A very good morning to everybody present here. It's very happy to be here today with all of you. Lot of familiar faces we are seeing over the last two years, every SPSE workshop, a lot of new people we are meeting who have become local chapters in the last few months or have started activating the local chapters in the last few months. So welcome to all of you. Madras weather has been generous to us in the last two, three days we've been having some showers. So it's actually cooler as compared to the hot days we have been having, maybe two weeks or three weeks back. So welcome to all the SPOC's. We also have our chief guest of the day today, Professor Dureshami who's the vice chancellor of Madras University. And we have Professor Anant with us who again started the entire NPTEL initiative from 99. So we are very happy to have you here with us today, sir. Thank you for gracing this occasion. I mean it would never tire us or I think we can never say enough to say, you know, how he started it and where the program is today is all because of his efforts and Professor Mangal Sundar's efforts. Mangal Sundar is in Canada, he's not here with us today, but he sent us his wishes for the event to be a success. So it's because of them that the whole NPTEL started and for about 10 years they were going on with it, creating the repository. And only upon that we have built the certification effort today. We are also happy to have with us Dr. Nalamuthu Kodandaraman, director of UGC, Human Resources Development Centre and head also with us today. Thank you, sir, for coming over. And we have some industry associates. We'll tell you about the new program we've started. So we have some people from the industry also partnering with us. So welcome to them. We have, we'll shortly have with us the senior consultant from the MHRD, Shri Parameshwaran. He will be joining us shortly. We have the team from Persistent. We will introduce shortly again. So welcome to the team. They're going to take over the Swayam portal and also our online courses portal. Shortly they'll be integrating both. So that is on. We have representatives from the Google team who have been supporting us over the last four years. So welcome again. We'll have more people joining us from our other partners too. So we'll introduce them as we go. We'll start off with the welcome address. I request Professor Andrew to come in and start off. Then we'll have. So the program of the day goes like this. I'll just give you a brief. So we have a welcome address. Then we have an update on what we have done over the last six months and where we are today. Then an address by the chief guest. And the top 10 local chapters, we will felicitate. 11 o'clock we'll have a tea break. After that we'll have an update on local chapters, processes, new initiatives, followed by discussion and interaction. And then we'll have the felicitation of the other LCs who are here today. Lunch should be at two o'clock and we'll close the program with that. Very good morning to all of you. Very, very warm welcome to IIT Madras on my behalf and behalf of the entire NPTEL family. I think all of you are part of the NPTEL family now. It's been four years that we've been in this journey together and it's wonderful to see the enthusiasm everybody being here. I would like to especially welcome Prof. Duresh Sami, Vice Chancellor of Madras University who's decided to kindly agree to raise this occasion and be the chief guest. We will hear more from him when he addresses us. Prof. Anand always is happy to see him. Prof. Nagarajan, Dean of International Affairs at IIT Madras. He's been a huge support as well. So let me get started. Mostly this event is a little informal. It's not a very formal event where we do things. So hopefully you're okay with the informal agenda. So I'll get started with important updates. My so-called welcome address is supposed to be a quick rush through of the numbers that happened in the last semester. Where are we, what we have accomplished, how many students have benefited, et cetera. Those kind of numbers I'll present real quick and then we'll move on to the other things. Okay, so here's what I'll talk about. Statistics are quite important whenever you run a program. If you ignore that, you're doing random things. So we will look at the numbers and show you what is it that we've accomplished in the last semester in comparison to what has happened before and in anticipation of what will happen in the next semester. Okay, so we need your continuous input to make sense of all these statistics also. We'll do that in the later interaction sessions. So today, I think what Prof. Anand and Prof. Mangal started 20 years ago is on really solid ground. Okay, so it is, if not the largest, one of the largest repositories of educational content in the world. There is no doubt about it. The numbers are really tremendous. Hundreds of millions of hits on the YouTube channel. We have more than 13 lakh subscribers to our YouTube channel. Remember, this is an educational channel. It's not an entertainment channel from some pop singer or something like that. These are educational channel with professors giving lectures. So to have 13 lakh subscribers who are subscribing is amazing. And one of the things you'll see in any conference I go to, even in last month I was at a conference in the US, two, three people walk up to me and said, you know, this lecture that you have given in NPTEL, I use it in my course every day. This is like in the leading international conferences. So this is used world over by people all across and they really appreciate it. Definitely the Indian audiences are primary target and people in India also appreciate it quite a bit. And these numbers, I don't have to read them out to you. They are really very big. And in India, there are very few multi-institutional projects which can claim any kind of success like this, having delivered numbers at this rate. And again, the credit goes to Prasannanth and Prasamangal's vision and their inclusiveness in including so many people in their program, creating a larger NPTEL family and community which has driven this growth to these kinds of levels. And we hope to carry forward that agenda. Okay, so since 2014, we have started the certification effort. I think for many of the older people who've been with us for a long time, this is all information that's known. Please bear with me. There are few people who are new and it's good to talk to everybody about these basic numbers. We started the certification effort in 2014. It was inaugurated at the MHRD by the then government. And in fact, we have a representative from the ministry also here, Shri Parameshwaran who's a senior consultant at MHRD and he manages the Swayam project. And he's the one who gives us all the money. So without him, nothing will happen. So what is it that we do in this online certification program? Every semester we offer courses. At the end of the courses, we conduct exams and those who pass exams get certificates. These exams are held in centers all across the country. Many of your students have written these exams. So today we have finished to 740 courses. And with this semester, we will cross the magical thousand number mark. We are doing 270 courses this semester. So we will get to the thousand mark this semester, thousand and 10, I guess. It's comfortably above thousand. More than 36 lakh students have, I'm saying students, but when I say students they really mean learners. These could be anybody. 36 lakh people have enrolled and benefited and more than 2.7 lakh have actually written the exam. So this is a major phenomenal growth for this program. It started in a small way and hopefully I'll show you more details. I like to put up this slide because once in a while, we should have the western way of driving us, which is having a vision, mission and then purpose, et cetera, policies and procedures. So the vision of NPTEL has always been to provide high quality, affordable education at large scale. So there are a lot of conflicting things in that sentence, but that's what we strive for. And how do we do that? We develop content, we offer online courses, we promote use and adoption by colleges and universities. And we've been successful in this effort, largely because of the cooperation of local chapters. There's no doubt about that. You'll see more going forward. Just to make sure we are in the same page, the MOOCs contain video lectures, assignments. There is a forum where you can ask questions. There are text transcripts for the lectures and there's also live interactive sessions once in a while that are held by faculty. All of this happens in our MOOCs. So what is the kind of learner engagement is expected per week? Typically, there are about three to four hours of video lectures in a week. There is an assignment, which people are saying two hours, but believe me, for a programming course, you'll have to write four programs and that'll take about six, seven hours if you're not used to programming. And of course, you have to get it to work, not just write. So that takes some time. There is a discussion forum if you are really keen and active. For instance, there is a course called Deep Learning which is a very popular topic today and the course released lectures yesterday. I think yesterday or day before lectures were released and yesterday I was looking at the forum, there are already nearly 100 topics on the forum. People are asking so many questions. So if you're active on the forum, you want to look at all the questions that will take much more than one hour a week. And also there's text transcripts and everything that you can do. So about every week you can expect about 10 hours of interaction with the material and that gives you what you learn from that. So how is it that we have grown? I said we started very small in 2014, we had just one course. And in this current semester, we are running 270 courses. The growth has been really big and the growth has been big largely in participation in numbers as come from local chapters and your role in motivating your students is absolutely vital here. Otherwise it's very difficult for us to reach out to students directly. So I think your role is very important. Equally important has been the enthusiasm of faculty at IITs to offer these courses. As you can imagine without faculty coming forward eagerly and offering courses nothing will happen. And they've also been motivated seeing these numbers and that is something that's very nice to see. And so I want to say a few words about impact also. So you will see a lot of people enrolling for these courses, lakhs of people, tens of lakhs of people will enroll for these courses. About eight or nine percent of them will write the exam. That is to be expected because this is an open process. I'll also give you some other numbers in the next slide to give you more nuanced data on this. So now enrolling in a course is very easy.  But really to participate you have to do much more and to measure that we have done a little bit closer study of the statistic and that is also very promising. So there are three numbers for every semester in this chart. For instance, if you take January to April, 2018, there are three numbers. First number I'll talk about is 45, which is the, so no, maybe first number I should talk about is nine, which is the smallest number. This is the fraction of people who wrote the exam from divided by, I mean, number of people who wrote the exam divided by the number of people who enrolled in the course. So that is coming out something like nine percent. So you'd say it's very less. But I think that is the wrong way of looking at the data. First thing you should look at is how many people submitted the first assignment? That is the next number, which is 21. 21% of the people submitted the first assignment. So there is this big pool of people who enrolled for the course. Just click the join button. They're really not interested. The people who are genuinely interested I would say are the people who submitted the first assignment. That is only about 21%. Now, out of that 21%, how many people wrote the exam? That is close to 45% in the January to April 2018 semester. So in NPTEL, we watch these numbers very closely. All these three numbers we watch very closely. And this is a measure of success of a course in some sense. For instance, that 45 number for the good courses will be much, much higher. It will be close to 60, 70, that kind of numbers you'll see. For the not-so-good courses, it will be lower. And we have our feedback and calibration and correction based on that. But still that 45 is a pretty good number, I think. It's not a bad number, it means the teacher is doing a good job. So once the student gets hooked in, something is happening with the student. So I'm gonna stop at this slide. For the remaining of the slides in the initial update part, Prasapratha will come up and present them. After that, we'll continue with the program. So Prasapratha Paridas is in the department of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering. He's one of the coordinators of NPTEL at ITMETRAS. Good morning. I join Andrew, Niketh, Bharti, and others from the ITMETRAS NPTEL team in welcoming all of you, the larger NPTEL family to this LOC felicitation function today. So as Andrew was saying, we have come quite some distance since we started our initial activity in the online courses initiative. So you can see the number of courses that we have offered is what shows up here. And you can see that, you know, since we started off with just one course, this immediate preceding run, we had about 226 courses. And in the upcoming run, we have 269 courses. So that's about 740 courses that we have completed, 16 exam runs. So that's actually been a very huge learning experience. We interact with a lot of people who try similar activities, both nationally and internationally. And these numbers are not matched anywhere. Nobody has done 16 exam runs in the manner that we have done which is relevant to the Indian scenario of how we want to do certification. And we have 269 courses for the July, December, 2018 semester. And already the enrollment is across six lakhs. So we expect that these numbers will keep increasing. This is something that shows the, again, another aspect of the NPTEL activity, which is quite unique, is the fact that we have courses across all disciplines. So we have courses across all the engineering disciplines. We do not just do courses based on overall popularity, just because the market happens to be driving things in a certain way today. We understand education is a broader concept and I know there are people in various disciplines who have necessities, who are very valuable to society and so on. So all courses are covered here, all engineering streams are covered here. You can see significant number of institutes are also participating in this process. We really go and invite the best faculty from various well-established institutes, national institutes, and get them to offer courses which are then very useful to the general public. If you look at the type of courses that we have offered, you can see that in the recent past, if you look at the distribution of courses between rerun, repurposed, and new, you will see that for a long time, actually the number of new courses was large. So we had 483 new courses from amongst the 740 that have been completed. So those are all new courses, meaning freshly it was designed. Faculty picked it up, taught it, and delivered it for the first time. 49 courses were repurposed courses. Repurposed is something that came from an existing NPTEL course which was then converted to the MOOCs format. Then converted to the MOOCs format. And then 208 are the courses that were rerun. So from the 483 and 49, they were rerun. So multiple offerings of those courses were there. You can see in the upcoming run, which is 269 courses, we are having a split, let's say, of 40-60% between new and rerun. So 60% is new and 40% is rerun. We think going forward, you will have more and more reruns. And in a way, we think that's a good thing because then the course is established. The faculty who is offering the course has a greater comfort level in how the course has been designed. They understand how it is being delivered on an online format. Because even though it is new for the audience, it is also new for the faculty. Most of us have not offered a course in an online mode with an audience as diverse as we are seeing today on those courses and in a scale that the online course offers. So for most of the faculty offering these courses, also it's a very new experience. So as they get into reruns, that experience is built on and they're able to deliver it in a much more reflective way, both from their own satisfaction perspective and from the perspective of students. Also, it really helps us because then we can offer courses in a predictable manner. We can tell you that these many courses will appear in the semester and then other set of courses will appear in the other semester. So in those ways, this is a very good development, so to speak. Duration of courses. We have again had a split of courses. Amongst the completed courses, eight-week courses seem to be the larger number. 