS ION. This is the same company that also runs the gate exam, for example. And they have some standard procedure process by through which they run their exams. We work with them. And they've been good with in the sense that we are not, in our faculty invariably want, you know, some nice experience for the student in the exam process. So they set up interesting questions, problems that the students can solve.  You can actually write a program in the examination hall. So a lot of these kinds of things. There was a course in which the students had to, I think the spoken English course, but students had to actually record something. And that is their answer paper. So this kind of thing. These are all not things that TCS ION has done previously. So for our requirement, they actually made these facilities possible. So they work with us. Of course, they have also their, you know, some issues crop up in the process, but they work with us to get this whole thing to happen. So we acknowledge them for it. Ah, from TCS we have representatives of that here. So your, can you just introduce yourself? Sair sir. Sair from TCS. So we have a representative from TCS ION. So we thank them for, you know, coming us, coming here and joining us today. And as I said, you know, a lot of things they do for us. We work with them to make this happen. We have software support from different, I think different companies are increasingly participating with us in it. MATLAB has been with us for a bunch of different courses. So they give student licenses. So people don't have to, you know, download something illegally or do some such thing. They can, you can get an actual MATLAB license which you can log into and use. And they are also happy with it because people learn MATLAB maybe later when they go to a professional setting, they may even buy MATLAB, whatever it is. They help the availability of it. I can't read this last thing. What is it? Certification. ICMR. So we have some other places for medical related things that we have ICMR helping us with the certification process. Transcription. So all our content we transcribe so that transcript is available in English. So somebody can download and quickly read through it if they don't want to listen to a lecture or put it on a mobile phone. So file size is small. That is done by DC Crew. This company, they do all our transcription. Text transcription in English. We also have these other companies, Bowen Barn, Mayflower and Crescendo who are helping us with converting this to this transcript into regional languages. So we are, this is an effort we have just started. You will increasingly see all our content available with subtitles in regional languages also being enabled. So when you're watching on YouTube, you have to go to settings and pick the regional language. You'll have our subtitles available there. You'll also have downloads available in regional languages. Mainly to enable students who have learned up to high school in their regional language and suddenly they are asked to learn engineering in English and so they face a lot of difficulty. And they're otherwise technically really good students who are unnecessarily being put into a very disadvantage position. So this kind of subtitling will allow them to learn the subject and at the same time also learn English sort of in the background because the faculty will continue to speak in English. We would like to thank our recent technologies and now some more companies have started providing us similar support which is in the form of CSR funding. This has been provided by them to assist us to give scholarships. We are only charging 1,100 for the final exam in a completely non-profit basis because that's the cost required to set up the exam infrastructure. We mean the invigilators that who are present there, the hardware that is used by the students. The premises that are used by the students. We send one representative from any of the IITs who are here. We all send representatives to each exam center. The person goes there one day ahead of time, checks if all the full setup is completely operational and is in good condition and they also sit through the exam day so that any problem crops up we can correct it live. So all this requires some cost. So that is the one that ends up being this 1,100 rupees on a non-profit basis. But even that in big cities maybe 1,100 doesn't look like much but in smaller towns it is a large amount of money since already students are paying fees in their college. So we have taken the assistance of companies such as Aresent who have been very gracious in giving us CSR funding support and this we use to give about 50% off in the exam fee and 73,000 students, more than 73,000 students have received this fee subsidy so to speak and that's a very significant support from them. We gratefully thank them for it. We also have similar support coming up from Tata Technologies, CapGemini, so these are other companies we are approaching who are also interested in supporting this and they are going to do so in differing amounts. So I think that's all I wanted to present. Thank you. So we're going to deviate from the agenda a little bit just to facilitate normal, easy way of going about it. So I'm going to talk briefly about some of the new initiatives that we are doing. At least, I mean, are you able to hear me well at the end because I'm hearing a lot of echo. Maybe it's okay on the back. We'll see. I'll try to speak slowly but part is a bit difficult to manage. So from NPTEL side, like Pratap mentioned, one of our major focus is to create value around the certification process and make it easier for people to participate in this and benefit from it. So we keep doing a lot of new initiatives that hopefully are interesting to you and I'm very happy to share this with you and as we go along, welcome your suggestion on any other new initiative that can be done. So your input in this will be very, very useful. You can tell us what would make a big difference to your students and to you and that is something that we can take up. I mean, we can only promise to try our best. Whatever we have done, we will talk to you about. The first one, which I think faculty from colleges have been asking about it for a long time and we have managed to do it after a few years of talking and negotiations is this faculty development program. Now AACTE provides career progression points for say a two week faculty development program that you have to physically go and attend in some place say an IIT or an NIT or something, so somebody organizes. So instead of doing that, you can take certain advanced online courses on NPTEL and you will get some equivalent faculty development points. So this is something that AACTE has officially approved now so this is, I am very happy to announce that in this session I think there was a news item on this. I am not sure if it got printed in the east zone but at least in the south there was a news item on this a few days back, you might have seen it. We are working on something similar with the UGC but at this point I am not very optimistic that it will happen but AACTE was very strongly supportive of this. So at least the engineering college students and institutions which AACTE has approved I believe some polytechnic colleges also fall under that category. Those institutions, the faculty if they do selected advanced NPTEL online courses it will count as FDP. So that is some one new initiative that I am happy to announce. There is something here I will skip this. So we have created a new certificate which has the AACTE logo it also has the NPTEL logo. It has a signatory from AACTE and it has a coordinator signature from NPTEL and below that there is also some wording to say that you know AACTE has officially notified this. I see a lot of people taking pictures. All these slides are available from our website. Everything we do is open. You can download the slides and take them. There is no problem. We are not hiding anything here. There is some wording at the bottom to say that this certificate can be used for career progression according to some notification of AACTE. So this is the certificate that we will get. There is this points conversion about if you do a 12 week course you get one and a half week FDP. I think two weeks FDP is 15 points. So one and a half will be 10 points or you can do the conversion 11 points something like that. The next big initiative is to get industry involved in this process. We have got colleges I think quite successfully involved in this process. All of you are evidence for colleges being involved. A lot of local chapters every week in fact we get 10 or 15 colleges still joining us local chapters. So the initiative is growing very very fast. We wanted to have something similar from industry also. So we have started a program called industry associate program NPTEL industry associate program something very similar for industries but they have different requirements. So they are not like colleges. So for instance one of the things that these industries are going we are trying to do we are trying to convince them to do is to co-offer courses. So a faculty member from IIT Kharagpur is professor Sandeep Paidonaku from the computer science department is co-offering a course with a person from IBM technologies on blockchain. Blockchain is a major technology of today. A lot of people want to learn about that. So now we have an academic person and an industry person together offering a course on this hot topic of blockchain technology. This is a similar course in civil engineering on glass manufacturing and use of glass in buildings. This is again being offered by a faculty member in IIT Madras along with an academy called glass academy which is a multi-industry organization fronted by Saint Gobain. I am not sure if you have heard about it. They are a leading glass manufacturer. So they are offering a course on glass in buildings. So these are courses we are trying to create more courses like this. We are working with Tata Motors, Tata Technologies to get some mechanical engineering courses jointly with IIT Kharagpur. Hilti constructions, another construction industry company we are trying to offer a course along with the faculty. So we hope to increase this number and in fact many of these certificates will also carry the logo of the company that is offering that also. So it has added value in the certificate. So this is the second initiative I wanted to talk about. The third one is producing some kind of a transcript. So now as the initiative grows it turns out there are people who have done multiple courses. There are people who have done like 15 courses, 20 courses. They have so many certificates. You stack up all of them if you want to go into an interview with 20 certificates a heavy load to carry. So what we are now allowing students to do is to download a transcript. So this is a consolidated list of courses that you have done on NPTEL and you can carry it on a convenient mark list. Maybe one or two certificates you carry with you. So this is one more thing we have added. There is no cost to this. Anybody who has done multiple courses can simply go to the website where you log in and this transcript is automatically available to you. So that is the third initiative. This is how it looks. If you have any specific suggestions on how to make it better we will be happy to incorporate them but I think it looks reasonably alright. So the fourth initiative has a dual goal. One goal is the green thing, go green part where we do not have to print the hard copy of the certificate and it also costs us money to do the nice printing and the nice lamination and the posting by speed post. All of that costs money. So if you opt for not receiving the hard copy you will get 100 rupees off. So that whatever the cost is for doing that you do not have to pay. You can pay 1000 rupees for the certificate. So this is a new initiative. We are trying to see how many people opt for this. If a large number of people are going to opt for this I think eventually we might do away with the hard copy. So there is always split opinion. Let me see a show of hands. How many of you like the hard copy? So you see a lot of hands are going up. You should think about it. It is slightly traditional thinking but people like to get that in their hands. So anyway, so let us see how this initiative fares. We will see. If a lot of people opt for it we will think about how to do the hard copy differently. Some calculation here we will skip that. So now the next initiative a lot of people ask about laboratory courses. So the theory courses are coming online. How do we do laboratory courses? Are there any enabling factors for laboratory courses? Now the difficulty in laboratory courses as you know is scaling up is difficult. I mean if you want to do a meaningful good laboratory course and you want to do it in large scale with good quality it is a significant challenge. So some people have been thinking about virtual labs. It has started well maybe not didn't pick up enough steam as it went along but one person who has done very well in virtual labs is Professor Sudhir Agashe at College of Engineering Pune. So we went and visited him. We saw his facility. He has a nice control system sort of plant multiple plants and then he is able to give access to those physical plants through computer and internet connection to anyone who logs into his server. And you can actually control a boiler or you can actually control a sensor sitting somewhere