Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Cass Sunstein, author of Liars, Falsehoods, and Free Speech in an Age of Deception. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Friday, March 5th at noon, Janice Nomura will discuss her book, The Doctor's Blackwell. In the mid-19th century, it was an unheard of notion for a woman to study medicine, but sisters Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell became path-breaking doctors. On Tuesday, March 9th at noon, we'll welcome Jane Zangline, author of The Girl Explorers, the story of the founding of the Society of Women Geographers, and how key members served as early advocates for human rights and paved the way for today's women's scientists. In life and in politics, truth matters. These are the opening words of Chapter 9 of Liars, Cass Sunstein's new book. As custodians of the records of our nation's history, we at the National Archives know well that truth matters. Researchers come to us to establish facts to unearth the true stories of historical events and people. The records preserve what happened at a particular time, but we do not label them true or false. A letter to an office holder may contain falsehoods, but the document itself is a true record of the writer's intent. It's up to the researcher to evaluate the sources and analyze viewpoints to determine what did or didn't happen. In Liars, Cass Sunstein looks at contemporary life to examine the role of truth and falsehood and asks how can we deter lies while also protecting freedom of speech. Cass Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard University. From 2009 to 2012, he was administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and he joined the Department of Homeland Security last month as senior counselor on immigration policies for President Joe Biden. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, often described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Law and Humanities. Founder and Director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at the Harvard Law School, he's been involved in law reform activities in nations all over the world. He's the author of many articles and books, including Nudge, How Change Happens, and Too Much Information. Now let's hear from Cass Sunstein. Thank you for joining us today. Hi everybody. It's a great honor to be here to talk at the National Archives of Repository of FACTS and Historical Records and to speak about the importance of truth and what can be done to safeguard truth under difficult, sometimes contemporary conditions produces chills down the spine. So I'm going to give you two epigraphs with which to start. The first is from a terrific mystery writer named Michael Robottam, and in a novel called Good Girl, Bad Girl, he writes the following. Some lies are selfish. Some inflate or conflate or mitigate or simply omit. Some are told for good reason. People lie because they think it doesn't matter. They lie because telling the truth would mean giving up control or the truth is inconvenient or they don't want to disappoint or they desperately want it to be true. I've heard them all. I've told them all. My second passage is from a writer who's a bit more famous, William Shakespeare, and see if you can keep track of the puns in one of Shakespeare's, I think, greatest works. When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies, that she might think me some untutored youth unlearned in the world's false subtleties, thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, although she knows my days are past the best, simply I credit her false speaking tongue. On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she? Not, she is unjust. And wherefore say I? Not that I am old. O love's best habit is in seeming trust, and age in love loves not to have years told. Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, and in our faults by lies we flattered be. That's Shakespeare's disquisition on love. And lying. In a famous opinion, Supreme Court Justice Alderwendel Holmes wrote, the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. Right now, probably on this day, certainly in these months, a lot of people have been falsely shouting fire in crowded theaters, and they are causing panics. The day of January 6th of 2021 was an example. In some cases, lies lead to illnesses and deaths. We've certainly observed that. In others, their lies cut at the heart of self-government. Some lies come from unfriendly nations. Some of them are homegrown. They come from public officials, private citizens, and from politicians or those who support them. Notwithstanding these points, my first goal, and I confess that I did not intend this to be my first goal when I started on this book, my first goal is to deepen the foundations of what many people find to be a jarring idea. In general, falsehood should not be censored or regulated even if they are lies. Shakespeare had it basically right. Free societies protect falsehoods in politics and in love. Public officials should not act as the truth police. A key reason is we can't trust officials to separate truth from falsehood. Their own judgments are hardly unerring and their own biases get in the way. If officials get a license to punish what is false, they will end up punishing dissent. As Justice Robert Jackson wrote, in the greatest opinion in the history of the United States Supreme Court, in fact this is my candidate for the two sentences which are the greatest in the history of any court, my choice, quote, those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. The best response to falsehoods is usually to correct them rather than to punish them. Punishment can fuel falsehoods. It can create a kind of oxygen. This is a time honored idea, but in some ways it's on the defensive. We need to understand them better and appreciate them more. So first point, protect falsehoods in a free society. Second goal, however, is to qualify this first conclusion and to take it back a bit. William Blake, the great poet commenting on lectures by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Reynolds was a great defender of generalization and abstraction, and William Blake scrawled in the margin.  To particularize is the alone distinction of true merit. Blake added, I thank God I am not like Reynolds. I'm going to aim not to be like Reynolds and not to rely on generalizations, and so I'm going to contend that government should have the power to regulate particular lies and falsehoods, at least if they can be shown to be generally harmful by any objective measure. And in that show, false statements are not constitutionally protected if the government can show that they threaten to cause very serious harm that can't be avoided through a more specific speech protective route. That's a mouthful I realize and I'm going to try to particularize it. Under the US Constitution, government can do a great deal to control defamation. If you say knowing it's false that your neighbor is a drug addict or has been engaged in some kind of criminal activity, that is punishable. That's liable. False advertising can be regulated. So can perjury. I suggest that these are foundations for thinking about how to prevent serious threats to public health and safety, and about how to protect at least certain threats to the democratic process. I'm also going to suggest that private institutions, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others, should have considerable room to stop the spread of lies and falsehoods to their credit. All three of these have embarked to some extent on that enterprise and that's a good beginning. Okay, let's acknowledge notwithstanding this plea for more control, typically private control on damaging falsehoods, that if you want to ban each and every lie or to excise lies and errors from human life, you're probably not a lot of fun. People boast. They exaggerate their achievements. That's human. Some of us flatter. We tell people things they want to hear. That's okay. People protect themselves by lying to those who endanger them. Do the ends justify the means? Not never. Sometimes. Some of us joke. We tell tall tales. Journalists spread falsehoods even when they're trying really hard to tell the truth. No one should have to live in a nation that makes it a crime not to tell the truth or even to lie. That kind of nation would crush freedom. But some lies and some falsehoods are beyond the pale. Suppose a company that sells medicine markets a new product saying if you take this one every day, you'll never get cancer. If the product has nothing to prevent cancer, that company will get in trouble with the authorities even in the free societies. To see why we have to explore the foundations of a system of free expression and that's true in nations all over the world, we need to understand what that system is for, what it's designed to do. Right now, 2021, that issue has unprecedented urgency. One reason is the rise of modern technologies which allow falsehoods to be spread in an instant. If you want to lie about a human being and throw them in their lives into turmoil, you can do that. If you want to lie about safety and health, you can do that too with ease. Much news, it's just so, is fake, and that's a big problem. An irony is that charges of fake news are often themselves fake, making it really destabilizing to figure out what's true.   No wonder that with respect to many questions, including questions involving health and climate change and what's happening in a government, people find themselves in a state of vertigo. Saint Augustine said a long, long time ago, when regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things will remain doubtful. Pause over that, if you would, when regard for truth has been broken down or even slightly weakened, all things remain doubtful. Saint Augustine chose his words carefully. Hannah Arendt, centuries later, warned, the chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed. It is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world, not only for a time, but potentially forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms or discoveries or theories. Facts and events occur in the field of ever-changing affairs of people in whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind's structure. This is a plea for the vulnerability of our beliefs about what actually happened. Okay, now I'm going to shift and to try to offer a framework to square my first proposition, which is let thousands of flowers bloom even if some of those flowers are fake news. And my second qualification, which is to say some of those flowers are poisonous and need not be allowed to bloom. Okay, there are lots of falsehoods out there and they're really different.  It might be an innocent mistake coming from someone who saw some smoke from audience members who were illegally lighting up cigarettes. A seller of a car might lie about a vehicle's gas mileage. On a date a guy might lie about his career achievements. That's happened. Someone might perjure himself saying he wasn't at the scene of an accident. Someone might make an innocent error in which he mistakenly identifies someone as a perpetrator of a crime. I suggest to make progress on these fundamental puzzles. We can do a lot if we identify four sets of issues and keep them separate, just four. Each of them plays a role in the proper analysis of freedom of speech and also should play a role when we think about the obligations of private institutions, including social media providers. So I'm going to put a spotlight on four questions. The first of the four is the speaker's state of mind. If someone is saying that's false, they might be lying, reckless, negligent, or reasonable, but just happen to be wrong. Someone might say, for example, that a neighbor has done something horrible knowing that that's false.  