350 courses were, I mean, almost half the courses were eight-week courses. But we find increasingly going forward. So for example, in the upcoming run, we have a very large fraction that is the 12-week course. So a 12-week course is like a full semester course. The typical complete course that many of us offer in our institutions is what a 12-week course is. Usually an eight-week and a four-week course is some kind of a specialized course, so where it doesn't appear to make sense to do a full 40-hour process. So I think for various reasons, this may be true. I think partly this is also because credit transfer is now coming up in a big way and often the students would like to take a complete course so that it reflects appropriately in their grade card. So if you look at exam attendance percentage, this is quite high. This is again percentage based on the number of people who registered for the examination. And we think this is good because, I mean, the fees is not very high, so I mean, people may register and not show up, but still this is very good relative to any other exam process that we can compare against. And past percentage is about 90% of those who register for the exams. Again, the way to look at it is the fact that the people who are registering for the exam have already done enough assignments and actually have some level of confidence that they can complete the course and only then they are registering for the examination. So they are not students who are in a semester program somewhere who are forced to take a particular course because it is part of the curriculum, et cetera. These are courses that they're taking out of their own interest and then they have completed a lot of assignments so they have gained the confidence so they consciously make the decision to take the exam or not to take the exam. And therefore, naturally, the past percentage is high. We keep on doing a lot of surveys from amongst our students or the community that we are reaching out to to understand why they're taking these courses because it is very, first of all, very useful and informative to collect this information. It also helps us tune our efforts better, maybe expand on some efforts and so on. So you can see right now 2% of the students are taking it for credit transfer. We expect that this 2% is going to keep growing because that's, I think, certainly an activity that a lot of people are taking up with a lot of interest. 30% are exploring new domains and 35% have taken it because college faculty encouraged them to take. So both of these are very good. In some fundamental sense, the MOOCs process that NPTEL is putting forward is primarily to give people the freedom to select what they wish to learn and not be constrained by what rank they got, what college they got, what department they ended up in, et cetera. And therefore, this exploring new domains is really capturing that audience. I mean, that fact that you can be in electrical engineering, you can do a management course, you can be in ocean engineering, you can do a computer science course, whatever it is that you wish to do, some economics course, whatever it is that you feel is required for a more complete education can be done here. We have a lot of other activities too. We have about eight percent of the students taking it for gate preparation and nine percent are taking it because it helps them with an existing job. So that's again a very important thing to take note of. It basically further conveys the fact that a lot of people, including working professionals, find these courses extremely useful to them. This is just gender statistics, gender-based statistics on how many are taking our courses. So you can see roughly it's a 60-40 split, which is pretty good considering, I mean, ideally it should be 50-50, but it's still better than what we tend to see in engineering education. Faculty participation is something that has significantly been increasing. So we have now, if you look at more recent numbers, we are seeing close to 20 percent of people who are taking our courses being faculty in various institutions. So in the Jan, April run, we had more than 16,000 faculty from various colleges take our courses. And we will show you something more about faculty development programs. So we find that this is a nice, it leads in very nicely to faculty development programs and institutions, I mean, or bodies like AICT are very supportive of this activity. So yeah, so this is the distribution of highest marks. This is to give you an idea of how students are performing in our courses, to give you a sense of how easy or difficult the students find our courses to be. So if you see, there are 385 courses where the highest mark obtained in that course was somewhere between 91 and 100. So that's the last column that you see there. So out of the 740 courses, so in roughly half the courses, you have the highest mark somewhere between 91 and 100. And then it tapers off. So then between 81 and 90, there are 205 courses and then 71 and 80, 102 and so on. We have a very small number of courses, if you can see here, about 10 courses, which were the total mark, the highest mark obtained in the course was anywhere between zero and 50 marks. So there was one course which had only between zero and 10 marks as the highest mark obtained in the course. So the reason we show this information is that it also shows our learning process as we have gone forward in this activity. So initially, I mean, at the end of the day, all the faculty who offer these courses have complete freedom in selecting what level of evaluation, what kind of evaluation they wish to do for the student community. But at the same time, we give them enough feedback so that they understand how to tune their question papers so that they are not only testing the student, they are also giving the student some feedback on what they have learned, what they have not learned. They're also getting themselves, giving themselves some room to distinguish between students who really excelled in the course against students who have got some competence level in the course. So to do that, we give them a lot of feedback on how to design their question papers, how to use their assignments which are spread across the entire semester to generate part of the question paper which has some semblance of that assignment activity so that students who have actually stayed through the course and answered all assignments have a reasonable chance of clearing the course because they've really learned something. I mean, they've learned something so there's no point setting a paper where the idea is to eliminate, it's not like an entrance exam kind of an exam. It's more to figure out what the student has learned. So that is how from having about 10 courses which were some of our earlier courses where the highest mark obtained in the course was 50 or less, we now have a situation where about 80, 90% of our courses, the highest marks are above that which is more like what you would expect in a course. Okay, so then you also have the number of toppers. The number of toppers that are there in any given course. So if you see here, if you see the right extreme, there are few courses, say for example, three courses where we have had more than 200 people topping the course. Okay, so that means toppers would be, let's say top 1%, 2% kind of thing is what we refer to as a topper here. And that's only three courses and the reason we have such a large number is because they are actually courses which are very mass appeal type courses. So there are courses which have several thousands of students, several tens of thousands of students enrolling for those courses. So in relation to the enrollment number which is very large, that 200 is not a large number. So that's the way we would look at this graph. So if you come down, whereas the vast majority of our courses, 481 courses are courses where there are between zero and 10 toppers. So that's I think, I think between this extreme and that extreme that gives you an idea of how this information is laid out. So there are 137 courses where there are between 11 and 20 toppers. So this sort of also gives you an idea of the number of students taking these courses because that's how these topper numbers also change. And you can see those are the courses, the courses that are listed up there, introduction to programming in C, soft skills, introduction to internet of things. These are the kinds of courses which have mass appeal. Large number of students take these courses and then correspondingly you have large number of toppers as well. We would, I think we've shared a lot of data here. We would like to take a few moments to acknowledge a lot of people who have been extremely supportive of this effort. This is a complex effort in, it involves a large community of people from diverse backgrounds who participate in it. First of all, we would like to thank MHRD for the funding of this program. They have been supportive of this program for now, almost 15 years that we have had this program at various forms from the original NPTEL program to this current online certification program. Ever since it was started, Professor Anand, Professor Mangal Sundar had put in a lot of effort to get it started. From that time onwards, we've had considerable support for this program. Of course, the results have been encouraging and so they have been very supportive, but through and through there has been so much support. The secretary for higher education, Sri Subramaniam, Dr. Sarvana Kumar, Ms. Malathi, they're all from MHRD. Sri Parameswaran who has been kind enough to join us here today. They've all really been supportive in so many things that we have discussed with them in these times. We would like to give them a big hand for this. Because it's a complex program and on the ground we see a lot of detail, we see a lot of aspects that we would like to address in various ways and it is very important for us to have people in these positions supporting us. Only then it's possible to deploy this in some kind of an organized way in the scale that we're talking about. We would also like to thank Google and YouTube. They have allowed us to put all our courses without any ads being put up there, large number of courses. You can see we have about 40,000 hours of video that has been put up. We have all these people to thank from Google, some of whom are here. Ashwini, Abhinav, Tej, Rishabh is here, and Divi and Sagar. A recent technologies has again been extremely supportive of us and has actually made a big difference to the student community out there. We charge basically because of the expenses associated with actually running the final examination. We are charging 1,100 rupees, which does not come across as a large sum of money in today's thinking of the costs involved, but still in tier two, tier three cities, it is a large sum of money and the people who have already paid a lot of fees for their college are finding it difficult. So this was again feedback that we received from the colleges. And we have had recent technologies, Dr. Nuzath and Mr. Budhasir, who have been very supportive using CSR funding and enabling 50%, actually about 500 rupees fee reduction for students. And you can see 73,000 students have received this. So that's a huge accomplishment, so to speak. Again, I would like to thank them and I also give them a hand for doing this for us. We would like to thank Tata Technologies, who are also now increasingly supporting us in the same kind of initiative with respect to fee waivers. We have other partners. We have TCS ION, I don't know if they are here or not. Ah, Ram is here from TCS ION. So they have been extremely supportive of us with respect to the exam delivery process. So all the exams that students have taken in these past four years or so, well, almost all the exams are all with the assistance of TCS ION. They also do various exams here, including gate exam. We work with them a lot because our requirements are very peculiar. Every course has some unique requirements and it requires a partner of their nature to who will work with us to try and satisfy those requirements. Of course, it also means that we're pushing boundaries, which means sometimes things go off smoothly. Sometimes things don't go off smoothly, but that's the idea of the partnership. We have MathWorks, which has given us online access to MATLAB and that has been very effectively used for a variety of courses. So students get access to a software package, which is very relevant to that course and it also gives them training in that area which they can then use in their workplace. We thank ICMR for co-certification of the course by NIE and we have a lot of partners who are helping us with the transcription and now increasingly into the translation activity. These are four companies that are helping us with the transcription and translation. Transcription primarily by Desi Crew, but the translation goes through all of these companies, Desi Crew, Bowen-Bahn, Mayflower and Crescendo. But yeah, so these are all people who make a difference in the sense that this transcript is what the students can download and then keep as course notes or we use it for creating our subtitles. So all these processes are done by this transcript, and we know for a fact that a lot of students find it extremely useful because many of them, especially for the new course, when we have released the course and we are fighting deadlines to get the transcript in also at the same time, often if you are behind by even a week, we get a lot of messages saying, we need the transcript kind of thing. So we know that it is very useful for the student community. We now request Professor Anand to come and address the gathering. Professor Anand needs not much of an introduction, former director of IIT Madras and he's been extremely instrumental in starting this program. I think the foresight almost 20 years ago to think that some program of this nature could have an impact on the nation, takes a lot of understanding of the educational process, and we have to be very grateful to him for having started this program. Thanks a lot. I think Bharti, Andrew and Prathap have given you breaking news. I have to give you only news that broke long ago, 20 years ago. I must say that when we started this program, there was a tremendous depth of teachers everywhere. That's true even now. But the original plan of the program in 1999, the proposal we made was to develop about 600 courses and then start a virtual university. That hasn't happened. I don't know when it'll happen. Recently, the secretary asked me if I would come and chair this and I said, no, you have to find people who are 50, 55, and I'm all of 72. There's no point in asking me to start anything now. But I just have to tell you a few things about this. When we first started, we started with both video and web courses. I think the web courses are sort of dropping off now. And I must say, Professor Mudli Manohar Joshi who was then the minister was very perceptive. He said, we want only video courses. You go ahead if you insist you can do some web courses but video courses are the ones that will be useful because especially for rural students, he said the face of the teacher is important. He also said he will create a channel called Eklavya. And he said because Eklavya was the first distance education student in pathology. And that was a rather perceptive statement. We started Eklavya but I remember in the initial stages it was started very soon and we didn't have enough courses to run through Eklavya. So we ran the same courses again and again. I remember going at lunchtime home and seeing Professor Srinivasan give us lecture on VLSI. Every day I saw those lectures. In fact, I learned a bit about VLSI because of sheer repetition. But I think the reception has been extremely good. A lot of faculty help from all IITs. Professor Mangalsunder of course has put in the maximum amount of work but there was Professor Krishalsen and there was also Professor A.K. Ray from IIT Kharagpur. A.K. Ray had done this in IIT Delhi before but not in the scale. But it really caught fire. A lot of people have helped and I must say that the universities and the colleges have been extremely helpful. We made it a point that this was a service that we would render to them and we said the customer has to be pleased.  