else but the actual sensor and boiler and all the units are in his lab in College of Engineering Pune. So we are starting to work with him and the way we will do it is there is for instance an industrial automation and control NPTEL course which is being run this semester from a faculty in IIT Kharagpur. In January 2019 it will run. I forget the name of this faculty. So Siddhartha Mukhopadhyaya is running a course on industry control and automation. Now those people who do well in that course in the top will be invited to take part in a workshop at College of Engineering Pune and get some hands-on experience. Am I right roughly? Okay. Okay. So I am sorry about that. So during the course we might facilitate participation for students on the virtual lab at College of Engineering Pune but assuming that doesn't work very smoothly at least for the top students in the course we will give them access to the actual virtual lab. So students who do well will get that experience. We will try to see if we can scale it but otherwise students who do well will do that. Is there a separate slide on the ISER thing? Yeah. Okay. So this is one laboratory component we are trying to bring in. Tied up with a theory course. So you have a theory course on NPTEL. You tie it up to a laboratory component. Maybe for the topers. Another similar exercise is through ISER Pune. Now they have a lab. They have a lot of labs there. Very nice labs. We once again went and saw them. And a faculty member there is once again willing to have students physically come to ISER Pune. And how is he going to select these students? So this is an organic chemistry lab and he is going to select students or I mean I will say students. It could also be faculty members. He is going to select them through the theory courses run on NPTEL. So students and faculty members who do well in those courses will be invited to the lab in Pune to go through a set of actual experiments for over a period of one or two weeks. One week and then you come back. Okay. So that is the another initiative. So scaling these things up is the challenge. We will see how to do it as we go along. This is a useful addition to the theory courses that you might do. Okay. So the next initiative is to do something for the toppers. Student toppers in the courses can we do something for them. So as it turns out a lot of faculty members at IITs when they offer this course and they see a bunch of students stopping their courses, they end up inviting them to come and spend the summer in their lab. So this has happened informally. We didn't really supported or stop it or anything. But now we want to kind of officially encourage it. We want to be able to, we are trying to raise money for this through our own mechanisms to see if we can support such activities, this internship activity, maybe support the travel of the student, maybe support the stay of the student in the IIT. This is something that we're supporting. We did this summer itself. We started it in a small way. About 12 students have so far gotten this. It's a very small number compared to the kind of numbers we have in mind. But as we get more and more funds for this, we are hoping to increase this into a larger initiative. So this is a very nice thing for the toppers. And this is directly targeted at students. We also want to have some industry internships for these students. We are working on that also. So the last or maybe not the last initiative is to have some sort of a mobile application. So now this has been a big request from a lot of people. Right now our online courses dot NPTEL dot AC dot N is easily accessible on your desktop. But people wanted a mobile app, mobile app. And what we have built is something called a progressive web app. It's not a typical app, though you can set it up like that. So right now it is a progressive web application. So what you have to do is you can from your mobile visit online courses dot NPTEL dot AC dot N on Chrome browser. Usually Chrome browser works well. And you will immediately see a different sort of a website. It will look almost like an app. It will have different icons and all that. It's much more easy to use. It's not fully functional yet. As in you cannot join a new course on the app at this point. You can only consume the content of a course for which you are already enrolled. So if you're already enrolled in a course, you can open your browser on your mobile. Go to online courses dot NPTEL dot AC dot N. You will see a much more mobile friendly interaction with our portal. You can do a lot of things on it. You can watch the video. At this point you cannot submit assignments also. So it's a bit limited. We are trying to work on those things. Hopefully in a semester's time we will have a fully functional progressive web application for our portal. So this will enable direct access from your mobile without using the desktop browser version, which is more difficult. This is the initiative. This is how it will look quite nice on that. So I also mentioned this initiative, the industry associate program. Through this a lot of companies are coming forward now to co-offer courses. Maybe that number is, I shouldn't say a lot. A few companies are coming forward to do that. A few companies again are coming forward to recruit students through this process. So recruit, I mean, freshers into their company through the NPTEL courses. So for instance, one of the announcements that I can make now is Infosys is looking at this semester. Particularly there is one course called Database Management System. It's again offered by IIT Kharagpur. Every time I keep saying IIT Kharagpur. So Prasaparthaprathim Das is offering a course on Database Management System. And there are quite a few other programming courses being offered. There is the C programming course, Python programming course. So what Infosys has said is, if you do the Database Management course and any other programming course, any student who does these two courses and gets more than 60% in both these courses, Infosys will give an interview to that student. You will be interviewed by Infosys. So this is a decision that Infosys has been based on requirements of course. I mean if they are not hiring anybody, they won't call you. Whatever they are calling, this is the eligibility criteria for them. So even if Infosys is not visiting your campus on its own, they will consider such students in their recruitment process, in their off campus recruitment process. There are also other companies which are doing this in a non-public way. They don't want us to announce it yet. They have told us this and they want to see how it goes. If they see that they are getting a lot of good candidates through this process, they want to increase this. And we are working with companies to enable this also. So this is another initiative that we are trying. So here is the name of a few industry associates. This number is also growing as we go along. The last initiative, it will be nice if Pratap was here. So he's kind of disappeared. So anyway, I will talk about it. Here I think we need a lot of help from local chapters and SPOCs in particular. So he mentioned briefly about translation of transcripts. I think even in Bengal it's probably particularly relevant because there's still a large fraction of people studying in Bengali medium. And when they come into college, they have to switch to English. And one way in which we can make the transition easier is to do this particular initiative. So what is it that we do? All our lectures, video lectures are transcribed in English. So you will see subtitles running below in English. Now we want to have those subtitles in say Bengali. So what we want to do is we want to take the transcripts and translate them into Bengali, let's say. Now this is not a very easy and simple task because most of our courses are engineering courses. And we want to keep most of the technical terms in English. We don't want to translate the technical terms also. I think in India today, most people want to know the technical terms in English. But the explanatory parts, we want to have them in different languages. Definitely we want to do it in Hindi. I think Hindi will be the number one requirement. But after that, I think Bengali or many other languages, we want to target. We have worked out a plan through local chapters and SPOCs to have people nominated for this doing the translation. Because the person who does the translation should know the language, should also know the subject. Now I think faculty are ideally placed for helping us out with this initiative. There is an honorarium associated with this. The ministry is funding us for this effort. So we will get the SPOCs involved and faculty involved in this translation process going forward. We hope to have volunteers from you. So that's it. I think that's the last slide on initiatives. And I think I believe the next program is to have briefly talk about the rating of local chapters. And then we will start giving away some of the plaques for the top local chapters. Thank you very much. Today, Professor Shorikat Maitral, the vice chancellor of the Maulana Abul Kalamajad University of Technology, West Bengal, was supposed to attend this program. But due to his urgent, some requirement, he had to leave the program. And Professor Shubhamey Dasgupta from his adjunct faculty of Macau to West Bengal, and who also looks after the MOOCs activities in the university, is with us and may request Professor Dasgupta to say how the MOOCs have been implemented in Macau and what are the thinking going on in the Macau? Good morning everybody. Professor Shorikat Maitral, honorable vice chancellor, he could not be present today because of his certain emergency preoccupation. So he sent me and first of all, I would like to convey his best wishes and for grand success of this workshop. And a few more things, actually, he wanted to convey and that was actually, you know, NPTEL is doing a great job and for a long time. And now they have, later on, they can credit the course. And teachers can help, actually, assist the students. And, you know, it's a good thing that converting all the lectures in, I mean, vernacular medium or having subtitles in vernacular, but, you know, it is a better, I think, initiative would be to train the student in English because English, even German people are also learning English because English has become more universal language. And technically, English is very much required and that's a good thing, that we should not translate the terminology, the technical terminology. So we should have, all of us should have initiatives because it is our responsibility to groom up young stars. You know, we have a problem in India that India, young stars are more in number. And old people are getting, a number of old people are getting reduced. But then it is a good thing that we have got young minds, young force, but at the same time, there is a problem that there will be less guides. So, the responsibility on older people is much more because you have to train and you have to shape a younger generation, which is much larger in numbers. So with that, I would say that this is a good initiative and we should see that this, all of us help NPTEL so that NPTEL can move forward. And in our university, we have initiated MOOCs in a very big way and in fact perhaps we gave systematic instructions to colleges long, long back and we have already started credit transfers. So if a student is facing some problem that some kind of special training the student has to do so that he or she cannot attend the regular classes, he can have, he can attend equivalent number of online courses and appropriate credit transfer can be done. And that we have already initiated and already we have done for, even this semester also, we have done for a few students we have requested. And only thing is that we of course say that online course is not totally equivalent to I mean rather the replacement of I mean classroom teaching. But the need of this avoiding classroom teaching and doing an online course in place of that has to be, I think, examined by the faculty concerned and the institutes. So we have to justify that and once it is done our academic, we normally get it through our academic council and then everything can be done. So we are from university side we say that we should leave no stone unturned for I think I think rather enhancing the initiatives of NPTEL and in particular and all kinds of MOOCs platform in general. Okay, so in case of NPTEL it is an advantage that we have all the NPTEL authorities very close to us and they have regional presence also and that is one of the major advantage and these workshops are possible maybe for other platforms it is not that much easy to have in face to face discussion. So I would like to visualize it to the best possible way. With that I would say that since it is really very much encouraging to see all the so many people so we take on us which introduced has the ICT has introduced we have already initiated so another extra 20 credits has to be done by I mean supplement that thing so that institutes should take initiatives you know and best initiative can be taken once faculty members are involved so faculty members should take initiative to see all the not only NPTEL all the MOOCs platforms. Okay, and whatever it is possible that whichever course and that they should have a self interest for themselves as well as for the students right and we take on us we have already initiated we have already but