Good morning ladies and gentlemen on behalf of NPTEL. I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the principles SPOC's mentors Professors item address faculty my colleagues friends and all the other representatives who have gathered here Last December I stood before you saying that we have over 150 local chapters The last six months these numbers have more than doubled Today, I can proudly stand before you and share that we have more than 500 local chapters This is indeed Thank you. This is indeed a very proud moment for all of us. I would like to share some statistics with you Till date we have completed nine exam runs and we have completed about 122 courses in These runs we have given out 12,000 and more as scholarships and The number of candidates who has been certified is 28,000 plus We we appreciate the wonderful efforts put in by the principles the SPOC's and mentors of each college and For joining hands with us and making an epithelial local chapter such a huge success. Thank you so much and None of this could have materialized without your help So I want to say a big thank you to all of you We hope to continue to work with you and ensure that online education reaches every student and every individual who has a thirst for knowledge Thank you so much Now I'd like to invite Professor Mangal Sundar to come and welcome our guests. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Kamala Good morning mean all I can do is to say thank you for every effort and The wonderful organizational and reach of the NPTEL team I Must tell you in 1999 we had no idea where we would be that's when this whole thing started and It is really nice to Recall that you there are 500 institutions which have expressed direct Participatory interest not merely Observational interest No, when we had distributed the course materials the earlier many many Institutions very interested, but now we have many organizations directly participating in it And that's a wonderful sign for good things to come in India first of all I want to thank my own colleague Professor Andrew Andrew Thangaraj the Department of Electrical Engineering Professor Pratap Haridas Department of Metallurgical Sciences and Engineering and the NPTEL principal Administrative team headed by this is Bharati Bala G Here Kamala who just spoke to you before and many others and the whole team of NPTEL for ensuring the continuity and The rocket speed with which thing should happen When some of us were involved in the earlier design of NPTEL So it is it is through them that we have been able to get all of you here and also share your experiences your Expectations and the value additions that you would like to bring in to this project Please see that this is the national program on technology enhanced learning. It doesn't have any institution by identity Okay, everybody in this country in this nation is welcome to be a partner That's it Maybe it is our coordinating maybe some other institution would like to coordinate this later But it's a national effort which means every one of us would contribute to it as Voluntarily and as sincerely as we can to ensure that the next generation of students as well as the current generation of students benefit from the whole process and many of us as individuals also stand to benefit because we get to learn from our colleagues in Parallel because very often you and your colleagues teach at the same time And therefore you have very little time to see what the other person is teaching Now NPTEL provides you the basis to go back and look at what your colleagues would have said and what you wanted to learn from them And this has happened to me. Yeah, this has happened to me many many times because When I need to look into a particular concept a few years from now Instead of typing Google, I think you should type NPTEL to find out that a particular concept is is there or not I think that's what we would like all of you to do. It's not that Google is I Mean it's not providing. I think we should raise our level to that bar That is the bar to which we want to reach that I think that's the idea and therefore it means everything and everybody's contribution is important in that process now I just put up a First page some of you might have read the couple of lines, but let me still put that up This is an article that I'm summarizing for another international agency. So hopefully It will get published in the next few months and I will make certain that it's available to everybody on the internet Let me just see if I can Sorry So I need to increase the font size, which is somewhere down here, I guess Yeah Yeah, this is something I have been taught as a school or a college student The woods are lovely dark and deep but I have promises to keep and Miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. This is a beautiful poem by Robert Frost Entitled stopping by the woods on a snowy evening The last line is important. I think that's what we are all here for we have Tens of thousands of miles to go before we can sleep and Remember there are at this point of time two and a half crore students who are in the higher education and About two times. Sorry about four times that in the high school education In engineering, we have about four and a half million Which is about 16 to 18 percent of the total student population in the world in India total student population in India four and a half million engineering students and about 16 million students in arts and sciences this is what was the number given by the UGC University grants commission in 2013 and all predictions are that the Demographical advantage that we have in terms of the average age of India actually going down as you are Becoming older it is surprising that the average age of India is still going down the youth is going to be the strongest component of this country for the next 20 years or 30 years and that must be due to the spectacular failure of the Indian policy of of Population control in the 1970s and 80s, you know, we failed miserably in the population control policy and China was absolutely successful in the Population control policy and the result of that is 40 years later. The demographic advantages with us and not with China so please understand that we have a great country and a great many student population that we have to actually help and Do that without asking for anything in return and NPTEL has always been from day one and until today Has been a social service and if there are charges involved for running exams and other things They saw incidental charges to ensure that the government is not overtaxed in running a project the government is already handing over a substantial fund to Support NPTEL and NPTEL like activities in many others and therefore you see we have promises to keep and We can't sleep until those promises are fulfilled There's a lot of stories about this and I know I have got just about five more minutes to tell you a little bit about Where all of this started? I mean when whenever you have assembled here in Sufficient numbers. I would also like to point out that this started with a person from this institute Professor MS Anand who was then a professor of chemical engineering and was the dean of Students as well as partly dean of academic research. It was professor MS Anand in 1999 along with professor Colleagues professor Netrajan here and Professor Paul Goodman of Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh They sat together and Involved me at that point of time to discuss your workshop on NPTEL No, they didn't call it NPTEL. They wanted a technology enhanced to learning workshop Most of you would see technology enabled the learning as a common phrase anywhere in the world But technology enhanced to learning was a phrase was that was used by Professor Paul Goodman who was a cognitive psychologist and he was always interested in cognitive learning Not merely learning through better communication and better methods of communication I mean that he said would automatically happen in any society when the communication tools improve Learning will automatically adopt to that But cognition is something that depended on the teachers that depended on the the social requirements of the learners and therefore cognition was more an intellectual and mind and brain driven processes and technology should enhance The learning process by inventing means and methods. This was the original idea and therefore we Adopted the name national program on technology enhanced to learning to say that technology enabling will automatically happen as technologies come in as communication methods come in and so on so That was 1999 and in 2016 to come back and think about that we have a little more than 1100 courses and we are moving towards another hundred courses to be offered as certification It's a long journey, but please remember no long journey is long enough The journey has now started taking up the speed and therefore it's very very important that you have an active participation in the meeting today And you tell us what are all the difficulties that you face? What are all the solutions that you have in your local environment that would fit in with the global Requirement for NPTEL as a project and as a program. So please keep this in mind You are here to tell us and Contribute to us. It's not that you are here to come and learn That's part of the process all of us learn from each other Therefore, please give us all the inputs that you would like to and please go back and inform you are nearby College colleagues and others how this exercise is actually beneficial to the student and how this is not Imposed on any one of you. It is not a procedural Imposition for you to use NPTEL. We have avoided that from day one When a CTE and a maturity wanted NPTEL to be compulsorily present in all the colleges We were the first to object and oppose saying that no degree of compulsion in learning can ever lead to learning I think what is important is the learners and the teachers have to adopt something that they think is valuable They have to be convinced by themselves that it is valuable and