And we called a lot of teachers and the amount of constructive criticism we got in those days. I'm really thankful to a lot of principals and teachers who gave us constructive criticism for the courses and that helped. And this is the only program in which it's done to a syllabus. You know we drew up a syllabus that was common from many universities. Put it together. And if you look at OCW which actually started at the same time. 99 was when Chuck West in MIT made this proposal. Only he didn't have to wait for money. We had to wait four years for money. In 2003 we got money and this is not a complaint. I think if I sat in that seat I'd behave the same way. So it's simply because they have to be sure that the program will work, that they're going to give us money and so on. So initially we received 26 words which they said was a lot of money. And then we received 94 crores in phase two. And now I won't even try to guess. But I think the money is much more but I think the major thing is the participation on both sides. And I'm very happy that the present team is carrying this forward so dynamically and the local chapters I think are a great help. The feedback that the local chapters have given I think has been very useful for the NPTEL team. I must only add, I want to quote from Louis, not the exact words, Louis is a great chemist and it is professed to his book.  And he said, but think back about the time when they were actually being constructed. He said you would have seen the scaffolding, you would have seen the workers working, the workers cursing, using words that are not parliamentary. Of course now in the parliament everything goes. But he said, then you realize that these monuments are the result of ordinary human effort given a direction and purpose. I think in a sense the direct, once the direction purpose was set, a lot of people participated and contributed to it. So you can't undermine anybody's contribution. For example, YouTube, when they first offered us, there was a strong objection saying YouTube has a lot of objectionable material. I said that material exists anyway, so let's try adding this orbit. And then it turned out the first year, the maximum hits were on the NPTEL courses in YouTube. In fact, YouTube gave us that feedback. They've been of course very nice because they took away advertisements and made it available. Anyway, I just want to congratulate the present team. I want to congratulate all of you for the participation. I want to thank Dr. Darswamy for coming here because Vice Chancellor coming here immediately gives an impetus to the whole program. And I'm very grateful to him that he's been able to come here and spare his time. And I'm hoping that this will go forward and we will have a virtual university soon. And the virtual university, we had a workshop in 1999 in which I want to remind TCS and other people four of the IT companies promised to do the administration of the virtual university because they are much better at it than we are. And then we can confine ourselves to teaching the courses, setting the exams and so on, and prescribing what should go into giving a degree. And I think that we are all right at. And hopefully it'll be a cooperative program. And incidentally, the IT secretary at that time came here in 1999 and he promised non-interference. He promised benign neglect, which is what we want from the government really. We want money and then benign neglect because, because eventually if they go on interfering with us, you have problems in all the universities. That's why the state universities are in such a bad shape. They're all improving, but if the interference decreases, then they will take off again. So I'm hoping it'll happen. I'm hoping that we as a country will soon have a very large contribution to make in the education scene as well. Because from NPTEL it's clear that many of our teachers are very good. In fact, some of the later emails that come are really flattering. They say one person said about one of the teachers, what you taught in four lectures, my professor has been struggling to teach for 15 lectures. In 15 lectures, this is from Chicago. And from MIT, somebody, and Stanford, somebody said the quantum mechanics lectures are the best we've ever had. And I don't know how you do it so systematically. So we are, we've had a tradition of teaching and I think we are reasonably good teachers. We can take pride in it. What we would like, I hope I'm speaking for, on behalf of the present team, what we would like is more teachers from other colleges giving courses. I mean, there's some discipline involved and a lot of effort involved, but I think if they put it in, then it'll be a complete cooperative effort. We already have courses, but not enough. Like to see more. So let me wish you all the very best. I have another board meeting to go to. So I'll have to excuse myself and I want to just congratulate the present team and congratulate all of you coming here and thank Professor Dureshwamy for being here. Thank you very much. Thank you, Professor Anand. The next address will be by our Chief Professor of the day, Dr. P. Dureshwamy, Vice Chancellor of Medras University. Professor Dureshwamy is an alumnus of the prestigious Varsity and former head of econometrics department of University of Medras. He's a member of the UGC Pay Review Committee for colleges and university and NAC appeals committee too. After completing his PhD in 1989, Professor Dureshwamy obtained another doctorate in economic science from the University of Paris in 2007. He was Sir Sarvabali Radhakrishna National Fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and was affiliated to the Medras Institute of Development Studies. His collaborative research with the World Bank provided key inputs for major program initiatives such as the district primary education program and he has also been the director of planning and development dean, academic and chairperson of the School of Economics. During his academic career spanning 28 years, Dr. Dureshwamy has been a visiting professor of the University of Paris and a visiting fellow of Yale University. He has also received several honors and awards apart from completing several research projects sponsored by UGC DRDO, UNDP and Rockefeller Foundation. He has published more than 70 research articles and reputed national and international journals with high impact factors and his recent works on the grounds of economics of higher education in India. His other specializations include macroeconomics, political choice and voting behavior. Sir, I request you to kindly come on stage and deliver the chief miscellaneous. Yeah, very good morning to one and all present here. I am indeed very happy to be here to felicitate and also interact with the coordinators of the NPTL local chapters. In fact, when Prisparthi wrote to me asking whether I can come and felicitate the local chapters, I immediately agreed. The main reason is that we are going in a big way, promote online courses and also adopt this NPTL same courses. So I thought that this will be this interaction and this meeting will be very useful for the university of Madras. That's the main reason that I have come here. So I'm very happy that Mr. Prisparthi, Prisparthi Sankaraj and Prudhav Hari has made an excellent presentation and put forth the main blog numbers. I'm going to talk about what is happening on the other side of the campus, like in the universities in Tamil Nadu and other parts of the country. I'm also very much thankful to Distinguished Administrator, Prof. Anand for giving the background of this NPTL program. Prof. Mangal Sundar has been in our committees. We have been running an online program for Pan-Aprigand countries. So what I dedicate. So Prof. Mangal Sundar has been helping us to design the program and also run the program. Then now that's... So when I took over as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Madras, I got an email from I think Professor Andrew saying that they asked me an appointment to meet me. Then they immediately said that we'll meet the very next day. Then the NPTL meet me very next day, Barthi and Pradha. And then they just showed a few slides. I told them that this is what I'm looking for. That what I want is that you have to give an orientation for our college principals first. And also our teachers. Then immediately they agreed. Then we organized a workshop in which they have a media presentation. There are a lot of... There are a lot of people who came forward to know more about this and also participate in the SWIM and NPTL programs. So the UGCS come out with the MOOCs regulation 2016. So as per this UGC regulation, the universities can change the regulation to include credits as part of the... Credits earned through SWIM and NPTL courses as part of the degree programs. So Madras University is the first university in Tamil Nadu to modify its academic course regulations. And now the students of Madras University, not only in the university departments in the affiliated colleges as well as in the affiliated autonomous, non-autonomous colleges as well as our distance education program can choose 20% of the credits from the SWIM and NPTL platform. And the credits they earn will be transferred and included part of the degree. Then we also made other provisions that they can do more courses than they required for awarding the degree. So this will give an opportunity for the students of the Madras University, University and as well as the college students to do more than the minimum required of 90 credits for PG and 140 credits for UG. And we will take the best of courses and the CGP is calculated based on the best performance in the courses, whether it may be from the online course or from the regular courses. So all the regular courses will be continued. And along with that, the students can choose the online courses. Then there are a couple of other developments. The now UGC has come out with a regulation for offering online degree programs. So Madras University is one of the few universities in the country which is eligible to offer online degree programs. And we have already formulated our regulations for online degree programs and it was approved by our Senate. So we are waiting for the UGC's approval to run this program. Perhaps in another one month or six weeks the UGC will announce and we will apply and once they get the UGC approval, we will also run online degree programs. So in this online degree programs also, the courses offered through Sam and NPTEL program can be part of our program. That is, this NPTEL program, to tell you that anybody can take this course and there is no copyright, you can download. And many of our faculty members are also downloading and using as part of our lectures. It may not be that you have to use the whole course material. You can take even the particular chapter and blend with your own lectures and use it. So similarly for our online programs also we are going to allow the students to credit whatever credit they earn through this platform. We'll form part of the requirement for their degree. So you have seen the numbers shown by Mr. Andrew and Mr. Pradap. This is just nothing that only nine percent are taking the exams. And about two percent, only two percent are taking for the credits. The story, the scenario is going to completely change even starting from this year. So from this academic year, 2018, 19, then we have changed the regulation and other things. The students are going to credit, register for these courses in a big way. Maybe starting, maybe one or two steps from now. So this, the enrollment in these courses are going to be an exponential growth because these are the best courses. It starts with the best faculty. This is to overcome the faculty shortage in the universities and colleges. Even you know that the nearly 70 percent of the colleges in this country are run by the private, the private risk on self-financing mode. So we know that how the quality of the faculty in self-financing colleges. So the only way to overcome the faculty shortage as well as the faculty quality improvement and overall improving the all our programs, not only in engineering and other subjects, professional subjects, but also in art, science, commerce and other courses, then this is the only way to do it that NPTEL and SOEM platform with courses being offered. So many of the faculty members in the Metas University also are willing to be part of this offering this courses. Then one more information which I would like to share with you is that UGCS recognizes the University of Metas, one of the national resource center for training program for teachers. And UGCS identified about 10 centers in India for various subjects. So for Metas University, the UGCS allotted this politics and international studies. So Prasarayanthu is in the Academic Council and Advisory Committee. So we need technical input from NPTEL team because it's basically an art, science university. I'm sure that we have a close association with IIT over the last two, three decades for running some of our programs and also strengthening our computing skills, computers. So every time we start a new initiative, then we call experts from IIT first, then non-university. So in this way we are planning to go in a massive way, promote the online courses as well as our distance education programs with video lectures and other materials from online. The other information which I would like to share with you is that Metas University has made a common syllabus for the regular teaching in the affiliated colleges as well as our distance programs. The advantage is one can move from one to the other, from the regular program to the distance education if there is some family disruption or some other reason. And similarly, one can move the other way also from the distance education