only first year you know syllabus we are following mostly the ICT syllabus and the first year syllabus we have uploaded but rest of the syllabus actually in the process we will be uploading very shortly and there we we wish to take all our stakeholders all the colleges in case of any problem you are very much free to interact and also you I central also told earlier also you should convey all your suggestions to the university without any hesitation okay because we believe that good things are I mean thinking for achieving excellence is not very explosive to any individual or even an university so all of us should contribute and then we can I think develop it and I think for next few years as a whole not only this this state as a whole in India we have a very bright future for young I mean youngsters and we should see that we ensure their future their possibility of getting a job their possibility of becoming entrepreneur their possibility contributing to the society thank you very much so before we start the distribution of the plaques for the colleges in the top 100 I'd just like to run through saying on what basis we do this rating so that everybody here how many of the people here are say first time SPOC's you have not been with us in the last run you've just joined and become a local chapter you're here for the first time with us okay so that's a little bit so I'll run through as to how we do the distribution of local chapters on what basis it is done and then we'll have the distribution of plaques for the first set and we'll then break for tea so as you know now we have renamed ourselves as SWAYAM NPTEL local chapters so NPTEL is the engineering partner for SWAYAM which is the national MOOCs portal and all local chapters under NPTEL are also now SWAYAM local chapters so that is the first thing that we have done and as on did actually this is probably we created in two weeks back we are on 1900 plus in fact like Rosa Andrew was saying in the last one month we have added 100 local chapters it's been huge in the last two months for some reason but the numbers have been increased otherwise we get about 5 to 10 every week but last one month we've done 100 so we are on 1900 local chapters and the growth in the eastern zone has been phenomenal in the last one year for instance in Jan 2017 the exam registrations from the east side was about 1% of our total and today we are on 13% in April 2018 we have reached 13% of our total is from the east zone and this is because of the growth of local chapters so in the east zone we have West Bengal Jharkhand, Chattisgarh which are all picking up and having more colleges come forward to create NPTEL SWAYAM local chapters otherwise from the south we have a huge presence in the west we have Gujarat Maharashtra then Uttarakhand UP so this is the place where NPTEL has a wide presence today and the most important part as to why we are really happy and we want to work with local chapters this light says it all in the last four semesters or six semesters you can see we have a steady participation of anywhere between 75 to 80% from local chapters so the SPOCs as you all are here have been really instrumental in taking this initiative to your colleges getting students to enroll getting faculty to enroll and we have seen this kind of a participation so it is there in enrollment it is there in exam registration and it is really encouraging for us which is why we have been able to achieve the numbers that we have seen before so in April 2018 we ran exams on April 28th and 29th we did that as a pilot just to see another model of exam but I think we people were not too happy so we are back to distributed split of exam mode this time again but at that point of time we had 114 centers across the country where we ran exams and that was in 110 cities and we also had non-TCS exams in some cities where either TCS did not have a facility to provide us exams or the numbers were a little smaller then they could do it so these were the cities where we also did it like Port Blair, Srinagar Badang, Ramgarh, Shillong Hameerpur and so on so we have started targeting places which have small numbers students are interested to write exams we are facilitating it for them so this is there the other thing I would like to state is at every exam center one of our staff from any of the NPTEL offices is present there to ensure that the exam is done well and in case there is some issue there also they know about it they can bring it to our notice some day so there is one of our people at every of those exam centers so this is what our certificate looks like and for those who have seen our certificate previously the new addition to the certificate is the Swayam logo so the Swayam logo is also now on our certificates April certificates have gone out with this and the last two semesters we have also added a QR code so on the side of the certificate you have a QR code somebody scans it they can get the e-copy from our server it's a direct way of verifying our certificate from the portal so coming down to rating and recognition so initially we had in 2015 maybe about you know 50 local chapters at the end of 2016 we were on 600 2017 I think we were on some 1200 or so today we are on 1900 so one of the things we wanted to do is how do we identify the good local chapters so are all of them the same are all of them interacting with us the same how effective is you know the implementation in certain colleges we wanted to also recognize them and also recognize all the SPOC's and the mentors for the effort that they put in for you know facilitating these courses to the participants from their college and that's how we started this saying that we would rate the NPTEL local chapter in a college so per se we are not rating the college we are only rating the NPTEL local chapter in each college that we have so this is the rating so as you know that the final score is 25% assignment score 75% exam score we take the best of all these assignments this is the grading we do and less than 40 there is no certificate currently above 40 we have 3 categories so based on this we have a logic for top or 2 which you must be familiar with so we have 1% 2% 5% toppers that we have and based on this we came up with one formula which has been used so far which is something like this so it is 0.1 into number present for the exam capped at 10 we just wanted to ensure here that you know from a college we get say 2000 people coming in right that should not skew the rating so we wanted them to at least pass the exam it is not just appearing or be present for the exam so the number being present for the exam we currently capped it so the max is like 100 beyond that it does not fetch any points in the rating the second part is you have a 1 point for anybody who successfully completes it or gets a score between 40 and 59 then you have 2 points for the number of candidates who get an elite category of certificate at 10 points for every gold medalist and a 20 for a topper so after every semester when the results for all courses are released we do this computation for every local chapter for all the candidates who participated we come up with the list we just do a descending order then we identify the top 100 and we give them a rating of AAA for the top 10 a rating of AA for 11 to 50 and a rating of A for the colleges that fall between 51 and 100 but then we did not want to stop there I mean it is 100 out of 1900 is kind of very skewed you know what about the other people who are also putting in so much effort so we said we need to recognize them too and that is how we came up with okay let me probably just show this too okay this is for the AAA AA so these are the kind of certificates that go out to the institution so for the top 100 we have an institution plaque that goes out as well as certificates for the SPOC so these are the kind of designs we have put out for this time so this for the AAA play college this for the AA and this is for the colleges that are getting a rating of A so the other set that we also do is rating local chapters as active so there the criteria that we have put is if there are 25 candidates from a local chapter who appear for an exam or if a local chapter has a gold med list or a topper then that local chapter is recognized as active and that SPOC also gets a recognition so currently our numbers for this semester the top 101 are already active anyway apart from that 452 local chapters have been given the active status so this is the kind of certificates that go out for the SPOC's too of the top 100 colleges and this is the kind of certificates we have made for the SPOC's of the active local chapters so we have different badges and parameters that is there the only thing that we are changing for the coming semester is we want some feedback data from the SPOC's for instance we find that many SPOC's are probably not even logging into the portal or some of them are not answering surveys for us when we need information given to MHRD and so on so we thought the SPOC's at least have to log into our portal once and answer our surveys you know to even say that there is some activity so internally there might be a lot of activity going on but we also want to see some activity from the SPOC's on our portals too so that is something that we are starting this time and we are also re-looking the formula so what I showed you we had applied it to say the April semester but we are looking into it because one thing we are finding is there might be a college that has just 100 participants but many of them are say in the top a category or have a higher percentage in which case they are still kind of you know taken over by the large number colleges so we are looking at how to get them also into the rating whether we want to do a different formula so one of the things we are thinking is if you look at the rating an elite student who gets 60 marks and 89 marks gets two points and that may not be too fair at the end of the day so we are thinking why not add all the raw marks above 60 and we will do a rating maybe with that along with some averages so we are dabbling with a lot of things we will put out something for you all to see and give you a feedback on and then so the rating system is also not like it's the same every semester rating changes every semester we keep changing our formula based on what we see as trends but we will keep you informed we will give you a heads up on that not that we will spring surprises on you so that is there and for mentors too we have certificates so mentors are faculty members in colleges who help the students go through the course in a more coordinated manner so they help them with viewing the videos doing the assignments maybe giving them lab time helping them understand some concepts which probably are not explained in detail probably in our NPTEL videos even just pushing them and motivating them saying that you have done for assignments already if you do two more you are ready for the exam why don't you complete that push them a little more to just get to that end of the course motivating them monitoring them that kind so for mentors too we have certificates of recognition that is based purely on the performance of the mentees so how the mentees perform we again have a formula and based on that we give the mentors certificates so this time actually we had 4301 mentors who were nominated I am talking about the Jan April semester out of which 1103 have actually gotten mentors certificates we also have the reasons for why the others did not get and this mentor data will only come from our portal so the mentor has to enroll to our portal in the course they also have to have mentees attached to the portal on the portal they have to have then we see the final score mapping so unless this does not happen there and we do not have the data it will be hard for us to recognize mentors because sometimes we get request he did not enroll but he helped the students outside of the portal in which case we cannot monitor the activity so that something that we probably will not be able to help and the other thing we are bringing a change in the mentor format again mentors are mostly faculty members who either know the subject who teach the subject are in that particular domain in which case we want to capitalize on more feedback on the course that they can provide us how easy with assignments whether assignments correlated to the videos what were the pain points that students faced what are the gaps probably in teaching that we need to address and maybe create more videos on is there any topic in your syllabus that we have not covered in our course maybe we need to add a module or something this is something we expect from the mentors to give us feedback on so we have created a form once a month the mentor has to login and give us feedback on the contents for that particular month so this we are implementing from this coming semester so from July semester this will also be a criteria for mentors to get certificates that they login and give us this feedback ok so these are certificates that we give out for mentors these are also available here ok so I think we can go on I hope this is clear we have much more after this but I would like to call upon all the dignitaries here now to felicitate the there are 21 local chapters in the top 100 from this particular zone and we are very very happy to I would like to now request deputy director sir Prof. Swagata Das Gupta, Prof. Pratap, Prof. Sunil, Prof. Gandhi, Prof. Indranil to please come on