Someone might say it not knowing that it's false, but it's a reckless statement. They should know. That's not as bad as a lie, but it's pretty bad. Someone might not have been really reckless, but if they'd really thought about it, they would have figured out it was false. That's not good. It's not as bad as recklessness. Someone might. It might be a journalist. It might be a politician. It might be you or I. We just happen to make a mistake. It really matters into which category the speech falls. Under the constitutional order of many nations, it does matter. The difference between lying and an innocent mistake is a big one. That's the first of my four factors in my framework. The second is the size of the harm. How much damage is done by the falsehood? There's a continuum here where maybe a hundred is a lot of people are going to die, and one is it's mildly annoying. But let's just say to get clarity on the continuum, sometimes there are grave harms, sometimes there are moderate harms, sometimes there are minor harms, and sometimes there are non-existent harms.  Let's say that the Rolling Stones were better than the Beatles. That's a factual falsehood. I'm kidding a little bit, but even if it is a factual falsehood, as I believe, it's not one that's harmful. There are plenty of factual falsehoods out there that are not very harmful. The third question, in addition to the state of mind of the speaker and the size of the harm, is how likely is the harm? Here, too, we have a continuum. It's certain it's going to happen. Somebody's going to die. At the other end is it's highly improbable. It's likely that the comment is going to cause no bad thing at all, and in the middle we have it's not certain, but it's probable, and it's improbable, but it's not highly improbable. As we get to certainty or high probability of harm, the argument for restricting lies or falsehoods becomes more forceful. If someone says, John F. Kennedy was not, in fact, president of the United States, he was actually vice president, we could generate an account by which that would be likely to cause harm, but we'd have to work really hard at it. It's not likely to do anything bad. The fourth and final question is the timing of harm. Here, too, there's a continuum, but let's just simplify and say we could have harm that's going to happen imminently today, or we could have harm that's going to happen 20 years from now in the distant future, or we could have harm that's going to occur not imminently, but pretty soon the next couple of months, or we could have harm that's not going to pretty soon, but it's not in the distant future. Let's say it's going to be 2022. You get the basic point that as harm looks more imminent, the argument for doing something about its strengthens. If the harm is in the distant future, it's more likely that something can be done to forestall its occurrence, where that something might not be censorship, but might be just correction and more speech. Okay, I've given you four points. One is the state of mind of the speaker. The second is the size of the harm. The third is the likelihood of the harm. And the fourth is the timing of the harm. And this is pretty common sensical stuff, I hope. And I've given you basically four categories for each of the four. We could mix and match them in numerous ways, 256 to be precise. We could create a matrix with that number of boxes. But as an act of mercy, let's really not do that. And let's just say that for purposes of thinking about freedom of speech, when we get to the part of each of the four factors that looks especially troubling or dangerous, the argument for some kind of response is stronger. And when we get to the part of the continuum for each of them, where the concern weakens, the argument for regulating them softens. So to give the extreme cases, if you have an intentional lie that is certain to create extremely serious harm tomorrow, the argument for protecting that I suggest is very, very weak. If we have a merely innocent falsehood that's highly unlikely to create anything other than very modest harm, and that won't happen for a long, long time, the argument for doing anything about it is vanishingly small. White lies typically fall in that category. So do exaggerations and other kinds of falsehoods with which we live with sometimes our best friends and colleagues. It happens, we might not love it, but the apparatus of government or Twitter not to be invoked to regulate that. Okay. Once we have these four factors, we're well on the road, I suggest, to separating the cases where we say with enthusiasm, falsehoods are a byproduct of a free society and not to be controlled from the proposition, well, surely you can regulate perjury and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That surely is true. If you commit perjury, you're creating serious harm immediately, and perjury typically requires state of mind. You know you're lying. It's not an innocent falsehood. But there's another point which is, I think, very exciting, which is because of new technologies. When falsehoods create harm, we have unprecedented tools with which to think about how to handle them, not just the apparatus of the criminal law, let's say, or asking for damages before a jury, not just getting the government involved, but having private institutions use their technologies either involving in a way that involves architecture or in a way that involves education. And we're seeing this in real time get increasingly sophisticated. So an architectural intervention might be reducing the circulation of certain kinds of falsehoods, so fewer people see them. So it might be the algorithm says if there's some lie about COVID-19, it's not going to be taken down. It's still on the platform, but it's not going to be something a lot of people see because the algorithm isn't going to throw it in their faces. That's an architectural intervention. Or you could have an educational intervention, which gives people a warning, or which refers to people to an accurate rather than false statement of what the world is like, or that gives people a kind of signal that the general view of people who study this is something other than what the speaker say. So if the speaker says something false, let's say about COVID-19 or false about the effects of a vaccine, one possible approach would be not to circulate that a lot. Another would be to give people access to accurate information. These are softer tools and more flexible tools than censorship or running to a jury. And they might be used in lieu of the more aggressive approaches. We could imagine, I think, in the fullness of time, much more creativity on the part of social media providers in controlling the dissemination of damaging falsehoods. And we could also imagine some governments building on those practices to think about more speech protective ways of controlling falsehoods than censorship or punishment. For now, let me just focus on the largest issues. We have four factors, state of mind, magnitude of harm, likelihood of harm, and timing of harm. And of these, to simplify further, two are the most important, state of mind and magnitude of harm. If we have an intentional lie disseminated by someone who is producing very, very serious harm, the argument for letting freedom ring is weaker than if we have a negligent lie by someone who was careless but not intending to produce a falsehood and that isn't likely to produce massive harm, though it might be likely to produce some harm. The case for regulating that isn't zero, but the case for regulating that is much weaker. Okay, I hope the general principle, what I called the mouthful with which I began, is getting a little more specified. Here it is again. False statements are constitutionally protected unless the government can show that they threaten to cause serious harm that cannot be avoided through a more speech protective route. That's the basic idea. And when lies are involved, the government may impose regulation on the basis of a somewhat weaker demonstration of harm than is ordinarily required for unintentional falsehoods. So someone is knowingly saying that their next door neighbor is a crook or that some product is going to prevent heart disease. The argument for giving that person a lot of breathing space is weaker than if the person just thought it was so and it happens not to be. Okay, to bring this in contact for a moment with current constitutional law not terribly long ago, the Supreme Court offered its most vigorous statement in favor of the idea that falsehoods are protected by the free speech principle. In that case, the court was dealing with someone named Alvarez who said that he had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. He hadn't. He bragged about having won it. He did so in order to get political success in his community. There's a law, I think beautifully named, the Stolen Valor Act that says it's a crime to say you've got the Congressional Medal of Honor. Now notice in that case we have from my first factor, that a state of mind, we have clarity. The person was lying. It wasn't just reckless. In terms of magnitude of harm, we don't have catastrophe. No one's likely to die if they believe the truth. They believe that the falsehood is true. On the other hand, you will distort the democratic process and demean those heroic citizens who have actually won the Congressional Medal of Honor. So on the framework suggested, the argument for giving protection to this lie is not very strong. That is, it threatens to cause serious harm, and it's very hard to avoid that harm through a more speech protective room. So not at all clear the Supreme Court had it right. Is it really important to protect someone's intentional lie that he won the Congressional Medal of Honor? Maybe not. But in many cases, the argument for protecting false face statements of fact is a lot more powerful. A denial that climate change is real, let's say, by someone who just doesn't believe the science. That's part of the marketplace of ideas. A false report on a prominent politician. Suppose saying that person did or said something they never did or said. It happens to be a mistake by a journalist who's trying to do her job. Or an exaggerated statement about the risks posed by genetically modified organisms in which let's say someone who doesn't have scientific expertise or someone who does have scientific expertise just gets it wrong. It would be wild, wouldn't it, to say that in a society democratic or not, those falsehoods are subject to criminal punishment. The government's own judgments about what's true and what's false might not be trustworthy. Regulation of false statements might and probably will chill truthful statements. If you tell people if you say something that's false, you might end up in jail.  