to regular as a lateral entry. Then the other advantage is that in many of the self-financing colleges, the courses are not taught well. So our video lectures will help these students to improve their knowledge in the subject and also improve their performance in the exams. So these are some of the things we have proposed and this NPTEL and so on. The courses are an integral part of this, all our initiatives. So thank you very much for inviting me and giving me an opportunity to share some of the things which are what is happening in the universities. So even the growth is going to be many fold and it may be even very difficult to manage this large number of students enrolling in these courses. I'm sure that the ITs can manage this and other leading universities like Amaras University will be part of this kind of programs. Thank you so much. So thank you, sir, for giving those updates about Amaras University. In this connection, I would like to say he's one of the very few VCs that we got an instant response from. We wrote a mail to him. By that night, we had a reply. It was not through a secretary, it was not through a director's office, somebody communicated directly, he was replying to us and we were like, oh, wow. You know, that was the level of connect we had. Within a day, we got an appointment and as he said, he asked us to present in a group of principles of the local arts and science colleges that come. Affiliated to Amaras University. The interaction was so positive and so enthusiastic, you know? I mean, we totally didn't expect it. So many questions. They were just bombarding us with, you know, what about this? What about that? We didn't expect that kind of reaction and it was very encouraging to see the principles taking so much of an interest in, you know, knowing about the online courses, about seeing how to adopt it and so on. So we are very thankful to him for having called us and invited us over to that program. After this, we'll follow up with felicitating the top 10 local chapters because Professor Durisamy has some other appointment after 11 and he has to leave. So I would request the top 10 local chapters whoever is available here to be kindly ready so that we can call you on stage and felicitate you. To give Professor Durisamy just a brief overview, we'll talk about it actually in much greater detail later on. We've started rating our local chapters based on the performance in the exams for every semester. So we take cognizance of how many candidates from every college actually participated, wrote exams in the courses, how well they did. We have a formula for it, which all of you are aware of which we shall discuss later. And based on that, we rank our local chapters. So we have currently a top 100 followed by some active local chapters. So this time based on the ranking that we have put out, we'd like to invite the Dean Academic as well as the SPOC, Professor Arul Kumar of Madhanapali Institute of Technology and Science to kindly come on stage. They have been rated as a AAA local chapter. So they have been consistently coming, I think in the AAA category last three times, they were on number three, number four and so on. But this time they are on number one. So congratulations to them. Madhanapali is a small town, I think two hours from Tirupati. So they have been constantly striving, one of the early adopters of the certification for credit transfer. They had implemented it and they have a lot of students actually going through programs for credit transfer. They have, in fact, I think a third year, second year is all of them doing it. So that is there. Okay, some stats about them. Their participation in the exams was about 2004, 41. Those are completed, 1,843. Elite category was 227, one gold, 40 toppers. So this is Madhanapali Institute. I would like to just call out each of the names though they're not here. The second was Institute of Engineering and Management Kolkata, West Bengal. And they had about 655 candidates present. But as you can see, the number of toppers and the gold are much higher here. We have with us Professor Shanta Selva Kumari. Again, a consistent in the AAA category. They are from Mepkosh Lank Engineering College, Shivagasi Tamil Nadu. They had 1,417 students present, successfully completed 759. Gold nine toppers, 28. So again, madam has been with us for the last four years. I think from the first ever exam that we ran, a constant supporter who has been in touch with us. Thank you ma'am. The next we would like to call upon YMCA, University of Science and Technology, Faridabad Haryana. I guess we'll meet them in the IIT Kanpur workshop. Valchand Institute of Technology, which will be the Bombay workshop that we'll get to meet them. So they were the top college last time. Then SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Kanchipuram Tamil Nadu. I think the SPOC has not come today, but they are also here. Then we'd like to call upon Professor Rajesh and the principal and Professor Amirathna Prasad to receive the award on behalf of Velagapudi Ramakrishna Siddhartha Engineering College, Vijay Varda. They had 963 candidates present, 345 in the elite category, five gold and 17 toppers. The next is Lovely Professional University, Pagwara, Punjab. I guess they'll participate in the Kanpur workshop. We'd like to call upon Laki Reddy, Bali Reddy College of Engineering. The SPOC for that is Professor Pawanshant. This is again from Mylavaram, Andhra Pradesh. The number of present is 877 candidates, 200 elite, five gold, 18 toppers. We'd like to call upon Professor Deepa of Ramakrishna Engineering College, Coimbatore. They've had 699 candidates present, 278 successful, 335 elite, 15 gold, 19 toppers. So they also are in the triple A category of local chapters. So these are the 10 colleges that have been rated triple A for this particular semester, January to April 2018. We will carry on with the other categories after our next session. I would like to now request, we'd like to thank Professor Durusami for his participation, for taking time off to be here, for sharing some inputs on Madras University. And we hope the relationship with Madras University can be continued in a big way. So thank you, sir. A small gesture from our side. Thank you for coming. And if you're wondering who the other person on the stage is who we've not introduced so far, that is Professor Niket Kaisare. He is also an additional coordinator of NPTEL now, because we are expanding, we have to expand our side of the committee also. So he is also getting added as an NPTEL coordinator of IIT Madras from this run on. So Professor Durusami, I'd just like to say here, we have, how many arts and science colleges, representatives do we have here? So we have quite a few of them actually here. Maybe not all are affiliated to Madras University, but they are. The other request that they keep coming up with is the courses that we offer from NPTEL side is a little high for them on the UG students and all that which comes. So we're telling them, send us the syllabus, we look into it, we'll see how to tailor it. So some help, we'd really appreciate from, that we can work with faculty and get it tailored more to those colleges also so that they can also participate better in our courses. So Madras University affiliated colleges. So anyway, since we are ahead of schedule, probably we can get through to the next part before we break for a tea. Pratap, you wanna do this? So we would like to share some more information about local chapters. This is a program primarily for the local chapters. So you can see the idea of it has been always to connect the NPTEL office and the students of the college in a sort of seamless way, in a manner that really enables the benefit for the students. So you can see we have a very large number of local chapters. It's actually crossed 1,800 now. Spread across various states. You can see 65 in Gujarat. We have Maharashtra with 323. Tamil Nadu with 306. So those are pretty large numbers. Uttar Pradesh has 342. So those are three states which have extremely large numbers of local chapters. So if you see as a result of this local chapter formation, one of the things that we've really seen happen over the few exam runs that we have done is that we have sort of stabilized that nearly 70 to 75% participation in the exam registration as something that is coming from the local chapters. So that shows how strongly the local chapters participate in this process and how important they are for this NPTEL educational community kind of activity that we do. And this is really stabilized. You can see the numbers initially fluctuating, but we are now sitting around 75%. You can see from this map that it's really spread across various states. We just have a few states where we have not really yet made much of an impact. But many of the other states, we have a lot of impact. The percentage is the percentage of exam registrations that have come from those respective local chapters. And the next number that you see there in the lower line is the number of workshops that we have conducted there. And the last number you see is the number of local chapters. Of course, generally as we conduct more workshops, we end up seeing a lot more of the local chapters. But you can see that we have large numbers in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. West Bengal has increased exam registration in the last three semesters. We believe it was significantly because of this local chapter activity. Yes, thanks to Mr. Das who is here. He has actually worked very hard in that area. And this is one thing that we should really appreciate here. The aspect that we see as an NPTEL activity is that we would like it to be uniformly beneficial to people all over the country. Of course, local offices of NPTEL make a huge difference in enabling this to happen. Otherwise, it's just a few of us running all around the country. And so we get limited by logistics. And Mr. Das has made a huge difference in the Western part of India, sorry, Eastern part of India. The, you can see also that we don't have, I mean, we're trying to still understand what's happening with respect to local chapters and how it makes an impact. So for example, in Maharashtra, we have a very large number of local chapters, but somehow the exam registration has been low. So that's something that we are still working on. So sometimes people sign up, but they don't necessarily do a lot. So that is why we are particularly grateful to the community that is here today because you're all representatives of local chapters who are also doing a lot in your college to enable this to be very successful. So we take this opportunity to thank you for really putting in this effort on behalf of NPTEL. In terms of exams, again, exam activity has a, we have really grown in all the activities that we have done since we started out. And every time we have seriously looked at what is relevant in the Indian context and a proctored exam seems to be an extremely important aspect of being relevant in the Indian context. So you can see that in April, 2018, we had 114 centers for those exams across India. And of course, TCS ION is the one that was setting up most of these exam centers. For each of these exam centers, we have a representative from NPTEL office who is present there physically one day before the exam and on the exam day to ensure that all arrangements are run correctly. We try to mimic all operations from exams such as GATE and JEE, which have been established over many years. So every aspect that they have a fine tune to get the exam process right is something that we are also adopting. We also understand the importance that we are trying to reach out to the public across the country. So that is our primary purpose. So numbers are in a sense secondary. The numbers will come. We are not really worried about the numbers. We do our job, the numbers will come. So we make a lot of effort to ensure that we reach out to places which are remote. In fact, remote places are even more important to us because in bigger cities and better equipped towns, people will somehow find a way. I mean, if you set up something reasonable, they will find a way to reach that place. We don't have to really get worked up about the exact detail of the arrangement. But there are many other places, Srinagar, Dumka, a lot of other places, Shillong, Deemapur. So many other places where maybe the infrastructure is not that good and therefore it may not be as easy or comfortable to set up an examination process there. And of course, TCS ION is, I mean, running it on a commercial basis. So they may have some restrictions on their ability to run it in some of these little bit remote places where they may not be seeing regular numbers for various exams in those areas. But for us, these are important places. So we make effort to ensure that the students here are not deprived. So we run what we call offline exams which are non-TCS based exams at these centers so that these students are not in any way impacted due to the lack of infrastructure there. So they write the same exams other students in other centers are writing except they do it in an offline mode and then we handle it post the examination. So some more changes that have happened in the recent past is that now every course that we have on NPTEL is a SWIME course. So if this is a question that probably comes up to you and maybe even many of you might have as to what is SWIME, what is NPTEL and so on. So SWIME is a larger umbrella activity also funded by primary and MHRD activity. Mainly to get digital education to the public in a larger scale. In this context, NPTEL has been the most experienced participant of SWIME. We are an integral part of SWIME and we are the most experienced participant of SWIME and therefore many of the processes that you see in SWIME sort of initiated from where, from with respect to what NPTEL was carrying out. And we are very proud and happy that we are in the part of SWIME and so every NPTEL course is a SWIME course. So if you see a notification that says that a SWIME course can be used for a following purpose. Say maybe for credit transfer. SWIME courses can be used for credit transfer. Every NPTEL course is a SWIME course. So if you take an NPTEL course, you are taking a SWIME course. The student is taking a SWIME course. So our certificates now carry the SWIME logo. All the people who got certificates in this nearly 80,000 students who got certificates this recent past examination have all received SWIME certificates. We also at the back of this certificate we have a QR code which has been on since July 2017. And so if you just have a QR code reader on your mobile phone even, you can scan that QR code and it will show you the e-certificate on our site. So that's the security feature that we have there. And so that's also something that we have put on our certificate. So something on ratings and recognition process that we have done. So this is something that we've, I mean, we've maintained over a period of time. So this is just to reiterate what we are doing. So we have tried to balance the online learning process, the self-directed online learning process with the proctored final exam process. So we have 25% weightage for the assignment score. So this is something that you're all familiar with and 75% weightage for the proctored in-person final examination. And we have also, even for the assignments, we are having, we are doing best three out of four, best six out of eight or best eight out of 12. Primarily to give the students some flexibility. So they have some off one week. They're not up to some activity and they're busy with some other activity. They're unable to attend to this. They don't terribly lose out on it. And as I mentioned earlier, we have also worked with our faculty to create an exam process that better captures the learning that the students have done during through the assignments. And therefore somebody who has actually done eight out of 12 assignments and ideally in fact, 12 out of 12 assignments has a very good chance of getting a pretty good certificate from in-petal. So our existing process which we have been maintaining is that less than 40% we don't give a certificate. So we do not give any participation certificate so to speak. 