this side so that we can felicitate the local chapters I will hand it over to Das sir here and he can read out the list ok now we go for the much we will go for the plaque awarding ceremonies we will start with this is the only college institute of engineering and management Kolkata may request the principal Prof. Anban Krishnanayak and the SPOC of the college Prof. Ratna Chakraborty to come here and receive the plaque certificates a big round of applause for them sir please next I will call upon Dr. Reena Palodi director of Techno India Salt Lake and the SPOC Prof. Shorbik Pal for receiving the plaque for getting rated double A principal ma'am is also ok sir principal sir please come D.P. Poddar institute of management and technology please be ready D.P. Poddar institute of management and technology Kolkata double A rated principal Dr. Shrutapan Mukhaji and SPOC Dr. Pallab Kumar Bhoomi next is Techno India College of Technology double A rated SPOC Prof. Shogota Pal next is University of Engineering and Management double A rated SPOC Prof. Shukallan Goswami next is Netaji Shubash engineering college Kolkata double A rated may request the director Dr. Rishikesh Mandol and the SPOC Dr. Shruti Pal to come and receive the plaque next it request future institute of engineering and management Kolkata again double A rated college SPOC Dr. Devarsheesh Chakraborty next Asansol engineering college double A rated SPOC next future institute future institute of technology double A rated on behalf of the SPOC Mr. Anup Chakraborty next is college of engineering and technology double A rated may request Prof. Orijith Khurshal and Dr. Arunachakraborty next double A rated Dr. B. C. Rai Engineering college Durgaapur SPOC is not here he has met with an accident Dr. Thibani Prushat Banerjee is there anyone from there Dr. B. C. Rai Engineering college next hardware institute of technology rated A may request SPOC Prasashilaj Dutta next NIT Meghalaya SPOC is Prasar A Dandapat on behalf of the college Prasar Kamalika Dutta is disbanded so okay take it take it take it next is Durgaapur institute of advanced engineering and management may request SPOC Prasar Shabushachi Sharcar next J.I.S. College of Engineering rated A SPOC Prasar Debushri Mitra next Vilai Institute of Technology Dr. Sheena Shekhar Sheena Shekhar Prasashina Shekhar from Vilai Institute of Technology rated A next is Mignath Shah Institute of Technology Kolkata SPOC Prasar Shubhupati Nath next is Shankaracharya Technical Campus RIPRO SPOC Prasar Shukum Kushum Anjali Deshmukh next Narola Institute of Technology rated A may request head of the institution Professor Dr. M. R. Kanjilal and the SPOC Prasar Jayantapal next Kalyani Government Engineering College SPOC Prasar Mr. Nohade Brana is requested to come forward Mr. Nohade Brana the last one Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology rated A may request Prasar Anurban Gupta to receive the plaque thank you sir now may request Prasar Sriman Bhatacharya the Deputy Director of IIT Kharagpur to say few words please very good morning my colleagues coordinators from different institutes and the participants for the workshop well, I was just thinking the early days of our NPTEL when it was initiated you know the way the whole program was planned the courses were selected and each minute thing that how a course structure will be how each lecture session will be and that effort today as I see has gone into such a widespread activities through this particular program called Siam a platform of a maturity of MOOCs which is an open online course indeed I think it's a it's a revolution that has happened because that program which we had started as NPTEL in phase 1, phase 2 and a number of courses were created through video and also web based are getting disseminated to a larger cross section of people today and a large number of students and many persons who are associated in different industries are getting benefited out of this particular program and we are extremely happy that we could see that we can we can serve to a large number of people in the society I think it serves on many ways and it benefits on many ways first of all the students who are undergoing engineering programs or other in other areas they are additionally benefited to get the teaching of other teachers from different institutes also they have the opportunity now to interact through this digital platform and to learn more wherever they have doubts the teachers get additional aid through this particular platform and thirdly many a times we hear from our students that the discipline that they have entered into in engineering actually they didn't want to get into that and possibly this is an opportunity for them then even they are not satisfied with the departments they are in and if they wish they can take courses in the areas in which they are liking apart from what they are doing that is one of the biggest advantages that this platform will be giving to the students so in number of ways I believe that this particular program is going to help the community and I could see today from the presentations that our colleagues have given from IIT Madras that different initiatives that have been taken to strengthen this particular program bringing in the components particularly from the area of the laboratories I think that is very important secondly having some interactions with the industries and industry academia combined courses I am sure that it is going to be very beneficial for for the academic community as well as the community from the industries because many a times particularly in the engineering of the technological courses when we teach either many teachers do not have the exposure to the industries and as a result students do not get do not get the actual concept of the applications of the aspects that are being taught in the class I think in that sense if industry people can come forward join hands with the academic community and develop courses they are certainly going to benefit the students at large and I hope that the local centers the local chapters the job that you have taken it up to widespread these programs to a larger cross section of people to larger students you should disseminate it in an appropriate manner so that more and more students can spread it out of it I am extremely happy to see that in over the years the number of courses that are being offered through this platform are growing and I could see that in this particular semester there are participants who have registers which are large in numbers almost all the order of 10 lakhs in fact I am also a person associated with this particular platform and last year I had offered and this year again we are offering and I could see that the large number of students are registering in the course so that's a good sign and that being a very basic course of the engineering it's very important and I believe that this trend will continue and we as a community will try to come up with more and more programs which can benefit our students I thank you all for joining this program and I wish the success of this particular program. Thank you very much So at this juncture we'd like to take the opportunity of thanking Professor Sriman Bhattacharya for being here with us today taking time off from his regular duties at IIT Kharagpur as a small token of appreciation we'd like to thank Professor Bhattacharya for being here with us we'd also like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Das Gupta for being here with us today and we'd like to again thank him with a small memento and a small token of appreciation from our side Okay so I think we'll take a break for tea here, the refreshments are I think in the room behind this particular stage maybe about 15 to 20 minutes then we'll come back again run through some more parts of what we saw this semester lot of interesting information actually which we also didn't know Yes, so we'll have that we'll have about the next some timelines that we've already put in we'll run through that also some operations aspect of it then we'll have a faculty interaction but specifically there are three or four areas we want to hear from you about so that also we'll come when we talk about the discussion part of it or students who do not our courses and supplementary exams that is one that is coming up second we are looking into whether our past percentages should be as they are today whether it should be 40, whether there's another way of grading students, what do we want to keep it at so that's another question we would like to put back to you and say how do we do that and any other concerns or any other issues you want to raise in this platform we'll open up for about an hour of discussion at that point of time we are also available over to in case any of you wants to come and talk to us that you could do it with us now too thank you you can see that the one exam, two exam takers are 94% 5% and the three exam takers is 0.69% four exam takers is only 0.3% compare it with Jain to April 2018 three exam takers is 2% four exam takers is 1% along with increased number of registrations so there we are talking about 0.3% out of 44,000 people who registered and wrote the exam here we are talking about 2% and 1% of 87,000 people who wrote the exam so the number of people who took up four exams was 780 this time in spite of all the complaints we got that you guys clubbed your exams on Saturday Sunday you have back to back you have back to back you have back to back people have actually written an exam on Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon okay so this is an example I quote to students when they come back and say ma'am there's no time to study you're putting an exam I have a college exam the previous day I tell them 780 people are writing four exams back to back so don't complain now so this is something that we wanted to showcase so we saw that there is a multitude of them there are people in the industry there are people faculty members also students so this is the kind of spread we are getting and the interesting part the last three semesters we were actually amazed that there was one person who wrote four exams and was a topper in all four exams for you know 2016 I think September, October 2017, March, April we saw one person wrote four exams I mean there were many who wrote four exams but there was one of them who topped all four this time in the 780 we have 12 candidates who have taken up either four exams or three exams and a topper in all four or all three exams that they have written so this is again a huge thing that we saw you know that it was not like they were just doing it for a time pass or getting a 40 plus certificate they are actually topping these courses they are writing and also something all kind of courses they did so looks like it's one faculty member who has done all the teaching kind of a courses there's a student, a learner who has done data science related courses he's done machine learning data analytics, data mining probably it's a project change or a company change I don't know what his intention was and the third student has actually done all electrical engineering courses so this is the kind of people that we are also seeing as learners like professor Andrew is saying there are a lot of students who are doing a multitude of courses with us because one of the things we also want to see is does a learner come to us do one course and actually never come back you know with a runaway seeing the courses we offer or are they coming back for more and this statistic really encourages us because you can see more than five exams people who have taken is about 1200 plus so there is a person who has done 21 exams with us, two people who have done 19 exams with us and the finals are only four years old in the certification business which means every semester these guys have done three or four exams continuously semester after semester after semester so again we said who are they let us see who they are so the top one 21 exam is a student in a college he has actually done 21 exams then there are people from DRDO there is a person from TS Genco who has done 19, 17 exams this is a profile of the people so again something to inspire all of us when we think you know should we do courses should we write exams there are people from different walks of life who are actually doing NPTEL courses and writing the exams okay as you all know we are not conducting exams currently today outside of India the courses are open for anybody who wants to enroll and learn but if they want a certificate they have to come to India write the exam and then get the certificate we have not yet facilitated for learners outside of India to write exams there but one thing that we saw was two semesters back there was a faculty member from Saudi Arabia who came in she wanted to do a course in fact that was also again IIT Kharagpur emotional intelligence course she came in she wrote the exam she went out then the next semester we saw we thought okay that was a one-off let's see a repeat we saw a repeat there was an engineer from Turkey he was working in the air conditioning business and there was a course on noise control and vibration so he said it's very important for my job I get this certificate he did the course he flew down to Madras wrote the exam went out so again we thought okay the second instance you know are we going to see a repeat so when we have registrations we always look out for these people last semester there were two people from applied materials