if not they should contribute to this process Therefore, we have always Maintained that NPTEL is a voluntary is a social exercise in which members who feel that they can contribute They can learn Participate with their own willingness and therefore if you are convinced that it is a very good project And it's useful to you and to your college. Please spread the word. We don't have too much money to advertise We do not send the newspaper advertisement by it like some colleges do saying they are the best institutions in the world They are in the top 10 category a full-page advertisement every 10 days or every 15 days that kind of money is not available Government of India simply cannot afford that Therefore it is by word of mouth that NPTEL has and also through electronic communication that NPTEL has reached the stage where it is But now we are on the rising side of what is called the hockey stick Therefore, it's very very important that we go as steep and as quickly Reach as many students as possible today Professor Andrew and Professor Pradap Bharati would share with you all the details of what the immediate launch on the 18th July and afterwards will be and how you can contribute to this through this mentoring and also having many students participate in it if the students ask you questions about why it is useful to me and What would I do with it? Please ask them in return? Maybe one question when your mother taught you to speak. Why did you think that it was useful to you? Okay, you learned and then today you communicate with that what you learned Therefore today if you learn something you do not know when and how it will be useful But please keep your mind open to learning This is the one message that I would like to give all the professors and faculty members and other Industrialists who contribute to this project. They have done it with this idea that This is the best of what I know. Please learn. Please follow it up and discuss with me and The only way that message can be taken up is the students to take up and say yes, but I don't understand this Can you explain this further? Can you tell me this further? Can you tell me where this will lead to this dialogue has to happen? Of course our network the social network using the Google platform allows this dialogue to be Instant during individual courses and offerings, but please feel free to communicate and write to all of us I am no longer an NPTEL official coordinator. I was here till last year but as is always the case that I'm around and I More than willing to contribute to any processes that NPTEL is involved. I have other activities I have to also worry about my students that are for five students in my research group now I'm a little bit concerned with their PhD and their MSc and other things but the team that is now here is Better than the team that I ever assembled in all the 15 or 20 years that I've been associated with and therefore I think they will take it up forward I'm more than willing to be with them and learn from all of them and learn from all of you through all The day we will have many more discussions. I look forward to your interactions. Thank you very much. God bless all of us Thank You, sir Next I'd like to welcome professor Pratap Haridas to come and talk about local chapter and some of our previous runs Good morning Actually over the last year or two we have been visiting several colleges and conducting workshops and In fact, so therefore actually some at least some of you are familiar faces I mean, it's a big crowd, but still we get to meet people and talk for a while so I do see familiar faces and For once it's nice to have you visit us and us hosting you. We're very happy that you could join us this morning so we just have a presentation here on our online course certification and I would like to point out that you know even in this gathering There are I mean representatives from colleges who have just joined us in this process And there are representatives who have been here with us for a while So we are giving you updated information, but some of the information you're for sure you would have seen at least some number of you would have seen and Some of it will be new for everyone There'll be some information which of course if you're a new participant in this process Would be new all together And we also want to add a few points that maybe we have not really emphasized much in some of our previous Presentations, so we would like to do that and most of it is based on background from I mean feedback from several of you interaction with several of you and so on so we'll get started here so as Professor mongrelson that pointed out and what you already know. It's this is a project from MHRD and NPTEL has been there since in various forms since 1999 and certainly projects since 2003 and We have Yeah, a lot of different things have been done Mainly accessed all over the world. This is just a highlight of that We give video lectures mp3 transcripts subtitles all of these are ongoing efforts on our side All major disciplines are covered and now we are on to online certification So this is all something that you are familiar with Also, I would like to point out that the between you know We have more than 400 and nearly 450 million views of our content This is the original content which was there on the as part of the NPTEL program and So the utility of the content has been well established and is appreciated So we have tried to make it more useful for our student community because ultimately they need to You know utilize it and benefit from it so much of effort has gone into it And it is in that context that the online certification process was started started because before this The content and even now the primary content that we have there is on a reference mode It's like a library anybody can take and see any of our students can take and see even now But if they so that is out of self-interest that they would do which is fine Which is always a nice thing to do but this makes it more structured for them They they more number of them will see benefit in it because you know time is limited students are doing various things So it is only you know very human and very natural to think you know What is the immediate benefit from this maybe later when you become a professional? You see the benefit in actually looking at good material regardless of you know a certificate at the end of it But as a student you have a tendency to look at it that way. There's already university exams and so on so This is a nice You know incentive for a student to additionally, you know think of you know to clear those doubts and actually have a reason to focus on this Material so therefore we have this online course initiative And as you all know you're aware the enrollment is free. So that's the other very nice thing We have an exam again. This is our No distinguishing feature there are international efforts which differ in both these critical aspects Almost all the two major international effect efforts of similar nature are commercial And they don't so they definitely charge fee because they have to run a commercial set up We are funded by the government. So our motivation is very different And therefore, you know enrollment is free enrollment is free only the exam has a fee because exam requires You know infrastructure it requires an exam partner to set it up. They have costs. They are a commercial organization So we need to be able to work with them So that's the process and then we get certificates from IITs So this is again something that students are very happy to look at and that's that's one of the things that is a big draw Because I mean it's a fact that we have only limited seats in IIT So we have always been forced to look at ways to limit the number of people entering the campus And we are forced to restrict what courses they take which is true even in your college You have some admission process you admit people to electrical engineering or civil engineering or computer science And they have to take only those courses. They cannot take any other course except for some very limited number of electives So so even when you enter a college, you have restrictions and certainly even before you enter a college You have restrictions so many students don't get in and I mean, this is actually the admission season across India And I mean if you know children of the right age, you are bound to hear You know all the anxiety of parents all the anxiety of the kids that you know They got into some college the fees is so much and you know, they may or may not be happy with it So this now enables them to reach into IITs get a course from IIT taught by an IIT faculty interact with an IIT faculty Get a certificate from the IITs and then use it to in whatever manner they seem see fit So Again just to let you know these things I'll go a little faster So basically the course is exactly like online. I mean exactly like a course that is in campus Except that it all happens online There are lectures every week there and we in a more organized way We have a tutorial every week also and then a final examination except that everything is online So that's where it all happens There is a start date for the course and an end date for the course just the way you would have in your in your university So that way this is structured And there's a final exam which is also on a fixed date known up front the Interaction with faculty happens through the discussion forum, which we are continuously improving There are several faculty who very actively participate in it who spent a lot of time on the discussion forum Of course that varies from course to course It depends on how well the students and the faculty connect through the discussion forum But opportunity is there and it can be utilized and it is being utilized On campus of course the admission process is there clearly defined there are prerequisites And an important is students meet each other So these are some things that you should become aware of because these are the issues and concerns that students will have So in in the campus when you