40 to 59% gets a successfully completed certificate which over 60 and less than 90 is an elite certificate. And greater than 90 they get an elite plus a gold medal tag. So some of the things that we are looking at is going forward which we have not made any decisions on and we would be happy to receive feedback from you. We are thinking of whether it makes sense to increase the cut off for the passing, for a student to be declared as passed. So maybe from instead of 40 if it makes sense to do with 50. We do a lot of studies on the statistics that we have obtained. I mean so this is not arbitrarily being considered. We're really looking at all these because we now have several lakh students who have actually completed the course got a certificate from us. So pretty elaborate data is available to us from which we can, which we can even share with on a general basis. But through which we are making some judgment on what is the possibilities that we have with respect to fine tuning this even further. But for now this is the process. So we will keep you posted in case there is any change, if there is any change. So we have the, we have a logic for toppers. So when we declare somebody as a topper we have some process for this thing. So if there's some certain number of people who have been certified. And if for whatever reason it's a very specialized course there are only 10 people who got the certificate then only the person really ranked number one gets declared as the topper. And if the number is between 10 and 50 then top two people in that course, first rank and second rank get declared as toppers. Between 50 and 100 the top five in the course get declared as toppers. And if it's greater than 100 then we have we have actually different markings on the certificates. We have a top 1%, a top 2% and a top 5% kind of marking. But we also say that all toppers have to get at least 60 marks. So they have to at least have an elite certificate to even be classified as a topper. So if for some magical reason there's a course where nobody gets over 60 then nobody is being declared as a topper so to speak.  So this is something that we do for our toppers. So this shows for a cloud computing course all the toppers there. We always of course get their permission to put this up because this is going to be publicly visible. This top 1% of certified candidates. You can see that the spread that you see here consists of students, it consists of faculty and it consists of industry people. So I think in terms of the reach of education and the sort of a leveling process that NPTEL has enabled, this is a great example of how that has been accomplished. So we'll probably pause for a break here. So it's 11 o'clock. Two requests to the SPOC's. So one is that I already announced we have a feedback form for you all to fill up. This is a survey that we periodically conduct. We had done it about a year back but a lot of policies might have changed within your institute. The way you've adopted the course is the impact of the certificates on the candidates have taken it might have changed. We want to collect some feedback from you all regarding all these data points. It's just a plain Google form. You can go to NPTEL.ac.in-slash-local-chapter and fill up the form for us. So in the next 15-minute break, if I'll finish your coffee snacks, you have five minutes time, request you to do the survey for us. The other one is also we are collecting video feedback. So we do collect video feedback after the exams outside the centers, but that is anybody. But we want specific feedback from the SPOC's to say how is NPTEL being received within your college? What is the problem points that you'll face? Any recommendations you'll have? Suggestions you have? Again, the same thing on video, like the form might say that yes, so many people got internships. Do you have any stories to share with us? Do you have any candid information to share with us? I'll take two minutes here because we've had a lot of stats I'll share to stories here. So there were two things which we had shared with the SPOC's, but I'm not too sure if you saw the video. So one nice thing about the impact we keep getting is, oh, yes, I got an internship. I got a job. I got this. So many people got qualified and we do get those emails. But there was one specific feedback we had gone to Gandhinagar recently for a workshop and the SPOC of a college there shared something which we thought really, I mean, touched us that day when he said it on stage. So I said, you have to make a video and send it to us because we want to showcase this. So it was only about three specific students inside their college and it was about a person who was kind of, I would say soft skill challenge, if you can say that, or communication challenge. I don't know the term to use for that. So the SPOC was saying that person would not look at anybody in the face in the college. He's in an engineering industry. He would not look at anybody's face and talk to the person. You even ask him for his father's name. He will not say it. He will just be looking somewhere. He will look down. He will not even look at you. He was failing in his college and so on. So at one point, this NPTEL talk came up. He said, he told that student, why don't you try this? And we are going home for summer and look it. The student came back after six months. He comes with two certifications and says, I did very well. And then he said, I want to go in for more. He did one more semester and he came back and he said, he sat across me from the table and for 15 minutes and talked with me. That was a big achievement because this was a boy none of us could reach out to. So the confidence of the courses, which brought him up to say, I could score well. I have done courses well. That was something. There was another girl he was saying who was consistently failing. She had some eight years of this and she was not being able to cope again and engineering student there. And he recommended, why don't you do NPTEL courses? So she was like, in this college itself, I'm not able to do it. How will I do it? He said, just try. It doesn't hurt you to do it. But then she came back after a semester and said, I got some 65% or something. Then he said, why 65? How many hours did you spend per day? And she said, I spent like three hours per week or something. He said, maybe put in five hours and you will get a gold. And he said, the girl went back. He didn't see her for a few months. She comes back the next run. Sir, I got a gold certificate. She is a person who has failed in some eight subjects, has a year. So you're saying, how NPTEL helped this? A professor who delivers a lecture in class. You cannot do a rewind and a pause and replay, right? You can't tell him to teach you five times. In an NPTEL video, you can do that. We have notes, we have assignments. You can take the help. People can watch it at their own pace. Even for the boy who could not communicate, there was nobody, there was not a teacher in the class who would say, hey, get up and answer my question because he was not comfortable with that. In an NPTEL video, I don't have to answer anybody. I'm not being questioned about anything. You just do the course at your own pace and in your own style. So this was again a girl who got a confidence and now she's so much better place. You were saying, yes, I can do anything. From IIT, I've gotten this. I do have, you know, I can do it. I just have to probably change my style of learning. And the third one he was saying, which was an eye opener, which I think many SPOCs and we keep telling the students, we meet is many students say, sir, we don't have the time to do these courses. We already have so much load and I can't do it. There is a student from that college who has done eight exams with us and wants to do more. So this SPOC was shocked and he said, how are you managing it? Every time I talk to students, they say, I'm so busy. I don't have time. I have this. He was saying, he said, this was a student's input.  Be it a mobile, be it a tablet, be it a computer, browsing, social media, whatever be it. So he said, I cut it down. I said, one hour will be for that three hours I'm going to put in for NPTEL. And he says, it's so easy. You don't require anything more than that. That's all you need to do. So the SPOC says nowadays I go and tell people saying that, you know, just cut down your time that you're spending on other sites. Come to NPTEL study. You can easily do your courses. So some feedback like this, if you'll have any stories within your college, there's a college that we went within Kerala, one interior rural from the main road. I think we went some two hours inside. It was like almost in a village setting. We were doing a workshop there and there for the last 20 years, they've not had internships for students in like, I think, third year or even the seventh semester they were seeing. And for the first time that time when we went, she said, a girl had gotten an internship after second year at Ernst and Young, which was because she had done two courses from us on some financial management and another management thing. She had showcased it, she talked about it and she got an internship. They were so proud about it that Ernst and Young, their college, one student had gotten, now she's becoming the inspiration for the next students to come that this is possible if you do it. Another thing that we had from Balchand, we had gone to Balchand Institute in Solapur for a workshop again. There what happened is we were going for tea and there were 20 students sitting up, well dressed and all. So we said, oh, what's happening? They said, no, recruitment is happening. There's some company that has come in from Hyderabad and they are interviewing all of them. So we just walked by and within an hour, as we were doing the workshop, the SPOC came and announced saying that most of them had gotten jobs with the company. And we said, so we were like, okay, why is he even announcing it here in this forum and the workshop is going on? Then he says, when they went into the interview, they asked him, it seems, do you have these, do you know Java, do you know this? They said, no, we have not learned it in the college. Then they said, do you know Python? Yes, I've done it from NPTEL, show a certificate. Do you know something else? Yes, we've done it, show a certificate. So he said, what worked there, which our college had not done as courses for them was the NPTEL certification that they were showing to him, they were questioned on it and they got jobs that day. This is a live example, we actually saw there, we were there at the workshop doing it, one hour before we saw candidates, one hour later we get news that they're all getting letters of recruitment. So some things like this, which makes us really happy and worth our while when we get, so many things that don't work for us, we get all calls that keep shouting at us, scolding us, you guys are not doing well, we also mess up a lot, I know that. But when all these things don't work for us, the things that keep us going is some feedback like this, the emails that we see, some things that change in somebody's life that has actually worked because of these courses. So if you all could share any stories from inside your college for us that we could showcase and use somewhere, that would be really great. We have two set of studio teams waiting outside, so you all could share feedback. Lunchtime also will be there, post lunch also will be there, but if you'll have time you can do that and please fill up the survey for us. So I'll just wait for Pratap and Andrew to come, okay Andrew's here. So Andrew can you come on stage please. So I'd like to call Ram Kumar onto the stage. So he is with TCSI on one of our primary contacts for conducting the exam. Ms. Cynthia is not here with us today, otherwise Ms. Cynthia, Ram Kumar and our current managers are with. So they three help us with coordination of activities for the entire exam run. So Ram always does this vanishing act when we say that colleges can interact with him and give him feedback and inputs on how to partner, but he says he has to leave now. So if any of the colleges want to become a TCS center in places that is not, they want to partner with them to be able to conduct exams within your college, we can connect you to them. Beyond that our interaction stops so beyond that it is up to TCSI on to certify the college and have agreements with them and however they work the modalities is between the college management one minute, between the college management and TCSI on. So thanks Ram for four years of support. We hope that this will really continue. And the first exam in July, 2014, we had done it in 10 cities. Today we are doing it in about 100 cities with about 120 centers. All thanks to them that we are also scaling up. Say everyone here. You want to? Good morning to all of you. It's a very proud moment. Always, it's a working relationship with NPTEL is very different because we do a lot of things which actually very, very different in terms of our regular process that TCSI on follows for any examination. So in fact we have grown a lot, learned a lot together and thanks to Professor Andrew, Professor Pratap and Bhakti because a lot of inputs used to come and which in fact we have evolved also from where we used to be and from where we are today. So that's a very good experiences and it's a journey of customer and a business partner is a very good experience. We have it with NPTEL. So and this is, I think I'm meeting all of you for I think third or fourth time. Every year they conduct a program like this as I make sure that at least I make my presence for a few minutes though there could be some other activities which are involved. So today also there are a few other engagements which are already planned but still I had made sure that I should be present for to meet all of you if possible to say hi to all of you. So a quick note on the process which Professor wanted us to highlight is any institute wants to participate or want to become an examination center for TCS that is possible or you need to have sufficient infrastructure is when we say infrastructure the computer labs with good power backup, UPS, Genset, all this and a very good network and all LAN connectivity and stuff. This is a very fundamental requirement where a system requirements are different which we can one to one we can connect if they are interested they can connect with us. They can write to us by mail. They can reach out to us and our local teams this is more of south right this is the entire crowd will be more of south. So we have our presence our TCS ion team members are available across almost in all the districts. So I'm not even talking about Tamil Nadu across all states. So you can write to us we'll connect with the right set of people to come to your institution. They will make relevant technical check and say or they can even suggest what all changes that is required. If it is readily kind of consumable they may also consume it. As well as there is other component which is the memorandum which they entirely sign up with the institutions which the management of the college has to line up with TCS and mutually agree upon certain terms and conditions. So this is a set of process that we can follow but yeah we already many of this could be exam centers for