And that is history's lesson, not just logic. People also can learn from false statements. Our engagement with falsity can deepen our understanding, whether the question involves climate change, genetically modified organisms, COVID-19, or the effects of a new medicine. We can learn from falsity. And that's a good thing in a democracy in which people are citizens, not subjects. People also need to know what other people think, even if what other people think is not true. If some people in our country think something that is utterly false, it's good for all of us to know that. Bending false statements can simply drive them underground and increase their power and allure. It can make them like magnets. Counter-speech, meaning response to the falsehood, is typically the better and more effective response than prohibition. But, and this is my trying to be like William Blake, not a generalizer, these arguments don't support the broad conclusion that a system of free expression always has to give strong safeguards to falsehoods and lies. Consider perjury, fraud, and false commercial advertising. Some of those issues are old, but they're new ones. Deep fakes in which anyone basically, based on a photograph, can be presented online as saying or doing something they never said or did. That's something Facebook has shown some concern with, and Facebook is right to show concern with that. Dr. Videos generally can show any of us looking like we have some evil act underway, or that we've said something that is horrific, that maybe we, it's profoundly to be oaked, we don't have underway, and that we didn't say. That use of modern technology to create destruction of reputations and harm to institutions of which human beings are an essential part. That is something for which at least private remedies, as some of the social media platforms are considering, that's a really good idea. Because so much speech occurs online, it's really valuable to be considering creative tools for reducing the spread of falsehoods, including disclosure, labels, warnings, disclaimers, and the use of architectures. These points, I am hopeful, offer a distinctive perspective on ancient problems and problems we're going to face in June or July of this year, meaning new ones. In the United States, current constitutional law doesn't quite strike the right balance. Public officials, actors, musicians, movie stars, and athletes should be able to do more than they now can to respond to defamation, if only to get a retraction. In addition, there ought to be power to regulate deep fakes in Dr. Videos where they are destructive to private reputations and to institutional integrity, let's call it. It's also very important to have new thinking about the protection of public health and safety, certainly in the context of intentional falsehoods, and if falsehoods create sufficiently serious risks, magnitude of harm in that context as well. Let me underline one of the points which I confess to being excited about, which is that some of the most promising tools for responding to falsehoods do not involve censorship or labels, they involve more speech-protective approaches, like labels or warnings. Private institutions, including magazines, newspapers, TV networks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., should be acting more aggressively than they are today to take steps to control the most damaging forms of lying and the most damaging untruths with reference to the little framework that I've offered involving magnitude of harm, likelihood of harm, timing of harm, and the state of mind of the actor. I'm conscious that these are specific conclusions spanning a wide range of problems. I would underline that as I embarked on this book, published by the way just today, it became increasingly clear, immersion in the materials, the wisdom of old arguments about the importance of offering a lot of breathing space even for falsehoods. That was driven home by history and analysis more than I expected. Still, if you have someone whose life is at risk because of what someone said that was knowingly false about them, or if lives are at risk because of knowing falsehoods or even reckless falsehoods about health and safety, we should ask what Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said to his advisors when presented with a conundrum. Roosevelt asked, what are you going to do about that? These are some of the largest and most fundamental questions, not only in politics and law, but indeed in daily life itself. Hannah Arendt, a hero of this book, put it this way. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. The principle of freedom of speech should not be taken to forbid reasonable efforts to protect reality. Thank you. I am seeing a question in the chat, so with your indulgence I will address it. The question is, I have heard that some countries are already adding courses in critical thinking and how it relates to social media as part of their normal media, as part of their normal curriculum. Is this good and should we try that in the US? The answer to that question has to be yes. Doesn't that critical thinking is important for all of us to have? It doesn't matter where we live. The only thing I'd add is that it is a little inadequate critical thinking. I will give you my favorite empirical finding in this domain as a way of testing the inadequacy. Did you all hear that the Boston Red Sox actually just a few hours ago acquired five players from the New York Yankees, five of their best players, and the Yankees gave them up for basically very little. So it looks like the Red Sox are going to be world champions just because of this trade. Okay, what I just told you was false. Some of you probably could tell that it was false. It was a lie, sorry. But I did it not only because I'm a big Red Sox fan and I wish it were true, but mostly because I wanted to illustrate a point. And the point is, if there is a falsehood communicated, either one on one or to a large audience, and if even instantly after the person who conveyed the falsehood said that was a lie, then people will tend to remember it days and weeks later and will tend with some part of their mind to think it's true. So forgive me, Red Sox and Yankees fans, some of you are going to remember as true the proposition that the Red Sox acquired a set of great Yankees players, even though I told you immediately after that it was false. I tried to choose a pretty innocuous example, but if someone says something about a political figure or about a vaccine or about climate change or about a country that's false, even if they say right after that was false, or even if someone, a newspaper or an expert says that was false, right after, some part of our mind is going to remember it as true. It's called truth bias. And the and a fiendishness of truth bias is that it has a good evolutionary foundation. That is, if a fellow member of the human species tells us something, we tend to believe it if they tell us in undergatherer societies that a lion's coming run, we're not going to think, are they right? Can I trust them? We're going to run. And so the truth bias has some, you know, foundation and something that's good, but it gives an opportunity for liars and also for people who are just reckless to distort our judgments, which is a long way of saying that critical thinking is a great thing, but the human mind is a little more, or that's the right word, a little more complicated than to be completely immunized from credulousness with respect to falsehoods, including lies by virtue of having a lot of capacity for critical thinking, which is suggesting that critical thinking is very important to have architectural responses by social media providers of the sort that some are doing, and to have, let's call it real time critical thinking promoters, as in you see something that's false, demonstrably false, not the truth beliefs. It's just a clear falsehood. And there's a notation to learn more about this subject. Here you go. Or there's a notation in clear cases, this is not true. Another question, you all ready? What is the difference between speaking falsehoods, knowing they are falsehoods, and repeating a falsehood, believing it to be the honest truth? Will we see a revival of traditional slander at lival loss? That's a great question. Let me tell you, if I may, a little bit about the American constitutional law approach to this and distinguish it from the British. So under current American constitutional law, if I say, let's say about a public figure, let's say Taylor Swift, I like her, so I wouldn't say anything mean about her. But if I said about Taylor Swift, she stole all her songs from Paul McCartney. That's palpably false, so maybe it wouldn't be libelous, but let's say I said it and it was a knowing falsehood and it turned out to be libelous. Under current constitutional law, she could recover damages from me. But if I said that merely negligently, I kind of thought, well, some of her songs sound like Paul McCartney songs, so she probably stole them. And I was negligent, but I didn't know it was false. And I wasn't reckless either. It's just negligent. A public figure can recover for that. That's where we are now. And I use Taylor Swift because it avoids political waters. If someone says with respect to a Republican or Democratic candidate, something that turns out to be false, but they were merely negligent, they weren't lying, and they weren't reckless, meaning they weren't completely unwilling to pursue reasonable sources of information. They were merely negligent. Under current law, carte blanche, you can do it. You can be negligent and spread falsehoods. Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court thinks we have been protecting libel too much. He thinks that the original understanding of the First Amendment was not so speech protective as current constitutional law is. He hasn't gotten a lot of traction on that. He might in the fullness of time. But where we are right now is that for a public figure, Taylor Swift or a politician, people have a lot of room to spread falsehoods about them, so long as they don't know that they're lying. Okay, that goes right to your question. So if someone knows that it's false, if I say something, let's say about a senator knowing that it's false and it is defamatory under standard principles, that politician consume me and recover damages. If I repeat a falsehood believing it to be the truth, that person can't sue me. I've been let's just stipulate. I've been honest in terms of my own understanding of what's true, and I haven't been reckless either. Maybe I was negligent. Maybe I was just an innocent believer in a falsehood, but I can't be sued. My view is the law is not going to change quickly on this. So falsehoods about public figures are generally going to continue to be protected. But I confess I worry about this. So if you say something about Taylor Swift, and this is not only or not mostly because I think she's great, but if you say something about Taylor Swift, that's genuinely damaging to her, and you were negligent, and she says, I want you to retract it, or I want you to pay me a dollar. Do we need in a system of free expression to prohibit her from getting a dollar or to prohibit her from getting a falsehood retracted if it's really damaging? So let's suppose someone says something about a nominee of President Trump, and let's say it's an innocent falsehood, but it's really damaging to that nominee. It might say something about their character, or their marriage, or their willingness to obey the law. It's just false, and it puts them, let's say, in harm's way in multiple respects that they, to show their head in public is much harder, and it was false. To say that Trump nominee can't get a retraction if it's demonstrably false or can't get a dollar, is it clear that that's the right way to go? I'm not sure, especially because falsehoods, and this is Justice Thomas's great point, falsehoods about people who are involved in government, are not just damaging to those people. They can be harmful to the political process, especially if those people are running for office, where citizens should be in a position to make fair evaluations. And Justice Thomas in saying that, by the way, was speaking of old ideas that were around in the founding period, not ideas that he made up. So whether, I don't mean to say whether he's right or he's wrong there, but he is raising fair questions about the idea that negligent or innocent falsehoods should be completely protected. Surely, they should be protected more than knowing lies, but if someone wants a dollar or please, now you know it's false, please say so. Help me out here a little bit. It might be that the right balance isn't obviously where we are. Okay, great. So the final question, which is sad for me because I'm really enjoying this, is how can someone think critically without full transparency of information? Okay, so it's hard, but if you get some information, let's say on your favorite television program that is partial. It might be about COVID-19. It might be about the availability of vaccination. You can still have part of your mind that is thinking, I'm not sure that that's the full picture. You might think I basically trust this newspaper or the station, but I maybe have some reading to do, and that's a great way that people exercise their freedom and show their own capacity for agency. So thank you all for your indulgence, special thanks to the Archivist and to the National Archives. The National Archivist is a national treasure, and the National Archives is even more than that. I'm very grateful for this, and let's vow shall we to keep our critical faculties intact in the next five years and beyond, and let's vow maybe to tell many fewer falsehoods than we would otherwise have told in the next coming months. Thank you.