teach a class 30 students or 40 students or 50 students who take that class are sitting right there in front of you And they know each other's names. They know each other's faces. They probably go to the same hostel They have when they're free they can chat with each other and so on that is not true When you do this kind of an online course because again, you may have some 50 students You may have even have more students You may even have 1,500 students taking that course or even 5,000 students taking the course But they will be distributed all across the country So you may have only three students from Chennai taking it maybe 20 students from Coimbatore taking it and they may be those 20 Students may be spread across 10 colleges. So most of them will not know who the other person is They will not know each other by face. They will never it's not like you know at lunch They're going to meet and chat and all so they are very separated out so the There's a need to try and work with them such that they also feel a sense of community in that learning process So the discussion forum is very important in that sense for both the students to participate in and for us also to participate in and In the college, there's clear, you know Goals that are present that students recognize they're going to get a degree They're going to get a transcript and so on and so they know what is going to happen in at the end of four years If they go through the process correctly in our case The recognition mechanisms are evolving. We already have a few that are showing up, but we have opportunity to have more So what we have done it started in 2014 So we're just little over two years into this activity with just one course we started in 2014 We have a website or a portal where the you know institutes Which are running the courses are listed and there are a lot of courses listed down there So a student can go and join any of those courses And since enrollment is free they can actually feel free to experiment and there are no real prerequisites. There is no Filtration process So it's not like only so many students can get in and there is definitely no limitation like, you know, you joined a civil engineering program You have a seat in a civil engineering program Therefore, I will not allow you to take a basic electronics course or a computer science course There's no restriction. Anybody can take anything and you don't even have to be a student You can be, you know, a person who's working from home working professional Maybe somebody who had to leave college for a while and would like to go back to something so all these things are possible and This is just a summary of some of the things I mentioned these are the major aspects of our online course There's a discussion forum a certification exam. This is again very I mean designed We have done a lot of things to design this whole process for the Indian student community so for us in India the exam is a very important integral part of Establishing that the student indeed participated in the process and the evaluation or the score or the certificate that they are producing Is you know has credibility. That's a very important part of the Indian process If you just I have heard people who have told me that, you know, they have taken some multinational, you know, course Online where the entire process is only online It's totally on faith and they have produced that certificate in an interview and that person said I can also print a certificate like this So there's a big difference there. So here we are actually doing it in person with all the, you know, rigor of You know in-phase Examination and the certificate is e-verifiable with the photograph of the person the exact scores they have got and so on So that's all things that we have put together So that's a course. So there's always once you get into a course once you click on a course and go in There'll always be an introductory video sitting there So student or anyone even as a faculty if you would like to advise a student some of your students saying, you know Why not you try this course? You can look at the introductory video get some idea of what is that course You'll also get an idea of how that faculty is, you know communicating. Are you comfortable? Things like that something about the course. What what is going to be covered there? What is the intended audience? As listed here, of course and the prerequisites. These two are there only as guidelines so that You will have a sense of, you know, who is the who are the people who are more likely to benefit from the course Comfortably others may also be able to benefit. They may have to put in a little extra effort. That's basically it But so this is not enforced. It is simply a guideline And then once you get in you have all the lectures listed here for each lecture There's a small write-up below which tells you sort of what's going to happen in that lecture and some additional links if there are any that are relevant and Then again assessment is an important thing as I meant spoke about the final examination Which is you know invigilated proctored in a center and so on assignments on the other hand We allow these students to experience an online learning process So assignments are on faith done by the student at their respective, you know Homes or wherever they are located and really we are not really enforcing anything if they speak to of course We would like them to submit their own assignment But if they will they would like to speak to their friends learn something in the process It's fine. I think ultimately if they learn that is good. So that's that's all it is We are not really getting too technical about it And this is how a discussion forum would look people can post questions and get answers done Sometimes the questions are you know elementary questions. I mean in the sense. They are just procedural questions They may want to know when is the exam going to happen? What is the format of the exam? These are questions that your students may post sometimes it'll be technical questions that you know some particular aspect Explain in a particular lecture in the course was not clear to them or it is something that is contradicting something They've read in a book something like that. They may ask some fairly involved technical question So Again, we do have again we have evolved a lot of features that are unique in our opinion So we have hands-on programming in on our portal So people can program on C C plus plus a lot of other options are also there which can be introduced based on the Faculty who's teaching the course we have some we can have both objective as well as subjective assignments So we do have a process where we have teaching assistants here who are MS PhD students here who work with our faculty and So they will assist the faculty in grading subjective assignments because Particularly because the numbers can be large. You can have a course which is a very I mean popular course Let's say something that many people feel is necessary for their learning process and we may have 1500 2000 more or even more students in that course and The exact fraction that is going to stay active or not in it is will only when you go into the course You will know so potentially this can be a large operation when we start the course We don't know we have no idea whether it's going to be hundred students or 10,000 students taking that course Except if it's a very specialized topic then you know in general yes The audience is going to be limited but some of the basic courses you can have a sudden spike in numbers and This is a typical may most of you know these kinds of exam centers Maybe in your colleges you already have that our exam partner right now is TCS So many of you in fact already know this exam partner They typically work with many colleges and have centers there for various examinations We use them for our examination. We have been working in fact for them. Also I mean I would like to share with you that for them. Also, this is a very Different learning process for them because they are typically they have certain types of examinations that they are already set up to run And in fact many of the banking exams and many other You know employment related exams are all run within that framework of that setup that they already have most of the time for our courses we Enable our faculty encourage our faculty to experiment to try out all new new things in the evaluation process So that the student also really benefits It they shouldn't get stuck to you know on standard way of you know taking a bcd a bcd and being done We would like them to actually participate learn something do a work example and so on So we are trying trying out new new examination types of questions So we had one exam on spoken English one course on spoken English and the faculty actually had students record Their answer paper was recordings that they had to make in the exam center So they came there was a room separately for the recording process while the other exams were going on with online and offline question papers The students who came for this exam had to sit in a room They were called in one by one and they had to make recordings for maybe about 10 minutes They were several no questions and comments that were there They had to respond to those comments and speak for a few minutes and get it recorded and those recordings were then given to The faculty as the answer paper which the person then the faculty evaluated it and gave a great So these are all new things new processes from our perspective that we are trying to do and our exam partner is working with us Trying to assist us in the process, but this is not without hiccups naturally when we try something new There's a great potential that there can be an error TCS also recognizes that they are when they work with us And in fact I mean although we would like to run it flawlessly and we make every effort to run it flawlessly From time to time some error creeps in but we always student you know interest is paramount for us So if there is an issue that crops up we try and try our