company one from the US and Austin Texas one from Singapore and they had some payment problems that's how we came to know so he was saying I'm trying to pay I'm not so I said where are you from what's the problem Aresha recyclers does it for the quality these are the two colleges both bone One place is that different one place is atlantic one place is Aresha And both of them got promoted to project lead position and apparently the manager said do this course called project manager from NPTEL and come back with the certificate then take up your position who no I have to come to India to write the exam so they exams. So kind of it is increasing slowly. This is just on the UGC ISCT notification that we had in 2016 based on which a lot of colleges adopting it for credit transfer are implementing. On the IIT front a frequent question we get is what have done with respect to NPTEL courses. So here I would like to say that IIT Madras has adopted it for credit transfer for their own students. Students in the BTEC dual degree can take NPTEL courses for up to seven credits in their system. That is done IIT Roorkee Prof. Gandhi our coordinator really pushed it and he has facilitated. So Roorkee students can also take NPTEL courses for credit transfer today. IIT Tirupati, IIT Palakkad have also done it. So this is from our side and again the interesting aspect we just did a study of last two semesters how many students have actually taken up exams with us from the different IITs. It's more than 800. In the last semester alone we had about 300 from the IIT Madras take it up. From different IITs also we have students taking it up. So this is there. This implementation by some universities already Makaot person had talked about theirs. UPTO University, the Abdul Kalam Azad University has also implemented in a similar way. They have a BTEC with honors for 20 credits taken up from NPTEL. University of Madras which is actually a primarily a university for the arts and science colleges. They have also approved credit transfer from NPTEL courses. So somebody has asked saying art science colleges can we do something? Yes we do have universities that have approved arts science college affiliated universities that have approved credit transfer for NPTEL courses formally. So that's also there. Gujarat Technological University and KTU. They both have approved it under the student activity points category. So there is something like 100 points has to be gotten by a BTEC student for graduating which includes the conference papers they present maybe other activities they do and so on. So in that they have brought in MOOCs. If somebody does a MOOC course they get some 40 points 20 points and so on under that category. So these are some implementations by some universities. These are by some colleges I'll skip that for now. Okay so coming to this slide we just want to talk about so we keep pushing the data line in this for those who have seen our presentation. So somewhere we want to start stabilizing. If you see our numbers if you see our graphs we are still hitting the upper curve. We have not yet flattened out anywhere. We don't know where we are going to flatten out even in terms of courses being offered in terms of participation in terms of exam registration. We are still on the upward swing only. But one thing we would definitely like to do is at least be able to tell people in advance that about a hundred and fifty courses will come in January every year and will come in July every year. The set of at least hundred and fifty or two hundred we want to make it sure and beyond that maybe another hundred hundred fifty will be the new courses or whatever that we are getting so that people can also plan for you know how their students take it and colleges when they want to implement it they should know that the courses are coming. So we want to get there. We are trying in fact this time for the Jan 2019 I think already about a hundred and ten or so courses we have got the list it's finalized next week once I get back we'll be publishing the list of courses so far approved we are also collecting new courses from faculty we will keep adding to that list. So one request to SPOC's the Jan 2019 list is being finalized now. So look out for our list that is on the website please send in your request for what courses you want to see offered. Okay then we can work on it but we need a heads up time of at least four months. If the course is already been offered for certification it's easier because then we just have to approach the faculty get them to agree but if the course contents are not available and what you're requesting for we need to create we first need to find a faculty we need to create the videos and that takes easily up to three months and then get them to offer. So many times we get request like in November or December for a January run course in which case we will not be able to facilitate. Also by October we freeze the list and we give it to MHRD November the open courses for enrollment publicity will start which means like October first is our kind of deadline for what we are going to offer next semester. Our timelines are also decided we have a co-ordinators committee meeting tomorrow we will kind of get it approved there on Monday probably or something we will publish the timelines for January 2019 semester. So what we want to do at NPTEL is we want to give a six months to eight months heads up for all universities and say this is our schedule and we are requesting university heads to work around that saying that if you can keep one day before and after free of our exam dates it would really help us because if students have to travel to write an exam or prepare for it that would be really great. Many times the universities are not giving their schedule much ahead we know that but we are at least trying to do this because as you know with TCS we have to book centers we have to start our planning because it's pan India it's not within a college. So our timelines are ready our exam dates tentatively are March 31st and April 28th for the next semester the remaining start dates and all we'll put it out on Monday. Two weeks time for all SPOCs give your feedback otherwise by August 15th or 20th we will be freezing this will be the timelines for Jan 2019. So we want to go ahead by at least six months and give you all the information so that y'all can also work on it. Course list will also be ahead the timelines will also be ahead. Yes and for people who have not seen this time we have introduced courses and two new disciplines textile engineering and mining engineering in fact just yesterday the IIT Delhi office sent me the list of tentative courses for Jan 2019 there are at least six or seven courses coming on the textile engineering from there which is really nice because that field also now we are having certification courses. Okay this already we have run through so I'll finish this. Okay just getting into the operation site for a little bit these are timelines for this semester all of you must be familiar with it. So we have courses that have started on July 30th the 12 week courses. Endrollment has been extended for one week for those courses so on August 6th we are going to close enrollment for all our 12 week courses. There are a set of four week eight week courses starting on August 6th August 13th August 27th. Endrollments are open for all of those till the date the courses start. So you can still ask your students to enroll and that is something here in this connection I would like to say that we are staggering all these courses and we're trying our max best because across the country when we are offering MOOCs our universities in the south or many other you know states are opening somewhere in first week of June while here when we see UP or West Bengal it's like almost the fag end of August so if you have to fit all of them in you know with the exam schedules not kind of clashing this is the best we are able to come up with so in this respect actually when we go for image and meetings the professors have been trying to talk to ACT UGC and we are trying to come up with a schedule wherein they can define a two-week period in which colleges all across the country would open. If that can be done then the MOOCs thing will work much better you know we can do plan also we've told them that they said they look into it if it happens maybe for next year. So this is the timelines these are the courses that are going for exams in these particular timelines just to come up with the SPOC I hope all of you know that you'll have two logins one of the online courses portal where you can dynamically see enrollment data you can also put in mentors for every course and the fee waivers are open now for application you can also put that in on the local chapter portal on the NPTEL dot ac dot in slash local chapter also you have a login you will be able to see enrollment information you will be able to see exam registration information you will get the hall tickets marks e-certificates so that is typically there the feedback and everything happens there so these two portals your login should work any issues with that right to us we will be able to resolve it okay so currently the enrollment data visibility inside your login works with this logic when they enroll to a course on the portal if you say that your role is a student or a faculty then the next question comes that do you belong to an NPTEL local chapter if you say yes there and select the correct college from the drop-down list inside the SPOC that data will be visible if the person says no I don't belong to a local chapter this data will not come into your login or if they select some other institution which happens regularly which we see for instance a in the south we have an SRM group that has five the minute the students is SRM he will not even see whether it's SRM Institute SRM Engineering College SRM College of Engineering they'll say SRM click something so it will not be the institution he belongs to so in your login it will not come so this is something that is for visibility where they have to correctly fill the yes to local chapter and select the college so if you're telling us that you know my students have enrolled I'm not able to see them inside my login the common issue is that they have not selected the college name properly or said yes to local chapter again this is something they have to fix there is a button called edit profile they can go there change the affiliation it will come within your login so there's something you can tell the students and this time in the enrollment form based on SPOC request we have added some new fields we are asking for the college roll number for the students the department name the discipline that they are doing the degree year of study there are more fields that we have added so if you think there's something else that you require for identification let us know we can still keep improving this okay this is a new thing we're going to do here and if I get questions I will pass it on to them so this is something for exam registration data that we are seeing so for the enrollment we are showing you based on whatever they select as college belonging to but for exam registration we are bringing in this to safeguard the privacy of the individual when they are writing exams with us so we have a question on the exam form that says are you taking the course exam for credit transfer if they say yes the entire data will be shared with you the student will not have an option to not share data with the college which means exam registration info mark C certificates everything will be shared with the SPOC if they say I'm not taking it for credit transfer then they get an option which says do you want to share information with your college there is a yes there is a no if they say yes again we share all information which is fine but if they say no we are not even going to show that they registered inside your login we will not be sharing this course we will not be sharing the e-certificates this data will not be considered for rating of local chapters so in fact this came about we are really going strict on this this time because last semester a few students actually wrote to us saying that I do not want to share I've told you why you're still putting my information out there so we said okay let's do this clearly that now the credit transfer started if it's credit transfer the college has to know which in case we will do everything by his choice if he says yes we will still provide but if it's not credit transfer and they say I don't want to share be it a faculty member be it a student whoever we are not going to share that particular information so in case you all want to collect information from your candidates please publicize it amongst them that they have to voluntarily say yes to sharing information with the college and the provision that we are giving here is the last date of releasing scores for all courses supposing for this semester October 20th maybe max by November 20th we would release scores for all to 69 courses three days after that we'll keep a button open right from now till then inside the login any point of time they can make the no into a yes so you don't have to come back to us saying you're not seeing data if the student you'll go back to the students tell them share your scores they can just log into the profile make that no into a yes you will immediately see data so till three days after the last course are released this option will be