us if I understand Madanapalli we have conducted exam Nebco we have conducted exam National Indian College we have conducted exam many colleges in this crowd itself we have conducted exam any other college and if they are very keen or university is very keen to work with TCS please don't hesitate to write to us connect with us we will tell what all the set of things that we need to go together we have to do it together we can do and then you know you can also become a proud TCS partner for conducting an exam it's not only for NPTEL you can conduct exam we conduct exam 365 days in fact I'm completely engaged today because some big exam is happening outside so mind is completely occupied on that so there are you know so you can always work with us very closely and you can become our partner as well on this so my email ID, phone numbers may be there with you or you can write to NPTEL office and take my details you can connect with me offline we can stay connected and take the relationship forward so thanks so much professor Andrew Prasaf and Bharti for acknowledging every year they don't forget whether we do something whatever we do no they make sure that they acknowledge us and you know very kind gesture thank you so much thanks thanks to all bye we'd like to call upon Mr. Suresh who works in the office of alimni affairs he in fact heads the whole alimni cell at IIT Madras it is through their office that the entire CSR money gets routed so the arisen funding and any other help they in fact help us connect with a lot of alimni who are interested in you know partnering with us possibly and so on so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank him for all the passing of papers giving us connects and hope that more connects come so that you know the fee waiver can be up on our side in terms of contribution thank you sir thank you for coming today we already acknowledged transcription partners I see Mr. Maniwanan here of Desi crew solutions I would like you to please come on stage so they he's heads the company Desi crew solutions private limited we have been working with them since 2010 it's been eight years that we've been working with them they were one of the first to even start we didn't have any processes of how to transcribe they had to set up their cells so they provide a lot of employment to people in tie to tie three cities also taking this project across and so on so thank you for being a constant partner and support for us over the last eight years and if you all see transcripts coming for new courses week after week in this semester it is also thanks to their efforts because Monday nowadays we are giving them videos telling us telling them give us transcripts back on Thursday we are trying to host it on Friday so that's what that's the timeline that they are also working we are making them run as we run so thanks sir thanks for being here today we have other distinguished guests but I'll wait for some time before we again get on to introductions we'll head on to probably the local chapter and ratings how many SPOCs here are totally new to the process that first time you're coming for an SPOC workshop okay then it gives me some ground for going through these slides I'd like to run through this I am going to be talking fast because yes the time also keeps you know clocking away never stops and we keep being rushed so I'll just go through these slides the rating of local chapters as you all know is based on the participation and performance of candidates from your college in the NPTEL exams so here we are not rating the college per se we are rating the performance of the NPTEL local chapter in your college so and in this we include the candidate can be anybody it can be a student, it can be a faculty member it can be any of the staff member who's taken the exam whoever it may be we don't distinguish on the you know role of the person in the college it could be anybody and we take those performance numbers into account and here again as you can see we have devised a formula that we have been using for the last two years which we will be revisiting and show you some things that we are in the works we have not yet finalized though so currently it is the number present for the exams is being capped at 10 points 0.1 for every person present which means beyond 100 there is no additional points you are going to get for people being present to the exam then it's one point for every person who successfully completes the exam that is passes the exam getting a score above 40 to 59 60 to 89 if you are an elite certificate holder that candidate gets an equivalent points of 2 when we calculate in the rating formula 10 points for a gold medalist and 20 for a topper so this is what we have done and last two years again this semester too we have had the top 10 local chapters to be getting a rating of triple A then 11 to 50 is double A and 51 to 100 this time we have a rating of A being given to that particular local chapter so this rating will change every semester as you see we have published even the ratings of the last four semesters on the website if you want to go back and look on how it has changed that is also available the next change rating will be after this will be for the courses that happened between July to November 2018 for the top 100 local chapters these are the kind of plaques that we are actually giving away that you can see lined up here and the 10 that we first gave away so this is for the college that we are giving it so this is the college name, the city state this is the format that we have done we keep changing the certificate so that it doesn't become boring bland every semester that we run same type you have five so we try to do some designing so that's for a triple A this is for a double A and this is for a rating of A apart from this do we stop there do we say only these 100 did something with us the others didn't do anything with us we absolutely don't want to get there so we know that a lot of SPOCs are working behind the scenes really trying to get the initiative pushed and kind of getting students to participate in the courses and write exams so what we have is another category called active local chapter so here we are saying that if you have at least 25 candidates present for an exam from your college or if any of your students you don't have the 25 but you have at least a top or a gold medalist from your college we would say it is because of the efforts of the SPOC we want to recognize the SPOC there so in that sense we have an active local chapter and this time for Jan semester we have 452 active local chapters the 100 rated local chapters automatically by default are active so yes we do tag them but it's already understood apart from that 452 we are giving certificates of appreciation with the SPOC alone the college does not get anything in this sense but the SPOCs get appreciation so this is the split this time they are based on participation alone that is at 25 candidates we have 55 local chapters colleges that don't have 25 candidates but have a top or a gold medalist it is 161 local chapters those that have both is about 236 so this is what I said that they get certificates this is the kind of certificates that the SPOC gets with the photograph the name, the college name this is for the 100 top rated local chapters so this is the certificate that the SPOC gets and this is the kind of certificates that the SPOCs of active colleges get so most of you must have received it while you were registering itself I hope it is with you so this is also present okay something that you might want to keep in mind when we open up the flow for discussion is we are looking at how the rating is being done because two years we have not revisited numbers are increasing local chapters are increasing we want to see is this criteria still valid do we want to relook the criteria and so on so one of the things we were thinking of is successfully completed do we want to cap the numbers somewhere so that is something we are looking at or the other ones since we always talk about performance of the candidates writing exams do we want to count only the elite and above two words are local chapter ratings so we are working on it we have not finalized on what we are going to do for this semester as you know we keep experimenting yes some work some don't so we will announce probably within the next two weeks or max month saying what is it that we are going to use as criteria for the July November semester but it is likely to change let's debate on it when we come to the interaction session SPOC also many times we have found that the college is getting either a rating or they are being tagged as active but then we find that we have never even interacted with the SPOC in some sense we don't know who they are they have never written a mail to us we have never been on interaction so one of the things we want to put down as an SPOC is at least a base minimum are they logging into our portal we want to check whether they are checking data they will know that they are an SPOC and they are working for this that is something and if we run surveys we want SPOCs to at least answer those surveys so this is a base minimum we are thinking that we know that an SPOC is doing you might be doing a lot of ground work on the other side but sometimes we don't know it so we thought at least we will get this from your side okay for mentors mentors has been again a huge support and we've heard a lot of stories on how mentors are influencing the results of candidates within colleges so for mentors also we have a recognition formula and this is the thing a mentor will get a certificate in these scenarios I'll just skip that I'll give you some stats this time 4,301 mentors were nominated by the SPOCs so the process that works is mentors are course specific for a particular run while the SPOC is the boss for the NPTEL local chapter in the college the mentor is only specific for a particular course in a particular run the role does not carry forward beyond that so that is how a mentor works and normally we expect the mentor to be a faculty member who knows the subject or can contribute to the learning of the candidates in that particular subject or at least motivates and kind of enthuses the students to keep on to the course and write exams and so on so 4,301 mentors were actually nominated 11,03 were qualified to get certificates so I guess certificates also have been handed over to you while you are registering and a split for why the remaining did not get certificates is 2022 mentors their mentees did not register for the exam so the criteria for a mentor to get a certificate is not on his performance we don't expect mentors to write exams and go through the course per se that's not a criteria but we check on the performances of the mentees whoever is attaching themselves to the mentor we are checking how they are doing so these mentees didn't register for the exam they registered but they were not present or they did not do well in the exam as an aside, 871 mentors took up the exam themselves 50 were gold medalists so this is a thing on the faculty front okay so some things more we are bringing on the mentor front so this is something that we thought because we thought we were not capitalizing on what the mentors were providing as inputs to the student and we want to reach out to that feedback too for instance a mentor in a college is actually going through our course content along with the students they are doing the assignments they are also handling the students they know where the problems in our courses are what the gaps are whether our assignments are pegged more difficult than what is there whether the content does not match with what is given maybe the forum has some issues that is where the mentors really can help us and give suggestions which we are not actively getting today so one of the things we are trying to do is we will put out a feedback form we did it about I think a year or two back and it did not work well but now we are going to kind of make it a little mandatory for getting certificates to say give us feedback about the course tell us what were the aspects of the course that were difficult gaps help us identify the problem points tell us what was nice tell us where we can add some content extra so that one we want mentors to fill up the form at least once a month so for a four week course it will be just once eight week course twice and for a 12 week course three times and the other one is the mentors need to be enrolled to the portal for the course which they are mentoring okay many times colleges come back and say oh our faculty members work behind the scenes and please give them certificates but we are kind of tightening it now unless we don't see all enrolled on the portal and we don't see mentees attached to your profile we will not be able to give certificates so that's something that we are saying here one criteria which we want to revisit is there is one point which says that if anybody has 10 students who appeared for the exam but none of them passed actually you still get a certificate I think being a mentor it kind of now hit us that you know these guys should be passing if they have a mentor and the mentor is actively mentoring them some of them should be passing it so we are looking at revisiting this criteria it may be removed from a mentor qualification certificate for the next time we have not implemented it for the general these are the kind of certificates that mentors are getting currently so we have these we have top performing mentors that is those whose mentees were gold medallists or toppers then we have those who had more than 100 mentees some badges we have given for mentors also so I'll go through that okay some tidbits that we wanted to show that we keep analyzing again is last year for last three semesters we have done some data check so last March which is you know a year ahead exactly number of people taking one exam was about 92% and two exams was about 7.2% and if you see the three and four exams given there it is just 0.69 and 0.31% after your April 2018 we are finding that 1.09% is taking four exams so they are actually though April you know we got a lot of flak for it and feedback saying it was a bad date and you did back to back exams and it was a single date there were actually 780 people who have done four exams on a weekend Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon and they wanted to do it they have done it so this number is the percentage is increasing with our increasing numbers which means more and more people are going in for the courses and the exams three exam people also it's gone up to 2% from 0.6 and 0.8% so we are seeing an increase in number of people taking more exams per semester so that is something that we are finding we wanted to see who these people were so I for those who have attended our previous SPOC sessions we always say you know okay September 2016 we had one person who wrote four exams and topped all four March 2017 one person who wrote four exams topped this time we had 12 candidates take up four exams or three exams a topper in all four or all three exams taken so this has gone up from one candidate to 12 candidates this particular semester so this is the kind of outlay that we have there is a mix of I think student, faculty and professionals also in this people who have done four exams with us or three exams with us and in the type of courses we wanted to check just to see how much time they would be spending so the first person has done more of the I wouldn't call it soft skill but something related to teaching research and so on but the second and third people have done machine learning data sciences course four exams which means either they are looking for a job change project change or getting it to some domain