best to resolve it in a manner that is you know good for the all these students That they're happy with so it's a very interactive process. It's a learning process So that's something that I wanted to share with you. You'll always see us We will not fit into a pattern. We would definitely be that is not our intention We will not stick to any one pattern. We will keep evolving with push boundaries and in that process We will also learn so that learning means we may make errors here and there although that is not the intention We have evolved our Scoring pattern is something that we have been evolving again You know intention was to first of all encourage people to participate So we are not trying to discourage people from participating and also to we are not running an entrance exam here So we are not so concerned about you know trying to eliminate, you know 20,000 students That's not the purpose of any of our courses Instead most of the time we would like to focus on what is it that the student has learned if they have learned something We would like to certify that they have learned that's all so that if they go to an interview and they show an NPTEL certificate and the interview You know panel ask them some questions There's a good chance that the student actually is competent enough to answer those questions Then our being I mean having done well in our course would be indicative that the student is actually capable of answering some questions So that's the purpose that our course tries to accomplish. So we have now this process We have about roughly 25% of the marks Given from the online assignments. So all the assignments that they do From that we'll get whatever the total that comes to that will be converted to 25% and that will count to 25% of the score And the final exam would also contain about 75% of the score. So we do emphasize on the final exam, but the Whatever work they have done in the assignment will count it will make a significant difference If they do very badly here, it will make a difference to their then chances are they may not do well in the exam Also, so therefore at least they should do well here and ideally if they have done well here That should convey that they have learned something and then possibly they will do well here and we do have grades of certificates We are moving to a process where For participation, we are no longer going to provide any certificates. We will not be providing certificates because first of all The numbers are climbing up drastically We have you know huge numbers of students participating in our courses and we really want them to cross some minimum threshold Before they get a certificate. It shouldn't be that you know, they just they just click a button and get a certificate So that's not our purpose here At the same time, we are not running an entrance exam. So we are somewhere in the middle So we do want them to make some level of performance before they earn a certificate So they have to earn it. Otherwise, we are not giving it to them if they cross 40% So that means they have got 25 and then at least 15% if they got this full 25 at least 15% from here Then they get a successful completion certificate So that's like that's more like what people would associate with you know Participating in a course at least this far you have to get then if it is more than 60% They get an elite certificate if it's more than 90% they get an elite certificate with the gold medal put on it So we are Through all our processes that you will see in in other ways also when we communicate with you And we put in new processes in place for various ways in which we interact with say SPOC's and so on You will find that our emphasis will be on students performing well Our emphasis is not so much on numbers. We don't really care how many students take a course We would like more students to try it. So we do we are not trying to discourage them We would like to encourage them to take those courses, but that's only one aspect of the show So if if there are places where you know thousand students enrolled that's only one aspect of the show And we would be more interested if you know 20 of them get an elite certificate Elite I mean sorry gold medal if 20 of them get a gold medal that that is much more important for us Than simply saying that you know we have had 500 students participating thousand students participating and so on So we want the whole process as a community No, this is not just an activity that we are doing on our own It's an activity that we're doing along with you and along with the student community We want that value system to be there so that when students take a course and they participate in the whole process They appreciate that you know the intention is that they should learn The results should show that they have learned and the whole any reward process that we have any You know reward process for the student and the whole community as a whole that comes Is reflective of this quality performance? So you will always see that in any other communication that we send to you also please always keep that in mind We value the fact that students participate, but that is only the first step that alone will not is not we are not going To be satisfied with just that so overall our systems will keep reflecting that Certificates will reflect that any other process we put also will reflect that so if we contact you on anything else You will see this in the background of our communication And we have courses of different duration now Increasingly there are universities which are looking at which are not just looking at which have Enabled and are actively carrying out credit transfer processes So we do have courses of different duration and those are roughly equivalent of a one credit course to credit course or three To four credit course equivalent so that that's the duration of the course and that reflects in the credit requirement so why do we have one credit course well the point is that some of the Courses that are done in NPTEL are highly advanced courses And some other courses are basic courses so typically basic course can run 40 hours You can run something for I mean there will be content there will be content because you're really exposing the student to a wide range of different things specialized courses are often not like that you have you know a very Concentrated content of a limited nature and therefore 10 hour fits that Reasonably correctly. I mean it doesn't you're not overdoing the content. You're not overdoing the duration. It's just right so that's how we have this and People can pick it up for different levels of credits And in fact when we do this I mean I'll talk about other universities also which are doing it The point is the credit is not really given by us the student takes the course They successfully completed we give you the raw data. We give you know what course how many hours? What does the score the student got the raw data has given to you it is for you to Incorporated in your system as found appropriate by your processes So you may have some process so you are right you're free to you know Put this into your process in the manner that you think is appropriate So what you consider as I mean so Student gets 75 marks. Let's say 75% they get it is your university's Decision on what they want to how they want to treat that they can treat it simply a 75% If that's the way the marking scheme is if they want to convert that to grades It's up to you to decide what grade you want to give we will give you the data not just of that student But for the entire course for all the students who took that course what is the average? What is the distribution all that information would be available to you you can calculate as you see fit So that full flexibility is there. We are always open on that that process So just to give you an idea we have now completed nine different course runs So that means courses started we went through the course and we finished off with a final exam Nine different course runs we've completed and we've completed hundred and twenty two courses so far And that's you can see more or less steadily. We have been increasing the number of courses in terms of how many courses are coming in and Increasingly more and more. This is also got to do with our own faculty also getting more comfortable with the process the online course process is Has specific aspects which are different from the kind of course that we run in our campus and therefore our faculty also needs some time to accommodate I mean adjust to this new processes and It is a it's always a learning You know Curve that is there So it takes time for people to adjust so invariably in fact their second run of the course will be vastly better than their first run And you can see here various departments. We have you know not restricted ourselves to any particular discipline This is another way in which we differ greatly from other you know international efforts of this nature There they are sort of because they are commercial They are sort of forced to limit themselves to you know courses that are hugely popular So they limit themselves to those courses because that's where they get the maximum number of students So any payment process that is there the profit margins are higher etc. We are not limited like that We are clear that we want I mean complete the entire undergraduate curriculum make it available We want to cover it. We want to cover specialized courses. So we are not worried if there's a course There are some courses where there are only 100 students taking it or 50 students taking it and there are other courses Where you know there are 10,000 students taking it's all fine for us as long as there is academic value in the activity The NPTEL process will support it. That's basically all it is You can see also slowly more and more institutes are getting are participating in it And there are going to be increasingly there are going to be more processes available so that you know faculty from other institutes Can also participate there may be additional portals put up for it and different