open after three days we will lock the option whatever data is available as of that day in the yes category is what will be seen by the SPOC is what will be taken up for local chapter reading any questions any suggestions any doubts on this any remarks okay if it's fine I'll proceed for mentors many of them are asking the mentor has to enroll to the course on the portal they have to declare themselves as a faculty member affiliate themselves with the local chapter then the SPOC will now set from inside their login this person is a mentor for this course once that is done again we do not have an option where you can say these are 50 students attach them to me again it is the students perspective that they say I am attaching myself to the mentor so what happens is once you are selected as a mentor for all students in your college in that particular course your ID will become visible under the mentor tab so the student has to go there just click the mentor tab and they say I am becoming a mentee of this particular person once that is done the mentor can again see if an assignment is submitted so in the 10 days period when the assignment is open you will see a tick mark if the assignment has been submitted once the due date is over assignment scores will be visible to the mentor but mentor has to enroll to the course in the portal SPOC has to set the faculty member as a mentor students have to attach themselves to the mentor as mentees that has to come from the students part so this is for the mentors yes sir mentor is it will also show to the mentor or not after the end of exam so currently we don't have a login for the mentor on our portal so the SPOC gets the complete results so we mark that and give it to them so he will get the entire results which means these mentee car results they will be able to provide you with so I ideally all the information is shared with the SPOC currently the exam results and so on only up to the assignments is visible on the portal okay okay issues that we are aware of and we are trying to correct we'd again like to open this if you'll have any suggestions questions on this we'd like to take feedback here request for exam cities I know we are still working out the cities in this part and this zone you know of India for our exams so one of the thing is yes always in TCS there everybody books exam centers about four to six months ahead even in gate exams and all they in fact do it about eight months ahead because the process is run that way but for the way our courses are structured and the way that we close our exam form like you know till about a month before or something we are only able to give them data in the last minute so we make some projection and we give them tentative numbers and say block centers for us but beyond that if our numbers suddenly increase because of some reason we are not able to cater to it so I'll give you a classic example which again you know happened last semester so on March 7th we were closing our exam form last semester and that time we had 42,000 people registered as on date there were requests for extension we said we'll extend but our thing was maybe a lot of people are complaining about the April dates also so we thought maybe we're not gonna have a high number of registration TCS was pressurizing us saying release your centers you're not when getting numbers you've just blocked us and other customers are not getting centers so we put a projection of maybe another 10 to 15 thousand we said we'll end up at 55,000 we released a lot of centers to TCS at that time in the next one week that we kept the form open we got 46,000 registrations it was unbelievable because we just didn't plan for it this was not the way we think in fact we ran a feedback form to those guys who registered saying what if we had not allowed an extended the form you know you're ready for that that you would not write the exam what stopped you from registering when we were open for three months because it doesn't help us plan and it's really like you know why you're waiting till the last minute and what we got back as reasons are not necessarily valid in some sense we felt they were just waiting for one more assignment mark one more thing but what if we had not extended the form that was a question that kept coming back to us you know so one thing which would really help us from SPOC side is if y'all can give us a projection of numbers you think will register from your colleges it would really help us total up for instance in Calcutta we talk about the Salt Lake TCS center I think the capacity there is say 1400 we do two sessions a day 2800 in Calcutta on a single date but if we get 5000 people now registering for Calcutta we have to know that we have to plan for 2200 more and if we do the fact and we are not going to get good centers it'll be 100 kilometers away 50 kilometers we will get a center but it's gonna put people to hardship but if y'all can tell us today these are tentative numbers we are expecting or in whatever form that y'all have feedback then we can work out with TCS we can arrange for more centers today and we can work it out better so one thing is that sir will be I think giving a feedback form wherein he's gonna ask y'all to put in some numbers so that we can also get an idea of how things are working out and plan better so that is something that we're saying in fact for those of you who have enrolled to the courses we now have a question there which says tentatively will you write exam for this course so that was more to for us to get a sense of are they serious that they will go up to the exam writing part or is it just for learning that people are coming to the portal so that was one thing that we introduced the second one is delayed dispatch of hard copies last time I think we took about a two months in dispatching this time I think we did a better job because our exams got on April 28 29 May 28th we had completed a publishing results for 226 courses and certificates 66,000 certificates were dispatched by June 20th what y'all are seeing are missing sideway in fact if y'all had come to our IT matters office in that period of May and June we had like stacks and stacks 60,000 certificates sitting in our office full day we would be scanning packing packaging putting list after list in fact in three years the development on the postal side has been we have stopped going to the post office to deliver the postal ban comes to our premises to collect certificates and go because we are such volumes of certificates going out so if y'all may some of you have certificates missing some have not received maybe one or two are gone here in there this is the reason our same staff who works for you on the portal on the local chapter team on keeping our websites up we are the same guys who are also scanning our certificates packaging and posting there could be errors on our part we apologize for it and we are working on it so we will try to deliver whatever is pending but typically this is what happens so we are bettering our process next semester our internal deadlines are if October 20th our exams getting over November 20th we are going to publish all results by December 15th we want all certificates out it will definitely be there let's see whether it happens and delayed disbursing fee waiver we know that the fee waiver went out just about last week people are in the process of getting the fee waiver refunds for the April exams this was because we had not received funds from Aresent we were waiting for this year's you know allotment from them to come to us we just got it so we disbursed it so hopefully the October exams we should do it faster again we are hoping by November end we should do the fee disbursal too. Timelines from the other side that I would like to talk about this time yes there were not too many extensions as I think SPOCs are getting used to our way of working all the processes are kind of getting ironed out it's not too much of a hassle anywhere so it was fine request for exam center in city I don't think this zone we have too much of a problem but some other zone sometimes we have they'll say that you know find it students will write in the city give me a city we work with TCS a lot we get a city then we see that hardly 40 people will be registering for the exam so then whatever we had put in as effort there goes a waste for us you know so get realistic numbers from the college in terms of registration that will also help us to plan then bulk payment yeah if colleges that are doing bulk payment for candidates from your side you all do transfer an amount to us right if there are say 250 students you're paying for and the total amount comes to say 3 lakh 43,000 we'll get 3 lakh 42,000 and we wouldn't know which two candidates or one candidate you have not or the candidate has not paid that you've not transferred to us so that becomes the thing that we're constantly calling up the faculty member the SPOC was saying who is this person it'll be nice with that mail if you can just tell us cancel these two people out there's the money there's a difference tally it here so one of the things at that time we're really scrambling you're also busy with classes you're you know hard to get your own calls at that time so it'd be easy when you're doing bulk payment just kind of correlate both tell us if somebody's canceling so that we can finish the process okay the last part is a major one instruct all students from your college to kindly look out for males and SMS from us we send out a lot of emails from our site saying hall tickets have been released or if their photo has been uploaded wrongly we say you know upload a nicer photo do this do that maybe they put up an SCSC certificate the certificate is not readable it's not it's blurred we can't approve it upload another certificate but hardly do we get any responses we are sending out SMS every day we put out reminders every week we put out reminders but I don't know the males are just not getting responded to so tell students in scores it's surprising that four months after we release scores there'll be a candidate who says I don't know where to go and check scores and we're like are you about four months back we have released how come you're coming now you know you didn't know that we released but many of them are still in that zone you know so just educate them that they have to check their males maybe it has gone to spam or junk I don't know our males but we are sending mails ask them to check on it or come to the website see the things are okay for them so that's something that we say this time we did this for students whose SCST and PWD certificates that we had given 50% waiver for if we could not verify it we blocked the scores we blocked their e-certificates so some SPOCs wrote to us saying my student finish the exam but scores are not released we blocked it because there was this verification we still have to get the document from them we are waiting for that so in fact even for this we sent emails and SMS saying we have blocked it send it to us and still we have I think 30 candidates who have not sent it to us there is remain blocked only so that is there okay giving you an idea of what kind of photos we get right there was a candidate who did Sachin Tendulkar's photo he didn't come to write the exam we're very sure of that but the photo uploaded was Sachin Tendulkar there's something in green color that came there's something that is pixelated that came there's a guy on the phone like that and the right if you can see this this person has even a cartoon character and saying nice one there's a photo uploaded for an IIT certificate that the student is going to receive at the end of the course whether the students appreciated or not from our office we are very very conscious of the brand we are putting out we do not want to give out a certificate with this kind of photo in fact to tell you the 87,000 candidates who register our office goes through each and every photo and signature of that we qualify them as good acceptable blood this one we send back mails we tell them to upload this is the kind of quality check we are doing from our office but then we don't even get a response from them so we block out photos sometimes and we send certificates but these are photos there was another thing I don't know yeah another photo where there's half a girl's face in that also I don't know how they put these up but these are photos that we are getting there's one more of three like the passport size that we get three are there in that so these are the kind of photos we are getting a normal you know passport size photo will do for the form I think so it'd be nice if you all can just tell them that put up a passport size photo even in fact for signatures we are getting thumb impressions how are we supposed to validate a thumb impression on the day of the exam I don't know we have to validate it when they sign but they give a thumb impression I mean that's what we get we get something on the backside front side it's not very clear with some text on a full A4 sheet on the center they will sign scan the A4 sheet and upload it you know how can it come on your hall ticket in that space it's not gonna be visible so these are some things when students are filling forms in fact in our form we have something for the photo page these are acceptable these are not acceptable these are good we even have those examples in spite of that this is what we get so we have not yet come to the point where we are gonna block and not give hall tickets