Okay, so now it's a very great pleasure to introduce Alexander Anders from Budapest who's going to be talking about Neolithic burials in the whole region in Eastern holiday. Good morning for everybody and for everyone and first we should like to say thank you to the session organizers, to Pani Maria and Juan for the invitation and for the opportunity to present our lecture in this conference. About 2,000 kilometers away from here in the northeastern part of the Carpathian basin, more than 7,000 years ago people had settled down in the region of Polgar. We don't know the exact size of the population, but some 340 burials have been uncovered on eight sides in the Polgar area in eastern Hungary, the dates of which 4 between 5,500 and 4,500 CalBC. A part of these burials can be assigned to the Middle Neolithic, Linarband Keramic and other part to the Late Neolithic, Disaharpiteshios Helium complex. The burials were not deposited in independent former cemeteries, all of them were settlement burials. Although for the third glimpse it doesn't really seem to be a high number, the most prevalent peculiarity of these burials is their very amount, since previously such great numbers of burials were never found within a smaller region in the Great Plains. Summaries of the former excavated graves mention only 200 burials from the Albeke and about 500 from the Late Neolithic. Polgar Island is a less covered-lucked surface rising above the one-time fruit pane, covers some 60-70 km² and lies on the outskirts of Bohrgar. The micro-region is outlined by the boundaries of the one-time natural paleo-geographic conditions and it was thus possible to reconstruct the sequence of human occupation and the changes in the micro-region settlement patterns. From the foregoing, it's clear that burials unarsened in Polgar and its vicinity almost immediately attract the attention of the European research as well, as they soon became source material for several international projects. Due to this large-scale international multidisciplinary research progress conducted in the recent years, bioarchaeological, I mean isotope, DNA and paleo-pathological data on the knowledge sigbarias of the Polgar region have been considerably increased. However, these initiatives were a large European scale research programs over each thousands of years, so to say they focused on the big picture to the construction of which the graves of Polgar can only serve as mosaic ties. Therefore, neither to the obtained results of an episode proposed field of research, nor is their distribution uniform. So the aim of our project, which has been started last December, is to get a better understanding of the life and death of these communities. Here, we would like to introduce this project for the first time for a wider audience and present our very first results. The main goal of this project is to change the so-to-say author perspective and to seek answers for such questions which are relevant from an inner point of view. The region is Polgar Island and about 340 excavated barriers is there provide an excellent background for tracing those changes, which may have taken place both in the life of communities and of individuals. We aim to collect equal quantities of data from each and every site in equal quality. As far as possible, we intend to fill the blank spaces left by previous research as well, since only then will our results become comparable. And we have quite a lot of questions to be answered. These are our most relevant questions and proposed research are the following. Are there any technological changes in life style between the various phases of ALP and late-nolicic a period which covers almost 1,000 years? Are there any traceable differences or changes with regard to the life of individuals who were buried at co-temporary sites lying at a great distance from each other? Were there any differences between male and female food consumption? And if so, who had they been changed through space and time? What kind of role did winning played in the life of community? Are there any detectable differences in space and time? Is there and if so, what kind of correlation can be observed between the life and the health condition of such individuals who were buried with valuable prestige artefacts such as spondylous red and red deer canines? Were there changes in health conditions through space and time? What kinds of tri-mortic lesions contiguous diseases can be traced and on what kinds of individuals? We'll be able to find a proper explanation for the under and over representation of certain age groups on the basis of their differences in lifestyle. Are there any traceable differences between men and women with regard to the work they had performed and are there any detectable differences through space and time? What kind of differences can be detected between the remains of children? Were there changes through space and time? Are there any differences, for example, between the individuals buried respectively in the singular area settlement and in the tail settlement of Polga Trusalom? Are there observable differences of correspondences at Polga Trusalom between the individuals buried in the vicinity of a given building? What kind of personal life histories can be reconstructed in case of unconventional burials? What kind of work was performed by those men, each of whom was buried with an anomalous obsidian nucleus in the cemetery of Polga Ferenciat? What can we know about the world buried in Polga Trusalom with a necklace made of 80 imitation of red deer canines or about the older women interved with four and six spondylose arm rings? What can be revealed about the life history of the young child buried is a 10 centimeter long spondylose bead. Were there any differences between the five individuals who got buried in one pit? Furthermore, were there differences between the lifestyles of the older women buried without grave goods at Polga Trusalom with the other ones? Were there artifacts found in the graves such as spondylose beads and arm rings, stone axes, bone and antletours, personal belongings? What kind of objects history can be reconstructed on the basis of user and do they have any relations to the personal histories? Did the man buried in Trusalom indeed use polystone axes? Will we be able to detect user traces on these objects or upper limb asymmetry in case of their owners? How red deer canine necklaces were assembled? Are all the these used for ornaments coming from prey hunted at the same season? Does this season correspond to the season of deaths of the prey hunted for consumption? What kind of data can be obtained from the specification of the disarticulated human bones occurring in great numbers in settlement objects at every site according to bodily location, age group, sex and their spatial distribution within the given site? I think we have quite a lot of interesting questions. But these questions can only be answered with the aid of a complex approach. As applied individually, neither the traditional archaeological or anthropological matters, not certain analytical techniques of bioarchology are adequate enough in the subs to solve these problems. The results will complement each other and the imaging synergy can shed light on the variation and the details of Neolithic way of light geared to individual person. So to sum up, the main goal of the project is the investigation of these 314 Neolithic barriers are nursing in the Poga region with bioarchological and biosocial methods. And the methods we are trying to apply archaeological, microarchological, anthropological and bioarchological methods as well. The starting point of our methodology are the approaches of Marek Zvelebil-Vedrovica as their vitals, life phase and Dushan Borysh-Lepenskivir project. Our research strategy comprises 4 correlating elements. The summary of the previous results and additional investigations which enable us to deal with equivalent data from various sites, applying new methods and integrating and synthesizing the previous and the new results upon which we would be able to reconstruct the micro histories of communities in the personal life of individuals. So we use physical anthropology and pathology, oral pathology, dental and buccal microval analyzes, analysis of antisocial changes using the methods of Vilot and Coimbra and the more detailed paleo-democratic study of the series will be carried as well. We also intend to carry isotope investigations to reconstruct the diet and possible migration. Manufacturing marks and user analysis of debris which is made from organic and non-organic materials such as ponderous artifacts on antleragontos and then red-dyed canines and polished and chipstones as well. Provinian studies on lithics and spondylous artifacts and a quite a new passage of searching the red-dyed canine cement and increments led by Solange-Rigo. And last but not least we apply the methods of archaeology and cardiotherapy radiocarbon measurements. And now let's see our first results. The man with the polished stone axes. Polished stone axes seems to be the expression of maleness not only in the late Nolicy community of the Pogatresholm but in the Weiderbach area or so to say in the Carpathian area as introduced some minutes ago. So and according to the preliminary results of the analysis and his changes led by Istvan Ratz there are no direct correlation between upper arm alterations and polished tools as grave goods in male graves in Pogatres. And we can add that the youngest individual who was buried with an axe was only four six years old according to the right so probably he was unable to use the axe as a tool. According to our interpretation the axes can be considered as signs or symbols and not real tools. And on the basis of the manufacturing marks and user analyzes of red-dyed canine beads carried out by Giugiana Tutt and the letters comparison with the archaeological data we can summarize the following results. Meals never worn imitation but females should try to wear real and imitation beads as well. Imitations were made either bone or clay. The wear of red-dyed canines and their imitation represent a strong connection to the Maturus age group. This phenomenon is strengthened by the fact that this age group is underrepresented in the graves and the singular iron settlements. You can see here this is the sign of this overrepresentation. Red-dyed canines had high prestige value and their appearance is usually connected with other high prestige value items. This indicates that wearing these beads might have been a privilege of high ranking women. There was no strict rule how to wear these personal adornments. Maybe these chains were made individually and they expressed the self or the identity of their owner. And according to the C14 dates wearing such kind of beads built in different chains had a long tradition at the Paul Gaturus alum settlement. According to different user and rejuvenation certain parts suggest that these beads were used longer than the lifespan of one person. If you take a closer look at on these beads and the use in the wider context of the late neolithic period of the curfew, we can observe that Paul Gaturus alum and two nearby settlements have a distinct position. We don't know why. And finally we were able to reconstruct the life story of a brave hunter or but we will present these results in an afternoon session. So please welcome and thank you for your attention.


Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of NPTEL, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the principals, the SPOCs, the mentors, IIT directors, all the IITM faculty here, my colleagues, friends, and all the other representatives from various colleges who have gathered here. Good morning, sir. As we know, due to the incessant rains in Chennai, we had to reschedule this event today. We are indeed very grateful to all of you who have accepted our invitation and found time and installed your busy schedules to attend this event. We also appreciate the wonderful efforts put in by all the principals, the SPOCs, the mentors of each college for joining hands with us and making NPTEL locals chapter such a huge success.  Local chapter is our pilot initiative. And we are very excited to say that we now have 150-plus local chapters. More than 15 exam cities were included on request from SPOCs. And we have also given out 3,500-plus scholarships to students so far. Some of the colleges who have represented today include Anni Velankani College of Engineering, Dronajaya College of Engineering, Dronajaya Group of Institutions, Pula Reddy Engineering College, KS Rangasamy College of Technology, Kallasindilam University, Kamaraj College, NEC Kovilpatti, Pani Malar Engineering College, Pani Malar Institute of Technology, Prathisha Institute of Technology, Priyadarshili Engineering College, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Sausury Academy of Engineering, Savitha Engineering College, Setu Institute of Technology, Srimathi Kamala and Sri Venkappa Agadhi College of Engineering, Sri Shasta Institute of Engineering and Technology, Sri Sharda College of Women, Sri Vasavi College, SSM Institute of Technology, Thiyagaraja Polytechnic College, SRM, Kattambulathur, VHSM College and Vallyamma Engineering College. This is from all over Tamil Nadu, UP, Delhi, Karnul, et cetera. Now speaking of NPTEL online courses, we are happy to share that from the time we initiated these courses till now. We have tripled the number of courses that we have run. Also, we have tripled the number of student registrations. None of this could have happened without your help. So I want to say a big thank you to all of you. And we hope to continue this work with you and ensure that online education reaches every student and every individual who has a thirst for knowledge. Thank you. I would like to invite Professor Mangusundar to welcome him. Good morning. Professor Bhaskar Dalmurti, the director of the 80 Midrass and also chairman of the National Program Implementation Committee of NPTEL. Professor Andrew, Professor Pradap, who are the next co-ordinators for several years of NPTEL and I hope that they will take it through this and many, many other initiatives of NPTEL. My faculty colleagues from several departments here and the faculty and principal and administrative staff from all the institutions who are adopting NPTEL in one form or the other to improve their own educational needs as well as to tell us how to create better and more directly useful learning materials for the students. The entire NPTEL staff team led by three or four people to start with Mr. Fernand, Krishnamurti, Bhakti, and Bhatta and of course Kamala who was here and all the other staff members. So it is my pleasure to welcome you all as an outgoing NPTEL co-ordinator. I've been associated with this project for the last 12 years from the beginning but I'm extremely happy that the next team of colleagues and interactive groups like yours is following so much more directly and in the future we have very, very pleasant online learning as well as offline learning. Online learning is only for a short period. It's an event and we follow the model of groups. So it is my pleasure on behalf of the entire NPTEL team and to the chairman of the NPTEL to welcome you to this one-day event which will help us to interact with you face-to-face and also solve some of the issues which have surfaced in the last several months to a year in interacting with colleagues. NPTEL is offered unconditionally as you know but of course its certificate is a service and therefore it does cost the process if we have to make the certificate a factor of form. This follows very closely the massive open online course format except for the certification part which is factored seriously by the NPTEL body because this was discussed several times in our TIC and the chairman was kind enough to allow this process of factoring with a private body which had run the other examination but we hope that the certificate that is generated is also very credible besides all the learning that happens during the process of the online course. The courses will be offered several times during the whole day we would like to have an interaction with all of you to make this product further and also to bring in thousands of other NPTEL and open chapters to our country and some probably maybe outside this country as well. And we hope that as a family it grows very large, very fast but not without control that it keeps the quality and NPTEL is also leading the way for the entire National MOOCs movement which are now carried out by many other institutions. Therefore we have a lot to learn from all of you that we welcome all of you on behalf of the team and we hope that you have a wonderful day. Thank you very much. Good morning to all of you and welcome to IIT Madras for this meeting of local chapters of the NPTEL online course program. The NPTEL program started as a massive initiative to make a, use the, then fairly new medium of online repository in the early 2000 that period to make available to students across India but even across the world who whatsoever may be interested as we say in our letters who whatsoever it may concern. A whole lot of courses, course material which are prepared by faculty who are among the best available in the country in various disciplines. Actually if you do a analysis of the program which has been running for almost I think 10 years now you'll find that its cost benefit is, the ratio is very good. There's no way any other country with their cost structures could have done a pre-creator repository of this kind for the amount of money that was spent. It's also been used quite well though it is sort of like publishing a book and putting it out, we don't know who's using it we don't know what they're using it for but we know through feedback when we meet people who have used it that it has served the purpose in many ways for different people. One of the things it did also collateral benefit was that because it takes a fairly large organizational effort to create such a repository the NPTEL project from the point of view of those who create the courses, the IIT faculty, the IIC faculty many other institutions who join in as partners in small ways it helped create a large family of faculty members who have similar focus in a similar mission. So a very large number of people across institutions who share some common interests and who share some common goals have become friends, have become to know each other have also seen each other's work online because you can always go and look up anybody's course and we have a feeling of being part of a common team that is trying to do something. This also is very important in a large country like ours very often otherwise we are just working by ourselves. When this new mass MOOC format started evolving in the west as a way of more interactive way of using the online medium for education compared to just putting an online course as a repository, we also started looking at it some small number of faculty actually offered courses on global MOOC platforms and we also started thinking about discussing among ourselves that's where the formation of this large family helped how in what way can it be useful in our country in our ecosystem, in our situation how should we adapt it, what should we do. So the various ideas that came up the various ideas that still keep coming up still learning is a long way to go partly our interactions with you we are seeking to find out what works what doesn't work and so on and we said we should also start experimenting because only then we'll know simply standing outside the pool touching the water with the toe is not going to help we have to get in. So even though the NPTEL project as it existed in the previous phase we just concluded this concluding actually on December 31st did not include a MOOC component we have enough flexibility and we have running the program sufficiently efficiently that we had enough funds left over so we said we can let's try some let's try this, let's learn so that when we submit the next phase for NPTEL for funding we have very clear idea of what can be done and what will work and we can promise something which we are confident of delivering not an experimental mode not a fully experimental mode so we started couple of years back with the help of Google's open source platform we started offering some MOOCs courses and that is how this NPTEL online program online course were started and whoever faculty were excited about trying this we roped them in and we started we also felt that from our discussions which I had mentioned we also felt that we must have a certification component otherwise it doesn't make sense and we started from pretty early in the game I don't think we offered any course without certification we might have one or two but not too many and we said we must do this and that is how there are some MOOCs programs in the world which do this but many don't and as we started we realized also that in the Indian context a large fraction of the potential user base are young students who are in college this profile is very different in other countries many other countries are targeted at working people at people who are otherwise in other professions or maybe not even employed just wanted to learn in more of a continuing education kind of mode and whereas we realized that we are actually going to be having a very large number of users who are young for whom they are in the graduate education program and this is something to augment what they are already going through so we realized that even the mode in which these courses are consumed if you use a modern word in the online world by users when we are very different it might be done more in groups if our entire classes may do it there may be a mentor or a teacher who is involved also which is very very unusual if you ask a MOOC program coordinator or somebody who is running even conceived of MOOCs in the US they would not imagine that that the consumer users will be sitting in groups and large number of them may even have a teacher with them so these are all things that are unique to us and we should therefore think about how to how to use the MOOC in this context and get the maximum of it with no preconceived notions about what should be done, what should not be done and so on so I think we started feeling our way forward and that is how the formation of these local chapters have happened we realized that many of the users our students are in colleges and there are teachers with them and they can be of immense they can be actually a partner in this and I think the NPTEL coordinators who are looking to see what will work best I found that this local chapter the formation is very useful and they have encouraged it and lo and behold we now have as they say 150 local chapters and we have variety of experiences from these local chapters different chapters have tried different things some of them have worked very well so we can now you know transfer best practices from one to the other we even have on local chapters Andrew was telling me in Ecuador and we have several across the country of course large number are in Tamil Nadu because of physical proximity the NPTEL online course programs courses are being taught by faculty from all over India but larger fraction of are from IIT Madras and since they had sort of the coordination of NPTEL is done from Chennai from IIT Madras the initial effort is also you know large fraction of it is from here so there are lot of Tamil Nadu colleges but what we now see is we have just got approval for the next phase of NPTEL program and the next phase of NPTEL program is largely going to be online courses I think the I don't know if there is any but there might be some continuing development of repository may or may not I am not find out but the focus is largely on these online courses and we actually want to figure out and expand in a way in which we end