processes available And in general this will be you know it will grow in a in a way that you know all of us can participate in various levels So that's a process that is that is steadily coming up and we will keep you posted when we have it Operation so this is all just selected titles. I won't go into it simply to show you that we cover various disciplines These are online certification. What impact we have done you can see that course enrollments is almost six and a half lakh And we have you know 32,000 exam registrations till May 2016 Attendances 85% in our exams in general this what you see here this blue is the enrollment the red is the People who actually register for an exam. So the enrollment is means the students simply Connects with the course and says that I'm just going to see those see the content They may or may not see the content but they have joined the course by hitting the join button the registration means they registered for the final exam which typically means they did assignments and then went through the Whole course process and did the final exam Generally only about 10% or so will participate in the final exam for various reasons and this is in keeping with international standards on this activity and We are fine with it. We don't see that as anything negative We would like more people to try different things that they have not tried before and then whatever they feel comfortable doing Whatever they like they proceed and complete. So that is the process. So it is it is all about including people not about excluding people And we have got data on what what kind of people have been involved Some of them are this is again, they are Their certification from their side voluntary information that they give us about 16% are employed 80% are students and 7% are others. We also have faculty and enrolling for some of our courses And so that's an aspect we want to show you. We do have an online portal for the which big which is Sort of highlights the efforts put in by our students because as I mentioned, it's a it's something that we want to encourage We want the community to feel happy with what they're doing So the toppers of courses are listed here. The names of the colleges are listed here and the statistics are listed here And if you go into the details, you can actually see what is the scores that the student got for the assignments what they got for the exam and across assignments, what were the scores obtained by the students and And the distribution of scores for the course from all students So a lot of detail is available once you go into a particular students You know mark mark sheet so for your college this is very useful if you are you're trying to do some evaluation based on it and The students have the since it's there is always an element of privacy in this The students have the right to decide where and how the information can be shared so they can select whether they want the details to be shared potential employers or Have it shared with colleges so it is their choice and we respect that choice and Credit transfer so credit transfer as I said, you know We do the course we give the content and we give the exam and we give this course after that The how the university takes it up or the college takes it up is their call how they want to do it You can see that from July 2015 for almost a year now a Centurion University in Orissa Kalasalingam University in Tamil Nadu and Madanapalli Institute of Technology in Andhra Pradesh they all been doing credit transfer actively with us and I mean to tell you that you know, this is not something that is isolated with the outside of IITs inside IIT Metras. We already have departments where the Students can take the same NPTEL online courses that you say your college students are taking and get credit in our system So it is not something that you know It's only an offer for others and that we don't think it is up to our standards or anything Our faculty are teaching our evaluation scheme is on our students take it they get credit for it So we already have some departments that have approved it many more departments are up in the process right now of approving right now actually we had meetings just a few days ago on it more are approving it and Again like in your university, there will be some limits on it How many credits they can do what kind of credits they can do and which category they can do some Framework will be there that framework can change but this is a process that we are actively doing our students do it My department students do it And this whole activity is expected to grow with support from MHRD. You may hear more about it in the upcoming months There is an intention to make there's an intention and an effort to make this a much more National Initiative from the government side. I mean we are already funded by the government only it's not like we're doing it I mean without their assistance, but there is a more coordinated Activity that's likely to come out in the next few months, which may include other disciplines include medicine include legal aspects and so on And at that point it may be much more visible right now We are doing personal contact with you with your students and so on but of course when once it becomes a government initiative In a specific manner you may see much more of it The lot of the efforts that we have all done as a community in this process Is the you know a core of the learning that has gone in towards making this initiative in the grander scale So many of the things that we have discussed with you many of the things that we are working with you You are working with us all those things are features that you will see when this becomes a national initiative We I mean we really share something very special here in terms of what we have you know accomplished as a unit together Because you will see you know a very unique national initiative which you may not see anywhere else even internationally Where many of the features that we have come up due to our own experience with it as a you know as a community are the features that are You know defining that whole activity Several principles have made it mandatory for faculty to do one online course per semester and linked increments to certificates This is just something we just wanted to share and Students can use it for various things for internship with companies and institutes We have course instructors some course instructors again. This is not compulsory But instructors are doing it because they really see this is a very nice opportunity Because it's not just it's not this is something that you should I would really like to share with you This is not just an opportunity for your students It's an opportunity for our faculty and and your and students and the general public in the spread across the country See because just like you may know I mean we say you know students try to get in and only a small number of Students get in so our faculty can actually access only those students under the normal setting Using this online course initiative We reach and we are able to communicate with students interested in our topics students working hard very intelligent students all over the country So you can I mean I can reach two students in Assam three students in Calcutta whom otherwise I would never be able to access I would never have an opportunity ever to meet them or talk to them or you know Exchange any information with them for us now through this process I can talk to people in Assam three people in Calcutta four people in Bombay and do this on a very Structured way throughout the semester and so when they do well I it's a you know It gives me great pressure. It gives them great pressure if they've done well We would be happy to invite them here for internships in summer We already have some summer internships in IIT through various other settings This is another way in which some faculty are looking at it And this also helps them prepare for gate examination because we are not diluting standards We are trying to maintain good standards in our courses So presumably somebody who does well in our courses will be able to do well in gate So this is just a list I won't go into great detail This is just there for your information that there are you know 10 hour 30 hour 20 hour courses with various numbers And there is a guest login. You may already have it if not you can always look this up and take it It simply is you have to go to the online course portal online courses dot NPTEL dot AC dot M And there's an ID reviewer one and the password is one reviewer. That's it reviewer one at NPTEL dot IITM dot AC dot N is the login and password is one reviewer if you do this this reviewer one this you know Hypothetical student called reviewer one is actually enrolled in all our courses. So If you go in like this, you can see all our completed courses also You can see what all has been completed student can see it You can see it you can you can be in a better position to advise your students saying This is maybe interesting course for you and so on and it'll also give you an ability to tell us You know what courses may be more interesting to you These are some frequently asked questions. So I I think I'll just I won't spend too much time on it Yeah, I think Barthi will look at it and so local chapter. We do have as Kamala was pointing out to you We have now got more than 518 local chapters and so there is a separate No website for it and a lot of information is put up there. We have state-wise list of local chapters We have the list of colleges with NPTEL local chapter and also what is required to start a local chapter Which is very straightforward. Most of you already know it. That's how we have this gathering here today and For every local chapter page where it displays the college and SPOC details Statistics of courses taken by the college are listed and college stoppers are listed. So it's a very again Like I said, you know, we it's it's all about being in a community and working with each other so all of that happens here and What are the benefits the main primary benefits are this