but maybe we will do it sometime so in fact we've heard that UPSC exams and other exams if they don't get good thing they don't win communicate they don't return the fees paid and they just block the guys out that's what happens there we have not done that but it'll be nice if you get better photos and signatures okay this is something I want to open out for discussion here so one of the requests that has been coming to us is colleges that are taking it for credit transfer if the student does not pass the exam that we are giving and does not get how are they supposed to cope with you know the exam and finish the course will we give a supplementary exam is that what is that's what has been asked of us many times so there is one solution that we have been proposing where we say that all the assignments for that particular course are open they are published they are published with solutions so if a local faculty member can actually use that and create a question paper for the supplementary exam conduct the exam internally and give the marks maybe that will work but of course that again depends on you know the academic council guidelines that they give saying what is it that is required for him to take the course or complete the course if they say you have to if this process is done then the NPTEL certificate will not go out that is only for the exam we conduct so if internally this is adopted and you all run the exam you all do it we will not be changing anything on our database the NPTEL certificate will not go out so the academic council says you have to bring the hard copy of certificate then I will clear it this will be a challenge yeah if the same course comes and next one they can take it it is fine but some we are seeing our fourth year eighth semester students which means there's like a barrier for them to graduate the graduation the last course that they're doing is also yeah so this is something that we are saying is it okay with you all we want to get some feedback on see one of it is we do a pan India exam today and we are already doing it on two dates within a semester four times in a year so it is a huge amount of logistics we are handling and that is the basis on which we are giving certificates so a supplementary exam again being conducted on that level may not be feasible for us is one thing that we are looking into so this was one option we are looking at do you have any other suggestions do you have any other you know possibilities that you can think of in case say even for if some colleges adopted it for credit transfer the student does not pass what do you think he should do or what do you think we should do from any suggestions we would like to hear from you actually on this can you pass or Mike I wanted to suggest if only they miss with the examination due to some reason hello yeah if only they miss the examination maybe can can they be allowed in the next run the same course so next run is always possible but but they have to take the whole course next run because sometimes the faculty might change or the weights so so the problem is the fee is not a fee that we are just collecting for the sake of the exam the issue is that the fee gets used for that infrastructure so TCS is charging us for it we are paying the exam partner for it and so in fact in fact we have to pay for a minimum of 50 students in a center so if there is a center you know because it's in a remote location we have we have accommodating a center even with less than 50 students we still have to pay them what is that case can that we transfer to the next slot like suppose last time it happened that Saturday was examination and the same examination was on Sunday one of our faculty member he had to write some DRC that the PhD meeting came suddenly all of Southern University's announces that and I requested for that may he be allowed for the Sunday that was not even possible so that yeah the logistical issue that is because the center has some limited number of seats so if they're running full then we don't have scope to not full or something like I was thinking that could be made across the country we have so so we have we'd also be consistent that's that's the thing otherwise they will say you know in that place you didn't allow displace you didn't allow it comes very personally it looks like you know I did a favor so these issues become a problem so that is why just for uniformity and the scale of the operation that's the reason why we are forced to stick to some thank you yes please the point is regarding the fee waiver and you have said that the A1 cities the students belong to A1 cities will not get the fee waiver but that the point if you may see from Kolkata region you can find that percentage of students they are going for the engineering course taking the bank loan so instead of going for the A1 cities that's a very actually not a very good classification if you go for among the merits the top 1% or 5% will get the fee waiver that will be much more logical I think so regarding this A1 cities just the classification that A1 cities all have a very good financial background and those have A2 and A3 cities they have not very good financial background this is I think a vague classification so you require to think about this matter urgently so okay to respond first of all the fundamental classification we rely on is the college and the principal certifying that the student is in financial need and whether they are in tier 2 or tier 3 we use that also when only when the college certifies that we give scholarship without that we don't give yes sir I understand so tier one disallowing there are two reasons one is sometimes the company that funds us puts that as a criteria they say we don't want to fund students in tier one so since that's coming with that tag we are forced to pass that on if the company is willing to support tier one city students also and if the local chapter can make a genuine case we have considered that in the past we have in fact there's one college in Mumbai which is run by a charitable trust and for really they take poor students in and they do it we have considered that in the past so if you can clearly establish that there is a genuine financial need we do consider that company the company that funds us also accepts it sometimes so we have to do that process before we do that okay hopefully that's clear so so I didn't hear that fully yes tier one is possible only if there is some special clearance through some process not in general okay so when we approach for CSR funding we are not placing the restriction that we will not fund tier one so sometimes it is coming from their side because they have some internal you know discussion or idea on it and so they are having that restriction from their side actually in in Macau in final semester if the students are attending any internship or anything else then for them this MOOCs has been already started and one case came I am SPOC from Macau so one case came when the student was in Bangalore and he enrolled for all the MOOCs courses and for design lab he need to do two courses either from C++ Java or Python and he registered for Python then I got an email from that team I think it's IIT Bombay or I cannot remember exactly that I need to means a mentor needs to register in the course and in the lab course and the student and the mentor together had to go through the lab course I think this lab course is spoken tutorials so we are not concerned with that oh it is not NPTEL so in NPTEL they you are not NPTEL is there's no lab course currently or what we start is there any plan for so what we talked about the lab courses is that organic chemistry that we want to start the COEP thing and all that so it's not in fact all our programming courses come with the assignments that are only hands-on programming so there is no multiple choice or mostly in that it's a programming platform they have to write a code they have to submit execute compile it that's how our courses work so it's almost like a hands-on course only there sorry for the confusion but the problem is that if our student has to get a full credit support whenever he is outside then it should have all the options once he or she if it can be in future if you can in future if you can like included yes I think that's a good suggestion for computer science courses we can think about that going forward offer some some sort of a design lab so that say Macau can certify that that can also be used for the design we will think about thank you okay good morning sir myself Pioto Sanna from the SPSE of MoloMinsk Technology so I have one suggestions so if it is not reflecting on the finance core then what is that need for the conducting the internal exam for the unsuccessful candidate so my suggestion is that could you repeat the question it wasn't very so if it is not reflecting on the final score of the for the supplementary exam oh okay so is the need of internally okay so maybe there's some confusion about this does Macau allow for supplementary exams if supposing a student writes the exam the first time and they fail what happens to them do they write a supplementary exam or do they have to repeat the whole course they write one more supplementary so this is the question of supplementary exam so from the NPTEL program governing council point of view we don't want to give the NPTEL certificate for people who do the supplementary exam okay so the first shot is the attempt you get in some ways we are not comfortable with giving a certificate to people who write the supplementary exam in some sense unless we conduct the exam ourselves fully we don't want to give the certificate okay second question is that regarding EICT FTP program so the NPTEL fees is 1100 right in NPTEL exam fees is 1100 and that faculties and students get the certificate say once and once the faculty asking for his NPT FTP certificate he or she has to pay 200 rupees more so so this is the issues that so the certificate NPTEL FTP certificates can come with the 1100 rupees so if it is possible please remove the fees of 200 my last question is few subjects instructor are they are continuously arguing with the students and the faculty of the mentor because of whatever the assignments they are uploading solution of the assignment there's something it's reverberating a little bit so I think the first point maybe we should respond to the first point itself that's a good suggestion we will think about combining the two things so that there is no separate fee etc but right now the quick and dirty implementation we can do is give another certificate and whatever cost is for the other certificate we recover like I say we are not trying to make money through this exercise but we will rationalize that going forward this is for this semester and the second question you asked we couldn't understand it okay in few subjects so the instructor they are uploading the answer they are uploading the answer subject assignment okay somehow at the 11th hour okay so this is not correct then they are giving the answer so they are saying that in the discussion forum don't make us a panic so the instructor should be aware about that what is the wrong answer and what is the right answer yeah so so I'm hoping that this is not a rampant scenario as in the case pointing out to a case where the assignment has an error in it one of the questions isn't is wrong and later on when the solutions come out they corrected right that's what happens so in an online course that's the only thing we can do once an assignment has gone out with an error and it has become live we cannot correct it midway okay so because some people are already answered and then for some people you'll have a different assignment that's not fair at all so we keep it open there will be some comments on the discussion forum yes the faculty might respond to it but the physical assignment itself when it is once it's been open it will not be changed but when the assignment is graded this correction will be made if there is a question that is wrong it'll either be ignored or something else similar will be done it's called re-scoring internally in NPTEL and we track that re-scoring very very closely if there is too many re-scorings going on it means that the instructor and the technique teaching assistants are not taking sufficient care in the setting up of the question ideally there should be no re-scoring right every question could be correct but believe me I think when you said a lot of questions repeatedly these errors can creep in one or two errors can be there everybody is a human being at the end of the day I will request you to be considered and if you think in a particular course there is too much re-scoring going on please alert us we also watch that very very closely because the re-scoring is done centrally at the IIT Madras office it cannot be initiated by anybody else independent of us knowing so we will know every re-scoring that is being done and this is something that we track for quality control also okay okay my question is about I mean how you select the exam centres because I'm from Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology and in the state of Sikkim we have two centres we probably the first year of NPTEL there was a huge number of students who registered about 900 students registered but at the end the centre was allotted to some other place so the students just refused to go for the exam and it was not possible for the college to facilitate the movement of such huge numbers of students