up being a force multiplier as they call in military we already have in India a large number of colleges the colleges have teachers they have students large numbers are learning every all these institutions have grown very rapidly in the last 15-20 years in fact most of them in the last 10 years when you have rapid growth there are always gaps they are not enough teachers, not enough infrastructure whatever whatever right students from different backgrounds come to these places they come with various handicaps as a result and everybody has to scramble to fill up these gaps what we want to do is to see how the NPTEL online course program can become a force multiplier in a different so the faculty of the IIT is ISC or tomorrow even some of the faculty of these institutions engineering institutions who are in a position to actually who are in a strong position and in a position to therefore reach out and be a force multiplier these we are trying to see how given their limited time and bandwidth because they are all functioning in a normal good old you know brick and mortar method of teaching and grading and research and all of that they are all doing all that so how can they function in a way in which this kind of technology this kind of tool can be used to really increase the value proposition dramatically for the students across the country as we saw from some of the feedback from the students who have who are giving their anecdotal views on this small video that you saw it can mean lots of things to lots of people some people just are very excited by the quality of the teaching some people like the content some people like the breath learning something about appreciating music whatever the point is how can we enable using this how can some limited amount of quality high quality but and solid effort but limited in scale because the number of people and amount of time they can spend on this limited how can that be amplified to some extent by this kind of technology and really made available to large number of people with the you know is an amplifier that whose performance depends on the impedance matching with the receivers which means the local chapters are very very important so we I think you will hear more from my colleagues on this but we are really looking forward to learning from you how the local chapters can play a big role in the oncoming years as we expand this program then the MHRE is in the process of creating a very large single platform for online courses in the country it is called SWIM it will come into existence soon I think the processes are going on so it is a way it is only it is not very different from what you are having now except that it will be nationwide and it will involve courses offered not just by the IITs and IIC through this NPTEL but also involve courses offered by other universities other institutions in law medicine sciences and humanities and so on so SWIM will be a very large nationwide program and what we are hoping is all our learnings from this effort will help us develop that into a really solid program which can be unique in the world first it solves our problems and maybe it will solve help solve problems for some others also this is our hope and I hope and you as the early 150 chapters involved in this whatever you are learning whatever you are sharing with us whatever you are contributing as your inputs to what will make this work better it is going to matter a lot to a lot to a whole lot to everybody in the country not just this it is not just for these courses and these chapters so I think we actually think as we are seeing what is happening that there can be a huge role played by people across the country who may be consumers but may also become contributors partly we can have situations where students or other faculty members in different parts of the country contribute various solutions to problems various small expositions on the way they are able to explain something which is very good so this can actually be augmented very well and we think a lot is possible other things that we worked out the certification is being done we want to make sure that credits can be obtained you know that UGC you know all universities are going to a choice based credit system so that has to come in place then there has to be a mechanism for credits to be transferred MHRD is working on all of that but in the meantime of course some of you are already doing it but this is going to become a long track possibility for all students in the country and as we move towards that kind of a system by the time we are ready to put all those nuts and bolts in place we must know what aspects of this new online technology works for us in what way in what fashion because we don't want to run something which doesn't do a good job and leaves which sort of one more sort of half baked at trying to expand education we don't want that kind of situation one situation that we have grasped this new tool properly and used it well and really used it to make a difference to the quality and scale of our huge educational expansion so I thank you all for coming today though we had rescheduled because of the rains I hope there were rains all over Tamil Nadu so those of you are from Tamil Nadu in your respective areas I hope things have come back to normal and I request you all to share your views and learn from each other and help us learn from you what works and what doesn't work so that the next phase the MPTEL when you see hundreds of these courses being offered continuously across the country that large numbers of students can benefit and we can learn and we can really grow this in a matter of couple of two three years to a really solid program which is a force multiplier for the huge education system that is going and evolving in our country thank you very much good morning everyone thanks for coming once again this program was rescheduled and thanks for being able to make it so I have a brief presentation that goes over the numbers I think sometimes each of us do our own individual thing it's good to see the unsolidated numbers of what online certification has done so far etc etc I'll start with that and then I'll talk about local chapters and how MPTEL has already benefited from local chapters and how we think of taking it forward in the future so that's what I'm going to do I'll quickly go through the slides I have several colleagues with me who are also going to share their experiences some of them have taught courses with us and interacted with you hopefully so they'll also talk about it so alright so these are some numbers MPTEL like Professor Bhaskar and Mangal mentioned it's been around for 12 years Professor Mangal was very humble in the way he said it but MPTEL has been a big phenomenon and there's no doubt about it for the money that we spent and the effort that he has put in has achieved tremendous results and these are the numbers and they tell the complete story the way it has to be and these kind of numbers you won't find in many portals and also you have to keep in mind MPTEL doesn't go for the hot glamorous sort of courses I mean we go for hardcore engineering courses we're here to solve the problems of engineering colleges and university systems in the country so we're focused on that and to make up these kind of numbers is really really impressive and a lot of credit goes I think we should all clap our hands once we've got a tremendous effort and like Professor Bhaskar mentioned bringing people in together and holding them together that's one of his huge strengths and he's able to do that and he has done it for so many years so it's all due to him okay so MPTEL online certification like most of you know is three steps I think I'm going to quickly go through this this is open online course which is run along the lines of MOOCs on the portal and then we have the proctor exam for language reader certificate so this is a sequence quite a good model for many people keeping the open online course entirely free so that you can do just learning if you like and then if you have if you feel like writing an exam you can pay a fee and write that so this is a story so far in terms of numbers and that's the portal it's got a new look now and we're trying to change it because once you have hundreds of courses it's difficult to have it all on the same page and it's very hard to look so we're trying to work with engineers at Google and of course I've acknowledged the contribution of Google they've contributed in time and effort and actual hardware resources I think close to a million dollars now if you hand up everything in two years and that's a lot of money they put in and it's most of it is due to their effort as well and January 2016 we have 43 course 45 courses which were redone or repurposed to be used in a MOOC and assessments are multiple choice you have a discussion forum lot of questions asked and like it was mentioned in that little video we also have hands-on programming in fact even subjective assignments are possible we have faculty members who ask you to submit PDF documents which are manually graded etc so that's also possible and mentors case we have a certification partner who runs exams I think many of you are also TCSI on certified exam centers I think many of your colleges are also that so you would have seen these kind of exams and the certificate right now comes from the continuing education centers of IITs and in future like Professor Bhaskar mentioned there might be a way to have a different body issue in those kind of things introduction to research which Professor Pratap Aridas is coordinating that's a very different sort of course not like a regular classroom course it has group discussions which really go beyond everything so in fact January 2016 there is a course on how to use a scanning electron microscope that's an important skill and apparently it's not that difficult it can be taught very nicely and you can use it in fact the faculty member says anyone who does my course can go and take measurements in an SEM directly without any problem so one more course three or four faculty members together are putting together a course on what is the career or how different career options and how to choose career options very innovative sort of course as in they are going to go into industry ten years experienced people talk to them about how their career took shape courses which don't have too many takers are supported by the courses which are huge takers so overall we achieve a nice balance and for instance civil engineering is a subject that a lot of people like good electives in and we are trying very hard to get make sure that civil engineering mechanical engineering we do offer enough electives and core courses to help the need there and the institutes right now item address and Kanpur are playing a big role we have also had contributions from smaller institutes like CMI and math science and other institutes are jumping into it Karakpur is offering eight courses in January this is their starting point and the way I see it they are very serious they are going to offer more courses we are going to get Delhi also we were at Delhi on 15th faculty they are really excited they are going to offer courses hopefully IAC and other IITs will also jump in once all of them come in like professor Bhaskar mentioned number is going to be hundreds of courses every semester and now that is a different sort of problem now how do you pick what course to take how do you advise students on which is interesting etc so we hope to work with you and help you in that process as well ok so here is a list of course title just to capture the length and breadth of the kind of courses we offer not just going for interesting ones everything you want to imagine is out there and I am enrolled in courses and 15,000 students have got certificate so far and that is the big number of course enrollment is always very big and number of people who do certificates is lesser and that is to be expected I mean you do not put any filter at the beginning you admit anybody you want enrolls and then you say you have to learn suddenly you know programming and data structures not everybody is tuned to that they do not know it also and after the second week only they will know that course is not for me maybe in some countries they expect results in this fashion but I think in our country it perfectly makes sense you can be in any discipline you can do courses in any other discipline if you do not like it you drop out I think that is much more liberal way of learning than you