we right now work with the exam partner in setting up the exam centers They have some formula based on which they set up the exam centers based on how many students have asked in which place They have asked and all that so that is why we have to do the registration a little bit ahead of time Only then they have the time to do this analysis and then distribute the centers But regardless of their way manner of distribution if you do have more than 50 students registering for an examination You can request for an exam center in your city and we will do our best to get you a center there So because we are we can work with the exam partner We'll do our best to get you a center so that your students don't have to travel very far and and You can make payments for the exam in bulk as a single DD We are actually evolving this exam payment process more and more to make it easier and easier for students to make the To participate in the process, but we do recognize that, you know Sitting in a city we assume certain things we assume net banking is there We assume that you know people have access to it and all those things which is not true in many smaller towns People may not have I mean students may not even have an account Maybe their dad only is paying or mom is paying or something may be there and and those people also may not be very familiar Or comfortable with net banking so therefore It is very natural that students would like to pay in some other form And so we have all those things available and very importantly this enables you to work with us to give scholarships to the students We simply require but this is a little bit based on corporate funding that we get we are I mean there are you know CSR funding opportunities Corporate social responsibility funding opportunities So some companies from time to time will use their funds to fund NPTEL activity and in that case They give us a fair bit of freedom on how to use those funds. We typically we one major Activity where we put those funds is providing scholarships to students so 50% exam fee waiver will be there So if it's thousand rupees or thousand 200 rupees that they have to pay they only have to pay 500 rupees and If you are a local chapter you can ask for this in a very coordinated way We only require the principle of this college to send us a letter saying the following students are economically Backward and they require the scholarship. We don't we're not asking any certificate. Nothing whatever you say your principal says We go with it so that's how it is and then Faculty can be mentors who can follow progress of students in the course this enables your students to stay focused on the course and completed Because students being students, you know when they start with some enthusiasm then there's so many things going on in their life That they get distracted they may start getting into other things So from time to time it helps if you know if some faculty sees them and says, you know Have you done this week's work? Have you done and then they get back to their no little bit of activity that they will do So I think we sort of hold with this We have 518 colleges with local chapters fee waivers that we have already given to 13,000 plus students So that's very significant We have conducted exams in 50 plus cities specifically on request from local chapters So this is not an isolated thing. We have you know really done this We have only done you know limited number of course runs in that itself We have done this 50 plus times and more than thousand mentors have participated so far Of course, we're trying to get the define the role of the mentor little better so that you know It's done in a very proper way. So I think that's it. We'll hold here if you have any questions take it otherwise Thank you, sir. Next. I would like to invite professor and share a few words Actually Kamala said a few words. I'm going to say a lot of words some of them are just going to be controversial Some of them will be I hope motivational some of them may be inspirational Let's see. Hopefully you won't throw anything at me Okay, first fall very hearty welcome to IIT Madras and to the building which houses NPTEL I don't know if you know NPTEL IIT Madras offices in the third floor of this building. How many of you have been to the office? Yeah, so if you've not, please do Go up. There's a nice new lift that we have Flashy lift you can take that and go up to the third floor. I See a couple of people from TCS. They've come here quite often You know exactly how that is so we're welcome to come and see how we operate see our studios our staff our staff Mostly mostly they're here. We'll introduce them to you formally as well. Thanks a lot for coming I know some of you have traveled some distance So I'm going to focus mostly on how to I mean to give you ideas on how to use NPTEL online certification and use what we offer to the maximum extent possible so that it benefits you it benefits your students Okay, so I'm going to focus mostly on that in the talk Think some of you are probably Very seasoned SPOC's and a local chapters you've been with us for a long time I see people whom I can recognize there. They know exactly what to do. They are Very good at it, but maybe some of you are new. I think some of the very new local chapters are also here Maybe all this is going Very fast for you. You're not able to understand. So I'll maybe walk you through some of the important steps and Give you ideas on how to benefit from this the most. Okay, so there are a lot of NPTEL online certification is growing at a fast pace Sometimes I'm scared at the rate at which it's growing. Okay, too many students to a lot of local chapter colleges It's it's a bit scary. I think our processes are not so well I end out that we can scale at this extent and what is even more scary is In maybe a month or so from now, you will hear a big announcement from the ministry Okay, so this announcement is going to be about something called svayam, which is More or less I would to put it very bluntly They've they've taken what we are doing and they are trying to make a big announcement out of it Okay, so you'll see exactly the same thing they would do, you know, many of the many of the ideas They have the MOOCs portal that they're trying to build They want to have faculty teach MOOCs. They want to have certification associated with it They want to have credit transfer associated with it So of course when the ministry says credit transfer, I guess most universities would follow suit and the UGC itself is Going is coming out with a set of regulations for credit transfer. So how to do it and encouraging everybody I believe the AICTE is also going to come out with it. Of course, ultimately the universities have to do it So this whole thing of doing online courses for credit is going to become a big reality going forward And I believe NPTEL is going to be driving the effort from the front in svayam as well So NPTEL will be one of the main contributors to svayam Whenever it's announced, it should be announced soon. So so While we are here talking about it in a small scale, this is going to happen in a big scale as well Hopefully the pointers I give you will help you in in benefiting from svayam as well Okay, so let's get started before I even start I was hoping I can go through the portal once I don't know many of you probably have seen the portal So what I'm going to do is just walk you through the portal to begin with It's always good to see the portal once the portal of course is online courses Dot NPTEL dot AC dot N Okay, so most of you have seen this So what you see in the top part is basic information about the course run Okay, so whenever we say a course run, it's like a semester in your college This one, yeah, it's like a semester in your college Right now when you begin a semester you come up to the timetable for the semester and what happens when so this part is the timetable for the semester this video is just a simple video telling what happens What is most crucial is what comes below? Okay, the currently open courses and This well it just lists three courses here Okay, so someone who looks at it first might think okay, there are only three courses open But what is most crucial in this picture that little red triangle on the right which you click on will give you the other courses But also I'll suggest one more way of going through it instead of just going through all the open courses I will really suggest going through course categories Okay, so if you click on course categories You will get the names of all the different branches and disciplines and you can browse the open courses Discipline wise okay, you might be a computer science engineer You might be a civil engineer mechanical engineer chemical engineer, whatever area you're interested in you can go and pick that area and Then browse okay, so let me pick computer science and engineering So you click on that you will get all the courses in computer science engineering Okay, the courses that come initially are those that are open currently. Okay, so again for every course We have basic information here. This is introduction to modern application development The instructor's name is here dr. Gaurav Rainer who's from IIT Madras and then there is the course duration When does the course start this course happens to start on September 5th and ends on September 30th It's just a four week course and then the last date for enrollment. Okay, basic information about the course This will be there in One course after another and to the right is the join button Anyone who wants to enroll has to just go click that join button and you will enroll okay So you can see the other courses here. Maybe you can Look at this one design and analysis of algorithms The instructor is professor Madhavan Mukund from Chennai Mathematical Institute who happens to be here So maybe it's a chance for me to introduce him Mother so he's here. So in case you want to bug him later on he's around So course duration is July 18th to September 9th. It's an eight week course. The last date is 18th, July So like this you'll see