there I don't know and the other one is electrical engineering all related and they've topped all fives and these two are from purpose technology probably a company and go our college of engineering a student so this is something that we wanted to showcase so I hope that SPSCs can actually why are we saying this in this workshop so when students come back and say we don't have time right we can't write even one exam even that one is a problem for me I won't do this these are examples that are an inspiration that people who are working in organizations who are already you know probably stretching themselves nine to eight or something doing four exams and topping the exams what excuse more can we give to say that we can't do something right so I guess this goes back home to each of your students the other data we wanted to showcase was this we also did saying that do we have repeat candidates coming back to learn from us or are they running away after the first course okay so that was something that we did we are seeing that five courses seven hundred and sixty four I mean courses I don't mean enrollment I mean exam registrations so people have done five exams with us there are seven hundred and sixty four six exams three hundred and nine and you can see the last row in this table twenty one exams with us there is one person nineteen exams with us two people I don't even know if we run so many dates or exam sessions we'll have to really see how they manage it that means from the first semester on they've been doing two two two or four whatever every semester and again we saw okay who are these people so it is a student from Konganada College of Engineering and Technology I don't know if it's an LC with us or the SPOC is here today but there's a student who's done twenty one exams with us then there is one employed person from DRDO nineteen exams employed from TS Genco nineteen exams so faculty from Velamal Engineering College Gunasekaran sir we see he's regular he's there in our feedback and on nineteen eighteen exams again P.A. Ashok is actually an SPOC Prince Sri Venkateshwar I don't know if Ashok is here today okay probably not attended he has done sixteen exams with us so there are a lot of people here who have done multiple exams with us over the last four years okay candidates from abroad so as you all know we don't have exams outside of India today and if anybody for learning it is free people can from abroad can enroll to our courses learn from our courses and so on but the minute they say how do I write exams the only line we tell them is come to India fly down to India write our exams and go if you want a certificate we don't have an option currently we are stabilizing still in India we look at doing it outside slowly so in that context we found that we had two candidates from South Africa who flew in to take exams these were actually students but the surprising part was there were two people from applied materials company they were getting promoted as project leads and apparently their boss had told them go do this NPTEL course from do this course from NPTEL write the exam and come back it will help you with your project management so I said N.A. you've learned why do you want a certificate no we are supposed to come back with certificates so one came from Singapore one came from Austin, Texas they flew down to Bangalore wrote our exam, took back our certificates and they are there in fact the person from Austin, Texas told me I was so liked your course that this time too I'm in a course in your NPTEL thing I'll come back this time too so I said yeah most welcome so this is something that we are seeing again credit transfer Pratap and you do you want to do it or should I go ahead okay so I think you heard VC sir also talk about it in the morning credit transfer I think is going to be increasingly important going forward a lot of universities across the country are becoming more aware of it the possibility of students being able to earn credits through this process now both the UGC and AACTE have come out with clear guess it notifications which say the universities can do it there is no problem there now of course when that is not that's only the beginning the next step is for the board of academic studies or academic councils whatever the equivalent is in every university has to meet and do it so in case any of you need a copy of these Gassett documents and all that all of that is available in our web page we can give them to you to help make a case so invariably what happens is somebody in the college or university has to go meet somebody in the board of academic council and convince them that you know this is worth doing a lot of people are doing it people will benefit and then push this a little forward it's not easy I think even in Madras University for instance while the academic council is approved then there is the next step the departments have to come up and say you know these are the list of courses every semester and that I think is yet to happen even for the July semester so there is this constant push that is needed I think if you are an affiliated college SPOC from Madras University please contact the concerned department and say please give us a list of approved courses so you have to push constantly to get these things going because university officials are busy they have 101 things to do and this is one more thing and you have to push for that so I will urge you to follow up on this don't be thinking that somebody will do it even if your university approves if there is a process make sure that the process is followed don't let it slip so IITs are doing it and IITs traditionally these kind of things are a little bit easier so in IIT Madras for instance students are free to pick their own courses and then up to three courses they can get credit for their degree and it's quite an easy process they have come back with a certificate and apply for the credit transfer 227 students from IIT Madras have taken this exam for credit transfer basis so in case you need to justify this to your academic council you can say even in IIT Madras they are allowing their students to take it for credit so this is not something which is supposed to be it has a very high reputation and standard there is no problem there so this is happening in other IITs also quickly we will see other IITs following suit as well so here is a few descriptions of what is possible how a few universities have done it and we can also share this with you in more detail later on so for instance Kerala Technical University and Gujarat Technical University are giving something called activity points to their students okay so this is not credit but this is something called activity points which is mandatory for the degree anyway so students can earn activity points through that so something like that is there you can do it UP Technical University and West Bengal Technical University that is the one at the bottom they are giving credit and they are also giving honours degree okay for students who do enough online courses they are giving an additional honours degree so some BTEC instead of just saying BTEC it will say BTEC honours so that is from online courses University of Madras has already approved it for credit but like I said there is a process that they have to follow the departments have to recommend some courses then that has to happen I believe it has not been implemented in one semester yet hopefully they will do that going forward so different models are possible and I think going forward this will definitely happen different universities across the country will approve it in their own ways and autonomous colleges are also approving it in large numbers so I am not talking about autonomous colleges here I am talking about universities doing this so here is some implementation for autonomous colleges there is a long list and different colleges do their own method and there need not be uniformity in how the credit transfer is done I mean as long as some credit is given I think it is okay here is a larger list of course colleges yes this is what SPOC have shared with us so if you are an SPOC here and if your college is an autonomous college and you are taking it for credit in some form please let us know and if you are part of a university which has already accepted it for credit in some form please let us know the reason why I am asking is the person from M.H.A.D is also here when we have high level governing council meetings in M.H.A.D people ask us is anyone taking your courses for credit and we have to give a good answer there we give a good answer there then more support will come for the program so all these things are very important so if you know that your students are benefiting from this program in any way whatever way please let us know keep the loop closed so that we can take the information back to policy makers okay so here is a more list the list is quite long I hope as you give us more inputs the numbers will increase as well so one of the things that is unique about NPTEL is we are not just happy doing whatever we are doing and we are not sitting idle okay so every day there is some new idea that comes some new initiative that we try to do or some initiative will be thrust on us from say the ministry or somebody they will say okay you have to do this etc okay so I am going to talk about few of the new initiatives the first initiative I want to talk about is the integration of the Swayam portal and the NPTEL portal okay it is something that has been in the plan for quite a long time and we have identified a company which is going to take care of both the NPTEL portal and the Swayam portal maybe this is a good time to introduce them the company is called Persistent Systems they are a Pune based company maybe Shaker should stand up Shaker and Mahesh yeah maybe you should come up on stage yeah so for those of you who have not heard about Persistent it is a slightly smaller company not as big as TCS or Infosys but they play a very important role in a lot of education activities how many of you have heard of Smart India hackathon so Persistent has been behind that okay so they organized it so even though being a small company they give do a lot of volunteering effort and quite vital in so many ways and it's really some sort of a very lucky accident for us that they've come forward to do this we're very very happy and thankful and maybe this is a good opportunity to recognize them ahead of time even though the work hasn't actually started so they're good to recognize them so that they feel the pressure a little bit so please give them a big round of applause so again there was mention of Google and their role and I want to emphasize the role of Google once again I think Google is a big giant I mean we are not going to give them any major tribute but just to tell you Google out of nowhere has built this portal up there's one engineer there who has built it from ground up Areshri was one of the engineers who was in that team in the Google team currently he's with NPTEL now we are proud to say he's an NPTEL staff so even though he's sitting in Bombay so they gave us time of expert engineers for architecting the portal and building it up now that is not an easy task and that they did and they gave us free cloud credits to the tune of nearly 400,000 400,000 460,000 US dollars that much money was as cloud credits was given to us for free and to date we have not really paid any money for the cloud usage on Google that's tremendous and many of their engineers work to keep the cost down and it's completely voluntary from them nobody recognizes them in fact even I would say the ministry should recognize them in a strong way but they haven't done that yet so nobody recognizes them but in spite of that they've done this and Sherp is one of the engineers who's played a key role in building up the portal so let's at least give them a louder applause so that will integrate so once I think the Swyam portal and the NPTEL portal integrates we will have one common portal National MOOCs portal that on which all of the courses will run and that will smoothen things out quite a bit for everybody I'm hoping that will happen it's one of the new initiatives that NPTEL is driving going forward okay so a few more things which are important we have been always behind this having a steady state of courses we have not gotten there yet we don't have an assured so for instance I should be able to tell you a timetable for the next six semesters for the next three years okay so of course the first thing I need there is some sort of a funding guarantee from the ministry that the next three years you can run courses believe me it's not coming so but even if it doesn't come I should be able to at least line up faculty and say you know here are six semesters of courses that's very important right so because you have to plan for at least next three years you should know something should come for sure and we are working on that we are trying to work very hard to make sure that that can happen at least the guaranteed basic courses we will try very hard okay so we will try to get that happening for at least at least a two year window if it's not possible for a three year window we will do that that's something that we are strongly planning going forward the January 2019 courses we are already thinking about January is okay we can do that so we will start a shared sheet and please get us feedback I mean if you want courses this is the time to bring it up I think always I see SPOC is reacting after we put up the announced list of courses for that particular semester that's too late okay for January you have to tell us now I know it's far ahead but that is the kind of time frame we can work on so believe me for faculty in IITs there is no better incentive than saying you know there are ten colleges which want your course okay then they have a real incentive to come forward and offer the course and that's a significant limitation for us so please come back to us with what courses you want in January okay okay so there's some very good news that I can announce for faculty of engineering colleges who have been doing our courses so far out of their own interest NPTEL has now signed MOU with AICTE it's signed now and it will it's already in action for the July courses it will be in action so amongst the 270 courses that we are offering this semester we will identify a subset as advanced courses and if faculty in engineering colleges take these courses and pass the courses write the exam and pass the courses they can get a joint NPTEL, AICTE, FDP certificate and this will count towards your career progression as points there is a way in which this is converted I believe for it's there in the slide, next slide okay later on it will come okay so this is the major thing so you don't have to necessarily go physically to some place and do an FDP and get that to count for your career these NPTEL certificates for the advanced courses this is not for the basic courses we will announce what these courses are and you have to apply separately for the certificate it's a nominal fee we will give you that certificate the joint NPTEL, AICTE certificate is quite important okay so this is a very I mean we've been trying to do this for about a year now and finally we have managed to do it and I think this gives I mean already a lot of faculty participate in our programs but now this is additional incentive for faculty who get our certificates so now there is there is a comparison between an NPTEL online course and a traditional FDP a traditional FDP you have to go to some place spend some three weeks there spend some money effort etc etc and at the end of the day it is also not clear what you have learned because there's been no exam there's no hard assessment nobody is really