know going into one discipline whether you like it or not doing everything in that only I mean I think that is not the correct philosophy in fact I like this number from what other portals might see but that is not the only thing about 13 percent are employed so the significant number is also employed in work and 7 percent are others others meaning various people and when we go to exams we see I mean it is quite interesting this there is a IG from CRPF even the January run I think Hanpur is also getting into it they are also trying to push that big time in their state so West Bengal will also come up as correct port comes up so other states will slowly jump into this as well some testimonials from students you heard quite a bit on the video that I think is a very good testimonial so in fact there is a college called Amini College of Engineering in Palakkad which about 75 students from there have got certificates and they made a nice video where each student comes online comes on the video and explains for like two minutes or something what they got out of it so that is something that would encourage all the local chapters to make I mean if you can make a video like that with your students it would be very nice also couple of things we do to bring students into prominent students spread out all over the country we do not know who the good ones are so we have a toppers page on our portal where for every course anyone who got more than 90 their little photograph and college name and the score is mentioned in the toppers page and it is so heartening for me to see for instance in the programming data structures course programming in C course I think couple of students from Kamaraj College of Engineering do we have representatives from Kamaraj yeah so couple of students from there their phase the name comes up I don't know I mean I group entries of someone far away from the big cities to see their phase in a big portal saying okay I'm one of the toppers in this course I don't know the kind of confidence that student would get is it's yeah so it's tremendous it's nice to see that kind of thing from spread out from all over the country I mean of course all the colleges are also mentioned I was personally happy about that but you know so many nice things come out when you have something like this and this is a nice thing that I think our staff came up with this idea of putting in toppers on the webpage I think it's a very nice thing as well so every student has a profile on that page okay so the profile shows for every student what are all the courses they did how well they did in that course what marks they got what exam marks everything so the student has a record or transcript of how they did the course in the portal available always not only the student anyone who wants to verify also can do the same thing so it's a nice setup in that session okay so in terms of numbers once again the enrollment is always very big but the number of people who submit the first homework in my opinion is a good representation of people who think they can do this course and from that number you can count your dropout I think that's a more reasonable measure at least as far as I am concerned and we have seen in many courses where local chapters were involved and the mentors interacted with the student the number of people who submitted the first homework they stayed on till the end so I think that again brings out the importance of colleges supporting students doing these courses it goes a long way in retaining them helping them be disciplined about the course because the discipline part the regularity part is something that you can't enforce on an online portal so it has to be done from the colleges I think it makes a big difference in that fashion so this is some list of courses we will go through this in maybe detail a little bit later so I want to say a few things about what we learnt so I think Prasabasco is mentioning general things and there are a few specific things we have learnt from local chapters already and we are trying to enforce them into our system okay so one problem we have had is in IIT when we run a course we are supposed to declare the method of grading and stick to it but usually there is a lot of flexibility in that I mean that is how I am used to running a course here I can say okay half way through the course I find the first exam did not really work I will reduce the percentage for that things like that it is very flexible here because we have a small group of students and we have the liberty to assist the class on its own because that is how our university works and many faculty keep that flexibility in their mind even for online courses so we had a few mishaps because of that that was invaluable feedback once again so now we are really pushing our faculty to declare a clear scheme of evaluation and stick to it whatever happens till the end so that is the huge learning we had that we had to push that into faculty's minds when they are ready to offer the course that is one issue we had the other great important issue was actually I was in Karnul for an exam and a few students from I think Pula Reddy College is here as well they were coming out and was talking to them about how the course went etc they said we all did assignments we used to just take assignments from others and put it in asking don't you have lectures where you are not able to do the assignment based on the lectures and the student I still remember the way she said the lectures don't show how to solve the assignment I was really a bit puzzled by it because for me the lectures are talking about how to use for loop it was a programming course how to use for loop how to use while loop how to declare the lectures are talking about it but the program is asking them to solve some last and on a rod problem okay so for many students in IIT or even people like me we are used to students who don't need that kind of hand holding so they know how to solve problems so you put a problem they know how to solve it they have been solving problems from a very young age they know how to solve problems so when you describe some scheme they know how to translate their problem in that language you describe that to them you know so when we describe in the lecture okay this is how you do it and then you give any other problem they will know how to do that translation so our faculty are used to such kind of teaching so they don't do that last mile of working out problems in detail for students in class in fact you do that our students will get bored they will come to those classes so they are used to that kind of a setup so this is great feedback once again so we are passing on that feedback back to faculty so we are telling them that every week you have to have one specially works out problems so if it's a programming course you have a video where you are sitting in front of a computer typing a program you know debugging compiling everything you show literally how you do it so these are things that we are passing on to faculty now getting them to do those kind of things in fact come up with solutions for assignments quite often when we give tutorial problems in class here we don't have to put out solutions there is a group of students who solve it they already have solutions we really don't have to do that we are testing on solutions etc so we are slowly trying to use this kind of feedback and I want to take this opportunity to say we really want more feedback from you so really what work it can be anything what work what didn't work any problem you had we don't guarantee that we can fix it because ultimately this entire system relies on academic freedom given to faculty in running courses we won't overly disturb that but nevertheless the feedback is important in giving guidelines and we can give guidelines to faculty of course we can give guidelines to faculty saying this is what works well our experience works well please use it and that's good enough in most cases faculty will follow it they know they understand that their ultimate target is of course to educate people they are not trying to fight anybody here so this feedback is very important and quite often I have seen many of you are a little bit reluctant to give feedback I mean our staff are quite friendly you have seen them you interacted with them so if you think you are little bit you don't want to tell me anything you can definitely tell them to us and sometimes you know our culture is such that you don't really question the teacher too much you know if you don't feel like questioning teachers you can tell them that many of them are available out here so please use this opportunity to give us good constructive feedback and how to make things better okay so of course getting marks is important but like I said the wider thing of what to do to help your students learn better I think that's at the heart of it please take this opportunity to do so okay so I'm done as far as the presentation is concerned I think we have some time budgeted for others to talk so thank you sir next I'd like to invite Professor Pratap Reddy talk about local chapters good morning I join Andrew Professor Bhaskar Ramurthy and Professor Mangal and first of all thank you all for joining us today NPTEL has been a learning experience for us it still is a learning experience and I expect it will remain that way I mean we are already I mean the courses we teach but this process is itself new so there are many things that is a learning experience for us that are learning experiences that we are using along the way so whatever it is that we have accomplished so far is something that's an evolving process so we have got some procedures in place some method of doing things and so on but these are all things that I've evolved over the last year and a half and we are actually continuously looking to see if we are headed in the right direction if there are things that we can do to improve the experience of this online course initiative for all the students who participate in it and all the faculty who are interested in it so as we started out initially the audience was typically you know individuals spread across the country and in many ways that is nice it means that you know you can have two people in Delhi one person in Karnol five people in Assam who are interested in the course and we still offer the course and people benefit from it so really this is an inverted model I have I mean we have come to many of your colleges you know experienced your hospitality and shared many of our experiences with you the model is inverted because in general in India we have always had the situation that you know 100,000 people who get into a college there are only 1000 seats so the first and most important job of the college is to figure out a way to eliminate 99,000 people then you work with the 1000 people so the most you know you become most famous for that process by which you have eliminated 99,000 people this is an inverted model we don't really mind many 100,000 people want are interested in a course they can take the course there is no problem they can take it and so that as Andrew uses the word it is very liberating you can take really education the way we have always wanted it to be that is you know people are interested in something they try it out they are not denied the opportunity of even trying out what they are interested in they try it out maybe after you know three classes they feel in fact I thought it was into my you know my line of work but it is not I am not quite comfortable with it so you pull out and so that contributes to those drop out numbers they just join check it out see if you know it is really as interesting as they thought it was or they really connect with it the way they would and if they don't they pull out which is wonderful I mean in fact so now you really have even a liberated individual he or she knows that you know okay I won't live my life thinking I never got an opportunity to try this course I tried it I mean of the five things that I thought I was interested in it turns out I am only interested in one of them great so then they can really you know focus with all their heart on that one thing without having this you know always this feeling that you know I was not allowed to look at this stuff and that is really the case here because you can take engineering student you can take an electrical engineering course you can take you know some chemistry course you can take computer science anything you can take aerospace course you can know we are not stopping