different courses. Okay. Now suppose let's say Design and analysis of algorithms is a course. I know what it is. Okay, many of you might know it But you want to know some more details. Okay, so maybe I'll pick some other course Let's say introduction. Okay with this course itself since Madhavan is here will pick it So you want to know a little bit more before clicking this join button and committing yourself to doing the course Maybe you want to learn a little bit more. So what do you do? You can go and click on that course It will give you some more basic information Okay on what the course is Okay about the course then the intended audience Pre-requisites and some more details Okay, both the instructor etc. And there'll also be a little video Which is about a four or five minute video made by the instructor Instructor to describe what the course is what who it is for Okay, so I'll definitely suggest that you read this information and look at the video and then you can think about joining In fact, the join button is also here at the end of this course There's lots of information the course layout what happens in one week? What happens in the second week third week, etc. You can see all that and then finally also There's a join button. Okay, so you can join from here as well So this is something that you can do. Okay All right, so this is how the courses are laid out on the portal. You can go and join Okay, so so maybe I should just click the join button to show you what happens there once Okay, so first thing it'll ask you is it'll ask you for a Google account. Okay, so Most people typically use their Gmail account at this point Okay, but you can also use any other email account which is associated with a Google account. Okay, so you can have a something called a Google account with any email. Okay, so it's possible If you go to Google.com, you can have a Google account there. It's possible So for instance my email is Andrew at E.i.tm.ac.n. It has a Google account associated with it and I can log in Of course, I won't show you my password So once you do that it's going to ask you for some basic things So this is something that Google authentication will always ask So NPTEL online courses is asking for something you say allow once you say allow You are logged in to the portal. Okay, so this is basic login to the portal This login is a Google login that we allow on our portal. Okay, so now for registration some personal details are being asked So you put in your personal details Sometimes it will get filled based on Before is to ask you for educational details Etc. So now, you know, I mean couple of things I should point out here The profession is very important. Okay, so it's an important field So particularly many of you might do the registration yourself. You might also have to help your students to register Okay, so here there are a couple of things to watch out very important So most students are probably going to say student here Okay, once they say student notice what happens. Okay, this is a new feature We have introduced in our portal for people who are even local chapters from a long time back. Please pay attention to this Once the person says the student in the educational details one question will come up here Are you part of an NPTEL local chapter? Okay, this is an important question and your students should say Yes So once you say yes notice what happens here Okay, nothing happens. But anyway, so you say yes, then you can pick the state. Okay, so let's say What state shall I pick? I think most many of you are probably from Tamil Nadu So let's say some state which is out of this out of Tamil Nadu Andhra Pradesh, so it's very close UP. Yeah. Hey, there you go. UP. I like that. So let's go UP Uttar Pradesh so you pick Uttar Pradesh and Your college name should come here. Okay Let's see. What's the name of the college? Dronacharya.  Is that correct? So they should pick that. Okay, so now this is very crucial for your students to do Okay, so if they go in register, they have to say they are from a local chapter And they have to pick the correct state and college because once they do that We can give you a list of students from your college who are enrolled in our courses This enables us to do it and this is a very crucial thing. Okay So otherwise, it's very very hard for you to chase your students and get the list of names Okay, so this is something we have introduced this semester in the portal Please make sure when your students register when your faculty register, they definitely definitely do this Okay, so this is very important and one more detail We are asking for which is actually not mandatory on the site But please ask your students to enter this is the college roll number So this also helps you track every single detail that you want about the student Okay, so the new feature we have introduced please ask your students and faculty who enrolled for these courses to put in this Okay, so of course if you're a faculty, you're not going to probably write a college roll number You might have some other number for writing it, but we leave that blank. Okay, so that's it This is a crucial new addition for local chapters. It's it's a very enabling feature It helps you to get the list of students from your college who are enrolled in a course Okay, so this is very important. Please follow this step Hopefully it's clear All right, so that's the registration Of course, I mean after this you have to agree to the NPTEL terms of service Which is actually very generic, but you also need to agree to follow the honor code I think please read the honor code. It's very important And you should encourage your students also to read the honor code and try and follow it as much as possible And you click enroll you're enrolled in the course Okay, so once you are enrolled What happens is you have access to the course content Okay. Now the course itself starts only on July 18th. So July 18th Madhavan is here. Madhavan courses content is going to go up on July 18th. Yes. He says yes Okay, so July 18th You will see the first week's course content or maybe even a little bit before that he'll put it up Okay, so usually the first week's content will probably be available Maybe a week before that. Okay, so it's useful so that you get into the course slowly Okay, so you'll see quite often students would struggle with the first week's content a little bit So it's good to get access to that early. Okay, hopefully this is helpful for you So students when they enroll through a local chapter They can provide that information on the portal and we can make this information available to you Through the SPOC page or something like that. Okay, so that's one thing I wanted to say I think that's all I wanted to say about the portal itself I'm gonna move back to my presentation and start going over the slides there okay, so Like I said, I'm gonna focus more on What what and as an SPOC as a local chapter what you should be thinking about what you should focus on what will help you Derive the maximum benefit out of NPTEL online courses Of course, this is once again my view. I'm very interested in hearing from you as well Okay, so what is it that you have done which you think is very beneficial? Now when you stand up and say that all the other local chapters here also benefit Okay, so they also hear it. Maybe they can adopt it in their colleges. Okay, so this is very useful We should think of this as a more of a knowledge sharing or practice sharing sort of event as opposed to just me telling you What I think is the best way of benefiting because at the end of the day, you're running your college I'm I have very little information about how your college runs, right? So you have to think about what works best for you So but nevertheless some of the ideas some of the emphasis that we have from NPTEL side I would like to share. Okay, so let me start So before I start a few numbers and some important things that happened in the past run or so I think just to give you some some feel I think some of you are very new might wonder how these things go So in the last run of our exam, so this March 16 and April 16 is the exam We held in March and April in the January semester We held two exams one is in March one is in April and this is the number of registrations We had more than 8,000 registrations from local chapters Okay, so it's a huge shift from before, you know So NPTEL online courses are being used by local chapters in a big way before January this never happened Okay, most of our registrations were from open registrations. Everybody was registering now in the January semester We had a huge change in the number of registrations Large number of people were registering through their colleges through local chapters Okay, so I think local chapters play a huge crucial role colleges play a crucial role in Making sure that the online courses reach the students There's no doubt in my mind about it But this again emphasizes that there's a late thousand is a fairly big number Tamil Nadu has been traditionally the largest one because I think I think Madras has been initially driving this effort And like I said once there is a national level launched by the ministry I do expect all these numbers to go through the roof Okay, so I think two people from TCS here I'm sure very nervous about exams etc But we are also a little bit nervous about the numbers going up because our staff are here We are used to these kind of numbers suddenly if one more digit increases here. I'm really scared, you know How are we going to scale? Everything, you know, so it's it's very hard for us also, but nevertheless. This is a good trend I think I don't want to stop people from doing it. This is a good trend and I hope this will continue as well So this is what I think I would really really emphasize. I'm very proud of this slide I really like toppers coming out of colleges and this is the number of toppers who have come out of colleges in local chapters in the January to March 2016 and January to April 2016 National Engineering College from Coal Petty. I think they are here represented here They had 40 toppers in the courses now a topper in an NPTEL course is not easy. Okay, let me tell you very clearly 90 or above you have to get to be a clear topper and if nobody scores 90 or above in a course Believe me that happens quite often. Nobody will score 90 or above in this course We declare the top 10% of the performers as toppers. Okay, so being a topper in an NPTEL course is something You and your college have to be really really proud of okay So it's not easy to produce toppers in NPTEL courses and this is the list of colleges which have produced toppers I think Dronacharya was also here. They produced 39 toppers. It's really impressive and the number you see keeps going down Pretty quickly. I want to point out PVP Siddhartha also. They have six toppers They are not a very huge institution But out of the six toppers is one of their computer science professors who's a topper in programming data structures and algorithms Okay, so that's a very hard course to top Okay, because that's a programming course many of you might have done it and she's she's got 93 marks in that course And that's really impressive.  