convinced okay so now on the other hand the online course you can do with the comfort of your own place with very little money that is spent and then you have exams you have a certificate you know that you have done well okay so this is all very very useful to know this is how the certificate will look it will have NPTEL, it will have AICTE it will have the signature of my signature is currently there over is the NPTEL coordinator and the advisor for AICTE his signature will always be there well the consolidated score is 99% I mean it will have to show only what marks you got it won't be 99% your photo will be there and below that you can see it says it will say as per the AICTE notification dated this this course will count towards your FDP okay and this is how the conversion is going to be done for a 4 week course it's going to count as half an FDP of one week an 8 week course is going to count as a full FDP of one week and for a 12 week course is going to count as a one and a half FDP okay so this is their conversion this is not in our hands this is in the hands of the board of AICTE if you want this to change you have to appeal to the AICTE side okay so this is how they are converting and this is what you get is that okay hopefully that's clear so this is some good news hopefully that we are sharing with faculty are people happy with this or not I'm not hearing too many applause thank you the next initiative is our connection with industry particularly for jointly offering courses with industry okay so there are two companies that have come forward now companies or organization the first one is IBM which is jointly along with an IIT Kharagpur faculty offering a course on blockchain technology I mean there was a few news items on this recently number of registrations in that course is really enrollments in the course is already very high and this is going to be really a blockbuster sort of course and blockchain is one of the most interesting recent technologies in this area so a lot of people are expected to enroll in this another interesting course it's just not so maybe not as exciting as blockchain is from glass academy this is on use of glass in buildings okay glass manufacturing and use of glass in buildings it's for civil engineering students architecture civil engineering students if you're interested you can do that we are trying to work with more companies along similar lines in fact we had even visited persistent and we were trying to convince them that they should offer a course along with us on some of these lines so wherever we visit companies even I mean we were visiting Naveli Lignite Corporation a few days back and we were trying to convince them also that they should offer a thermal plant engineering or mining engineering some such course jointly with us so when an industry and academia joined together to offer such courses I mean I believe everybody benefits so it's a nice thing to do as well so this is one of our new initiatives let's see and your feedback and this will be very important I mean you should get back to us on why this is good whether you liked it or not so that we can take it forward okay so the third initiative is you saw quite a few people have done lots of courses with us and they've been asking us for some sort of a transcript okay consolidated mark sheet so that they can present one mark sheet instead of presenting some 20 different certificates which are also quite heavy okay so we decided to create one it'll look like this it'll have the picture of the person it'll have like a table where you'll say what course they did when they did it what marks they got etc etc so I think this is already available on your login so if you already have a nptel.ac.n slash NOC login you can go there and look at your consolidated mark sheet which will be there okay one more initiative it's a go green initiative I don't know you can think of it as go green so right now the hard copy of the certificate is delivered by speed post to the address that you put down right so if you write an exam that's what you get so in case you don't want the hard copy okay we are going to make your fee as 1000 rupees okay so the 100 rupees which is our cost for doing all of that is subtracted so if you don't want a hard copy so this time when you register for the exam by the way the exam registration form is already open and people are already registering so if you don't want a hard copy now there is a option in the exam registration form you can indicate I don't want a hard copy and then you pay only 1000 okay so this is uh this is important but remember there's one caveat here so in case you say you don't want hard copy and then maybe six months down the line you realize your father or your father-in-law is saying I want to see the hard copy right so then uh you you will have to pay 200 rupees okay that's like 100 rupees extra so so anyway let let us see I mean I want to see how this succeeds because there's conflicting emotion all the time when people say I want to see the hard copy people say no hard copy is a waste so let's see how many people opt for it if a lot of people opt for this then we will know the actual uh real worth it okay so this is what we're doing so the other initiative which has been a lot of people have asked us about experimental courses a lot of people ask for experiments how do we do lab courses what are the kind of courses that we can do okay so one uh nice virtual lab experiment which is actually based on physical experiment that you can remotely control I don't know how many of you are aware of it we visited college of engineering Pune professor Sudhir Agashe there we went to his lab we saw his setup it was really very nice so he has a control engineering plant several plants he has and he has sensors and controllers for that he's pulled it out into some computer and you can remotely access those plants from wherever you are he has a way of allotting timetables and all that it's actually live you can go see check out the if you're from this area and you're interested please check it out it's a it's a very nice setup that there's any of you heard of this it's a virtual lab experiment some of you have heard of this it's amazing how good news doesn't travel at all in our country if you ask him about something about something that went wrong or some celebrity something happened everybody would know about big boss for instance but nobody knows about this it's quite sad I think so maybe after our adoption this will go a little bigger so it's really a nice facility that he has and I'll encourage you to check it out if you're interested in this area it's it's very interesting so we are doing it in a small way we're trying to control it because the numbers can't be too high for this we are doing a workshop now so as a pilot we are doing a workshop on today's 14 16 17th at College of Engineering Pune we had opened a form only for the Pune colleges for now they said they can accommodate up to 30 people so we are asking for faculty members to actually go there in person spend two days learn about the setup and so on maybe we will have a repeat of these workshops over the next two three months so the faculty members can get inducted to it and our hope is that there is a course from IIT Kharagpur by one professor Siddhartha Mukhopadhyay on industrial automation and control which we hope to offer in January when that course is coming online as a theory course we want to be able to give this setup to the colleges so that they can book slots they can remotely access do the experiments along with the theory course and you also can see the practical aspect of it so that is a way in which we are planning at least we'll have to see how well it goes yeah so this also requires some computing support and a lot of other things if it has to scale up so I'm not 100% sure how easily we can do it but we will try that's our aim maybe for a limited group we can do this so this will solve that to an extent now another experimental effort that we are doing recently is in collaboration with Aisar Pune for some reason Pune keeps showing up in this workshop a lot I don't know why so there's a faculty member in Aisar Pune called Harinath so he is interested in running an organic chemistry lab this is an on-premise lab you have to actually go to Aisar Pune stay there and run the lab but how are we going to pick people who will go into this lab this will be based on how you do in an NPTEL course so if you do an organic chemistry NPTEL course very well so primarily we'll first initially begin with faculty from some colleges if you do well in an organic chemistry course we'll I mean there is money for this I believe SWYM has already sanctioned money for this so we will pay people to go to Aisar Pune stay there do the experiment and then see how it goes and then we will have to see how to scale that up to a larger larger number later on okay so these are two efforts we are doing for bringing in the experimental aspects to these courses hopefully this will give us some idea on how to scale the experiments larger into a larger number going forward okay so internships for top us is another experiment another initiative that we have tried currently these are internships at the IITs right from the faculty who are teaching that course so supposing a faculty member teaches a course and then there are top us in that course then he or she the faculty member can invite the students who are top us to come to their lab and spend some time there for do an internship okay so there is some money for this so we try to raise money for this then some payment is given to the students for that it's not too much I believe travel and accommodation we take care of we have started in a small way in IIT Madras six students came IIT Bombay one student came triple IIT Bangalore one candidate has gone and IIT Kharagpur four candidates have gone this has started in a small way we are trying to scale this up and we need some feedback from you so for instance how critical is it that we fund these programs okay so is it our students going to be interested even if we don't give them any money or support okay so that is a question that you can you can try to answer that will help us how to scale it up because I think our ability to raise money for this is not very high we are trying but we'll have to see how much money we can raise but this is a program that we are trying to push as much as possible okay the last one not the last one more initiative was having a mobile app for the online courses portal a lot of people have asked us about a mobile app because everybody uses I guess mobile plan these days we are not doing what is strictly a mobile app we are doing something called a progressive web app okay PWA so actually now if you visit the online courses portal on your mobile you will see the PWA version it will if you have data you can check it on your mobile you will see a very different version of the online courses portal okay so it is something that is tuned to your mobile browser it will look very different you will see a lot of things are accessed much more easily like an app and there's also an option to have a shortcut to that on your on your what is that thing called on your apps page also okay so it's possible there is a little video here on how to do this so this is how the thing will look yeah so you can add it to your home screen and then if you tap on that it'll open up much much easier to use and log in you can check out your profile and see the courses that you're enrolled to you can see all the course content all the videos through the mobile front end also there's announcements progress tab is there you can search through all courses so a few things you can't do you cannot yet join a course on the mobile front end you'll have to join it only on the desktop view and you can't you cannot also submit assignments okay so these two things are a little bit more tricky we are working on it hopefully by the end of this semester it will come so all apps need feedback okay without feedback apps are not going to improve okay it can give you guarantees and maybe there are enough bugs and issues there on the app it's still called beta you're not to open it up for full release please use the mobile front end as much as possible and please give us feedback okay so this will help us improve the mobile front end significantly and help help usage a lot of people ask for mobile mobile front end so this will help us okay so the next new initiative which has a lot of promise in closing the loop on this program is this NPTEL industry associate program okay I should say it's this why I'm NPTEL industry associate program so through just like we partner with colleges for various good purposes we also want to partner with companies okay quite a few companies are already industry associates what can these companies do they can work with us to say even offer joint courses offer internships for students offer job interviews for students who come through us whatever it is just close the loop on on giving students access to all these things and also they have their own internal training and all that which for which also NPTEL material can be useful so all of these things you're hoping to do through the industry so these are some of the early industry associates we have with us today one is cyber-media private limited Infos is limited Indian Institute of Industry Interaction Education Research I think that contact person is also here with us so actually Infos's people were supposed to be with us here today but due to some last minute engagement they couldn't actually come they've asked me to make an announcement on their behalf that if any student completes a programming course which may be C, C++, Python which we have in our portal and also complete a database management course and secures more than 60% in both the courses they will be eligible for an off-campus recruitment process of Infos's so they are going to take it oh this gets claps okay so this is an announcement they wanted us to make in fact they're looking out for immediate recruitment it seems so they even told me saying that if in the next two or three weeks if we can get a pool and we can ask the students saying if they're available actually for the recruitment and set it up either in Chennai or again she said Pune that they have these off-campus sites then they are ready to interview them so we'll send out an email and if there are students who have completed both but 60% is going to be a qualification more than that it's up to them so there's like a base qualifier to even attend the off-site campus thing that they are looking out for and we'll put out emails just ask students to check it ask them to enter and fill the form so that we can give them some data on whatever is there also the other thing we are trying is some companies are approaching us to recruit either for internships or jobs they want a more detailed profile of the candidates which we are currently not collecting because we don't require it for somebody doing an online course but they want to know what is a 10 standard 12 standard mark what is the college mark what is this they want more details so we are going to start a form we are going to send it out to all the candidates and say if you're interested to being part of our extensive database so that we can share this data with companies come and fill the form so that will decide on our server and as people have consented to you know share this course we will be sharing all this information with companies who want to recruit from that pool so that mail will also go out along with the link to the form please again ask your students whoever is interested to fill it up and tell us whether they are okay yeah so i think that's maybe a much more exciting announcement to make