anybody if they do well they do well they get a certificate from us so that's the thing so as I said you know initially we started off with individuals now we we were also looking at new ways to you know make sure that most students benefit from this whole process lot of effort is being put in and interest is there we just wanted to make those two connect and the local chapter process has really helped this happen and so first of all we really thank all of you for you know having enabled it because because of local chapters we really have a much more coordinated way in which we are able to reach out to students understand their concerns understand any limitations in the process and address them so just to give you a few examples so I think I mean some have already been mentioned I think puller ready colleges here we had the 500 candidates from that college to participate in one course so specifically for them examination centers were open so this is something that we understood our exam partner enables these things if there are a large number of collection of students in one location we can add more exam centers in that location and getting some knowing this ahead of time really helps so that we can plan our logistics much better so that we had about 500 students and we had centers and carnals specifically for them in a mini college in Palagart we have 100 plus students who wrote exams and at that point they didn't even have a local chapter so that was very nice then we also again learning experience you know sitting in a city we assume certain things and they are not necessarily true so for example with respect to Anaya Velangani college what we learned was that you know many students may not have online payment processes available to them through which they can make we just set up a portal we say pay your fees online and so on and that may not work and the college authorities were very helpful they worked with the students I think they are here Anaya Velangani colleges yeah so great so that's them they really worked with those students try to enable payment of those fees in a coordinated way through DD and so on and so that worked and we had lot of other things that are going on side by side throughout the country there are you know people are certainly looking at these idea that such online courses can be used for credit in some manner that is acceptable to their university and as the professor Bhaskar Ramurthy was pointing out the government also wants to you know expand this program and have something called Swayam which is expected to come sometime soon and presumably more actively get colleges to you know benefit from this in a formal way right now it's going on we give a certificate the student takes it and he or she can use it when they see fit this would make it much more formal many universities are doing this in some manner so for example in Madanapalli college in Andhra Pradesh one online courses compulsory for all engineering students three credits so any one course they can take and three credits worth of content is there then and they clear the course successfully then they get credits for it this kind of a model is actually being tried out by different universities within the flexibility that is there in their system so they are asking for one or more courses to be taken by the students and and an NPTEL course ideally fits that kind of requirement in Maharashtra University also students have been allowed to take one online course for credit many students from Pune are taking this kind of courses from us UPTO has mandated all colleges to take NPTEL open online open online courses and about 25 have joined with local chapters so this kind of initiative is on and I expect it is very likely that it will grow that one or more courses will be specifically picked up by students and that again I think local chapter really helps in helping us decide what is that course that would make sense our faculty right now are offering courses based on their expertise their knowledge domain knowledge what they feel students in that area should you know it is important for students in that area to learn specific colleges may be looking for a particular elective and they may not have faculty so that kind of feedback helps us also plan our courses to tell our faculty that you know certain types of courses people are looking for and so on even the new course that we are offering the one that coming up on research methodology and to some degree it is based on feedback we also had the idea that it would be a useful course but we did have specific written feedback from number of students saying that this kind of a thing is not there we are joined for some research degree and we are not really sure what we need to do so we have now that kind of feedback helps us put such a course together we already have such courses in our campus but we had not thought of it as something that we could offer as an online course now we are going to do that so in any case I think that is all I really wanted to share with you we really thank you for being you know actively being local chapters in your respective colleges it is a very important you know concept and you know activity for making this whole you know community activity of education successful so I thank you all for being that thank you for having come here thank you very much


Uh-uh-uh, don't turn that dial. This is the right station if you wish to hear about Jonathan Thomas and his Christmas on the moon Well, I guess you've heard what has occurred to Jonathan Thomas and Gus But just in case we'll find the place where it all began You see Jonathan Thomas was a wee little tad who is never too good or never too bad And Gus was the bestest of all teddy bears and one night when they went away upstairs to bed After his dad had said good night and after his eyes had closed up tight and two little elves slid down and looked around Then Gus that's the teddy bear He opened his eyes and what a surprise to see such guys from the moon and then right soon He growled and growled and sort of howled Till the elves were afraid and wouldn't have stayed for a million trillion dollars And they turned about faced and away they raced and cuz he chased them up to the skies and Jonathan Thomas He heard their cries and opened his eyes and almost died with surprise and cried And then without stopping to pack not even his sneakers and wearing nothing at all But just his sleepers he chased after Gus and he ran and ran as only little boys can until he came to the moon But it seems he got there a little too soon because the Terrible's Rebobliums had broken the laws and kidnapped poor old Santa Claus and then a merry old soul Who was all King Cole held a court of the very worst sort and Jonathan Thomas? He got the blame of course he tried to explain that he just had came That's not good grammar, but it rhymes with the line and they told him They'd scold him and set him to boil and feed him two doses of castor oil Unless he minded the laws and brought back poor old Santa Claus or Jonathan Thomas didn't know what to do But then neither would you if you were not you but instead were Jonathan Thomas. I Want my mommy and daddy and good. Please mr. Man in the moon. I want to go home My goodness gracious. Yeah, how can you go home when you haven't found Santa Claus yet? But I don't know where he is.  Of course. You don't know where he is You couldn't find him if you did how can you find someone unless someone's lost? You don't have to find the answer to that question until after you found Santa Claus King Cole says that the terrible squee-bub your lungs had kidnapped Santa Claus and taking him to the land of squee-bubble I go there to find him. Maybe they'll kidnap me too and gobble me up. Yeah. Yeah, that's right Oh, but I don't want to be gobbled up. I want to go home. Yeah. Oh my gracious They are someone at the door that makes me so sore I could rip and roar till my coat was tore and what's more or what's well? Quick quick quick think of another word that rhymes with door. I don't know of course not I don't know rhymes with blows so go and Joe. Oh now. It's a sin and I'll have to say come in. Oh Oh, so it's you isn't of course. It's me as you can see I'm little bo peep and I've lost my sheep And I can't find them really I can't I've left them alone really I have But they didn't come home. Have you seen them? Oh, of course not. Oh, thank you very much. Good. Bye. Oh My goodness gracious Seems like everything on the moon is lost these days Yesterday mr. Squeezel lost his temper. He hasn't found it yet the day before that the grandfather's clock lost an hour Yeah, and it still hasn't found it if this keeps up We'll all be lost pretty soon and then where will we be? That's what I want to know Where will we be? I guess we'll be lost here. Well, why of course, that's right Why didn't I think of that? Why didn't I? Oh, but come come come. We'll have to hurry or else We'll lose time. We'll have to find that too. Oh By the way, I've got a surprise for you Jonathan Thomas. Oh, I like surprises. What is it if you please? I just decided that I will go with you to find Santa Claus Cool, oh if we both go it'll only take half as long unquote. Oh That's very kind of you sir because I would have been afraid to go by myself Oh Fiddlesticks you don't have to go by myself to reach the land to squee bubble You have to go by the rock candy bridge over the merry-go-round river Yeah, and then through the canyon of the three dwarves Is it very far if you please? Oh, that's very only a thousand miles or so. Why? Because I'm little and you're big and my legs aren't as long as yours and My legs get tired a quicker than anything now They couldn't get tired quicker than anything because anything is always tired and besides We're not going to walk. We're going to ride. Oh, that's nicer than anything Oh, of course we ought to if we didn't auto we wouldn't have to would we and we'd better hurry Oh, we won't find Santa Claus in time for Christmas. Yeah, come on Jonathan Thomas first We have to go to the stable and get Gorgonzola Who's why he's my horse of course my beautiful horse What else in the world could he be? The only one who can always run and never get tired of me Yeah Gorgonzola Gorgonzola a cheesy sort of a name Yeah, he's got a red coat and he can run like a goat. Yeah, and sky blue is the color of his mean There is Gorgonzola Not so loud we'll hear you and get his feelings hurt He's the funniest color. I ever saw he's red and blue and green Of course he is. Haven't you ever heard of the horse of another color? Oh, yes, because my daddy says that to my mommy He says that's a horse of another color. Well, there he is. That's Gorgonzola They'll come over here so you can meet him. Does he talk? Does he talk?  Hiya, JT. How do you do? I do as I please and I don't give a sneeze because I I'm as happy as any horse can be or I'm colossal.  Oh, yes, sir. Of course. Oh, you'd better stay in fact Jonathan Thomas He's going into his dance. He does that every morning. Oh, that'll be fun I've never seen a horse dance Gorgonzola is my name a cheesy name, but just the same. I'm a beautiful horse to see for I'm stupendous I'm colossal.  How do you like that? That was very nice if you please nice. That was colossal. It was super stupendous Yes, sir. Mr. Gargons. Well, well, all right. All right. All right. It's time for us to leave for anybody knows You can't go anywhere unless you leave. I'm ready if you please say where was we going wait? Don't you know wait on the land to squee bubble of course to rescue Santa Claus, aren't we Jonathan Thomas? Oh Why that's moira. That's what it is Plain moira. That's why don't people tell me these things Didn't you know Mr. Gorgonzola? I didn't know nothing. I'm saying it's moira. That's what it is nothing but plain unadulterated moira Now listen, let's stop the arguing Gorgonzola and quit stalling in that stall Well, you've got a hurry or we'll be late and there won't be any Christmas then this year. Oh Okay, I'm with you. Put J. Tell me back and let's go Well, all right Jonathan Thomas climb up on Gorgonzola's back now, sir.  That's it. No leg over there Mr. Gorgonzola. I said hang on. Here we go Here we go. Yeah, here we go Well, there they go Jonathan Thomas and the man in the moon and the beautiful horse of another color Gorgonzola Down the road which leads to the terrible land of Screebobble But do you think they'll find Santa Claus in time? Well, we certainly hope so don't we and we'd better listen to the next episode and find out hadn't we don't forget