next year numbers started coming down and now in fact we can't even tell them to register because the centre is not in our control even this semester we have about 350 students already and some faculty members also but this problem needs to be looked into yeah so Mr. Das has already updated about it we were talking to the TCS person also we are aware of this particular issue so we will try to get the centre there but at the end of the day NPTEL only tells TCS in this city I need this many nodes and that is what they have to provide for so where we are able to plan ahead and we know some centres we block those centres ahead for us but then when we don't know numbers or some places like this TCS then decides also TCS has their own financial agreements with colleges and we don't get into that part of it so they have a preference for who they use why they do not use some centres why they use some centres maybe they've had a bad experience in one of the exams previously conducted where some problem came up so that is all there internal thing we don't get into that I agree with you but madam considering that the case is of a state like Sikkim which is in one of the remotest corners we look forward to this kind of support in fact I believe there's nothing better than NPTEL to help students not only of engineering colleges of Sikkim but also of schools in large numbers so I believe you need to take a different view at it totally I totally consider cases of remote places very very closely we also have the option of doing other type of exams please talk to us offline about your specific problem I guarantee that we will try our best to solve this thank you so much so in fact we keep pushing TCS specifically in this regard we don't you know we don't take their first cut as you know the final list of centres we every time we get input like this we specifically talk to them because as Bharati was mentioning they criteria as to why they have picked a center they will simply say you said the 500 students in the city so I have picked the following centers that center you have a city address but it may actually be 20 kilometers from the city and depending on where you are 20 kilometers may take even hours to go so they are not completely looking at these things they have a broader picture due to other considerations they have in the process it could be infrastructure considerations let's say number of students so they optimize all that plus also any other exam run same many things they are looking at side we are definitely pushing because take NPTEL courses are our priority we push to get it the way we want it and it's a learning process I mean so maybe we don't get it right next semester attention to the places which we missed out on so but it is on so you please tell us and in extreme cases as mentioned some other way in which we can handle the exam at that center so really appreciate it thank you so much Namaskar, first of all I would like to congratulate the entire NPTEL team the amount of effort and the organized support which you extend to the local centers thank you it's really commendable it's really commendable my question is on industry associate initiative which we are talking so is it active from the semester onwards? yeah we've started actually sometime in January and we are not pushing very hard on it because it involves a lot more effort from our side and we don't have too much staff for taking care of it it is slowly picking up speed and that numbers are also slowly going up we have a lot of industry associates now yes it's slowly picking up so the example which we have taken the database along with programming in C or rather Python so we have to take both the codes parallel yes for enforces that is the criteria you have to take it does it have to be parallel not no I think even if you've done it before it's okay anytime and they will look at our list of students who have done that and they will also look at additional information about that students see for those students they want a recruit they want the full CV rate we don't have the full CV so we are working on a way in which we can collect that full CV from the students and they will call them for interview based on this data and then do that so when we share this data we will get expert permissions from this data once we do that we share and once they have a requirement for such candidates when they have requirements they will come they will look it up from this pool all right it'll be via the concerned like IITs or directly to the Institute that part have not I don't know 100% how we will work it out we have some plans we have some funding for bringing the students into the IITs doing some mock interview doing some you know some slight training before we go into that but that doesn't work out it will be the interview so one more thing the FTP initiative is really good for the faculties what about the credit transfer to the students at least central universities can be pushed for taking I know and believe me we whenever we get a chance we visit universities all universities are not like Macau for instance they don't react in the same way there are complications I agree we do try our level best wherever we get a chance we have been to so many universities and spoken to so many officials yet I think at this point I'm optimistic I wasn't optimistic one year before but at this point I was I'm optimistic I think it will happen but it will take time the university is first enough people in the administration of the university have to be convinced about it they should believe that this is a good thing and secondly they should have the energy and enthusiasm on their part to focus on something like this if their priorities are different then we can't do much about thank you so much yeah shall I talk I will come to you next yes this is a infosys tie up whatever you're talking about recruitment has it already started your planning at what stage it is exactly infosys yeah so it's it's it's it's been approved it's gonna published to the students yeah yes please so we will publicize this through some newspaper article and all that it will happen soon but you can publicize this to your students right they can publicize to their students no okay so maybe in a month's time we will do a official mail will come to you saying yes please wait for that you can tell them informally yeah but don't say it official thank you sir I'm from North East University Meghalaya Shillong actually we are in a remote corner and actually our license is very much interested that MOOCs courses should be started very in a high speed over there so I will invite you someone of you please visit that place because regarding MOOCs they have got different opinions and wrong opinions so and these things should be go they should go and at least send someone to the license level to meet our license letter to have a common lecture for over there this number one number two is noticed has got a very you can say great problem that many of the students are reluctant to appear in these courses only one thing can attract them as my previous speaker stole that if these courses are connected to the appointment that means getting job so this is very encouraging one that if some student takes DBMS management system and some some course programming scores and it gets more than 60% he would be directly into interview so if you can send an email to us as you have told and you will be sending it probably in one month as you have told right now so we can display them and we can enroll the students very fast okay this is number one and for our PhD students these type of things what you have given IBM with IBM that means blockchain based and my students research college students has taken this course very well and if you can float similar type of this hot topic IOT based systems IIT blockchain based systems with some industries like this does impact in industry and startup is also to establishing startup units also which is also another it is wanting to have some startups actually coming to Naga land right we are going to Naga land for a workshop on April's 18th August 18th August 18th we are traveling to Naga land for a workshop we are hoping to talk to people there but Shillong we do have a center there is a center and happens and but the point you said is well taken the officials of many universities told about this have to be told what is it that we are trying and how it is going etc because they are like you rightly pointed out they have their own opinions based on what about it yes thank you hello my name is Shantan Roy I'm a student of government degree college when I want to say that I have done this courses I learned things from NPTEL so that's a very interesting course and also from CMI I have CMI Dr. Krishnan Hanumanthu is there so they are offering courses so it's very good now the point is I think you all that from this semester I mean from this year all colleges and universities are having CVCS system so in that in this regard if you see the number of courses offered for colleges that is now number is very less because in in that courses not seen any course on commerce maybe I have made a mistake but as far as my knowledge is concerned also for the humanities courses also there are I don't think the fellows of maybe there are some courses related to English but I don't think there are courses on philosophy also philosophy history I have seen a course on Sanskrit also so since the all the colleges are having CVCS system so from the next semester onwards if you can get some other course because we have also in discipline-specific electives then social enhancement courses or AECC is there so it would be very much helpful for the government general I mean this that if you offer some courses like that yeah the comment is well-taken do you want to say anything okay so we will try we will try to do that as well but it's like I said since most of our instructors are from IITs the general focus is on engineering yeah but we will we will look at the problem yeah just a suggestion here so we do have management departments in the IITs so we have quite a few courses which are on management financial accounting then I think we have something on costing and business e-business is there I don't know if it's directly relevant to our students but financial accounting was there there was a course so maybe some parts of it might be the other things that we normally get this request saying that you know in physics you have just four courses how are students supposed to take so one of them is they can be a programming course everybody the programming course today probably you know whatever stream they are in they need a basic data analytics course that they need to analyze data maybe some soft skill courses so even though it may not directly relevant department discipline that we are not able to cater to some of our other might possibly interest them that could also supplement the learning so that's something that they say but we are trying for other courses yes sir you can talk I guess those who have taken the course what are their performance and all this thing any course whether it's a MOOC or a credit base the aim is to generate employment so do you track what happens what happens to the next student whether he gets a course after all all we are doing is to get employed so we are not actively tracking every semester what we do we do get feedbacks directly sometimes of people saying I got a PhD they write a mail to us that we did this course this was this impact that's a small fraction the other way we actually track is the core core is book pages where people are writing to each other about the you know when they went for interviews what happened they are discussing amongst themselves a lot of times if you go to Kora and just Google I mean search for NPTEL there you'll find a lot of us where people ask what is use of an NPTEL course what I do if I get a certificate or something and others have answered it we don't answer so that will show you some parts this is a very small thing but recently about maybe two weeks back we ran a survey form amongst certified candidates we said fill up something say if you're a student did you use it for gay education was are you still in the undergraduate level if you're an industry professional what did you do with our course if you're a faculty member what did you do we got about 6,900 responses from people who have completed so far and a large that they did get jobs they did get internships in fact industry professionals have written they got higher pay rises on showcasing these certificates they got project changes they got job changes that was from the industry and faculty many of them have written categories we really wanted to learn how to teach it or when I was studying I never got a chance to study this course so now I've studied this course and I'm going to deliver it for starting a new course in my college that was another thing that the faculty members put in so in that sense is what we have tracked active tracking per se per student we are not telling them saying we asked them for a feedback but very rarely do they come back to actually give us that kind of an input you want to say something okay yeah he just left yeah it's no use because he has left no no this is the TCS people here that the TCS ion people who conduct our exams they're not TCS is a big government organization by the way I mean it's a huge setup it's hard to say what they recruiters are concerned because I got the report