It was very high. It was very nice to see So me personally what I would like all of you to see is toppers from your colleges Okay, so toppers are the things to focus on you might say I have 500 people writing your exam I'll say yes. Thank you. But like I said the numbers I'm more scared about but if you say I have produced five toppers I'm going to be really really happy. I think that's that's what is the enabling factor here That's what's crucial here. So the six toppers. I'm really happy about they don't have too many students They produce six toppers. That's that's very impressive and toppers is what really shines in fact an NPTEL dot ac dot n slash NOC We give priority and prominence to toppers We put up the names of toppers and along with their pictures in every course and we would like to see toppers from all across the country And that really shows that our education system is working in some sense, right? if you think about it, there's a course that we organize and toppers are coming from all over the country so something is right about the system and we have to work on it and Make it even better. Okay, so this is the list of toppers and The more toppers from NPTEL local chapter that there's nearly 200 toppers have come from local chapters Okay, and I mean, you know, so you can look at the names, you know Some of them are really, you know, they're not in big cities. They're not big colleges For instance Kamaraj College of Engineering Technologies is again in Vrindanagar. I don't know people from Kamaraj here. Maybe not. Oh, you're here Okay, so again from from not not a very big city in Tamil Nadu again They're producing toppers and they also produce toppers in difficult courses. It's really impressive. Okay So this is something that I mean in case as an institution, you're worried about things like NAAC accreditation I know things like that. So this is something you can be really proud of and believe me people in NAAC will respect this This is something. It's not easy to get something like this Okay, so that's toppers and here is again a list of different category of certificates Like I said, so so see these these numbers are changing a little bit marks less than 40 is participation 40 to 659 is Successful completion elite and elite plus gold and like I said From NPTEL side, we want to see bigger numbers here Okay, so the first two columns elite plus gold and elite that's where we that's where we want to see numbers Okay, so the numbers here. Yes, of course, we're very happy that most students are getting exposed to it But when we produce toppers believe me our faculty are more happy So anyone who teaches the course when they see that so many people have got elite plus gold and elite Certificates, they're really happy. They think they're producing. They're really they're teaching is having an impact Okay, and here again, you see a big list NEC coal patis at the top see a lot of people are Doing a pretty good job and that's where I think the local chapter has to make a real impact Okay So when when you when you introduce these courses to your students You have to handhold your students work with them very closely and push them really push them to go to this level for any good course And that's where it's it's it's you're making a huge difference Just imagine some somebody from your college This phase is visible in NPTEL's website showing them as a topper in a course Yeah, the national level you've competed with so many other students and you come out on the top It's something really impressive for the confidence of the student for your own college and for everybody Okay, so please do work on that like I said the last column. Yes, you can improve We are happy if you improve that but really the first two columns is what we want you to focus on from NPTEL site Okay, so again more of a list here most more more colleges This is not the latest version I sent all right Okay, so let's Okay, so I'll come back to the slide later on I'll move on to the Move on with what I think an SPOC should do what I think a college should okay So how do I see an SPOC in a college, you know, I mean so I think this this acronym stick and somehow Personally not a big fan of this SPOC acronym We somehow started it and it has stuck so much that we can't change it now and I'm a little bit Worried about it. I've been thinking of other names and one name that comes to my mind is like an NPTEL ambassador You know, a lot of colleges say they are local NPTEL coordinators I've seen that also being used in a college but coordinator, you know as a nomenclature that we use for ourselves And it becomes confusing who's a coordinator So so I think ambassador is a very nice word a lot of call a lot of companies also use it So I would like to think of the SPOC in a college as the NPTEL ambassador in that college And maybe not just for that college and even for the surrounding areas Okay, so you're working with us and as a person who believes in this online course effort as a person who can Propagate this online course effort both inside your college and outside your college among of in the locality Okay, so that's the kind of person we have in mind You have to be really be motivated by this you have to you have to really get your students motivated for this your institution motivated for this people around you motivated for this and I know a lot of SPOC's here I've met them personally who are so motivated who come up and talk to us Very happy to be a part of this big group and that that's what we see. Okay, so ultimately In the big bridge that NPTEL has with students the SPOC's and mentors and faculty in colleges play a huge role in doing that so Okay, so now some of the some of the some of the things that you have to do as an SPOC are not always You know just inspiring and motivating people. There are also routine things that you have to do Okay, pay pay attention to some detail for instance the Your college page in the local chapter portal is under your control, right? There are things that you can upload their information that we can put their images that you can put there You have to first do that once you become a local chapter I think many of you have already done it Maybe the newer local chapters have to do this now You have to go and update the information that our local chapter page has about your college Immediately, okay, that's very important. Make sure that's up to date your logo your logo can be put there Your logo can be put there all of that has to be correct. Please do that Okay, and make sure that you are added to the group. Okay, there is a Google group of SPOC So many of you actively follow that I think it's a very active group right lots of email exchange happens Maybe a bit too active sometimes you fish like too many emails are coming in But nevertheless, it's an important Google groups to be part of make sure that you read it make sure that you participate in it very actively because a lot of our Announcements go on that Google groups Okay So we try to make sure that some of the announcements are made more prominently, but nevertheless We have kept it an open group. It's not a moderated group for now. The numbers are still reasonable But please post any questions that you have on that group If it is a specific question that's specific to only your college You might just want to write to NPTEL at IITM You don't have to post it on the group Okay, but in case you see that this is an issue that many colleges might be interested in then it's good to post it on the Group okay, so in your own judgment, please make this distinction if you have a simple question about you know My student did not get a hall ticket. It's probably not necessary to put it on the SPOC group Okay, so you can send a mail to NPTEL at IITM, which is also a very actively watched Watched email ID you will get a display soon, but in case you have a question about you know in this course These lectures are not very clear. That's something which affects a lot of colleges You can put it on the SPOC group things like that Okay, so you should make sure you use your judgment on that but this is important your active participation in ensuring that your college Details are up to date on the local chapter portal and participating in the SPOC group. These two are very very important Okay, so a few other steps that you might want to do and this is also this also goes a long way in helping your students Actively participate in NPTEL courses is to get the content from NPTEL on hard disks and then lock it up in a cupboard, right? No No, don't lock it up in a cupboard, please What is the next step the most important step is to make sure that that content is served on your Land, okay So there are a few steps there some of them are technical Maybe you have a local system admin who can help you but the technical aspect is very very easy You have to install you to get a computer install some servers on that computer and put it up on the on the on your local land It's it's easy to do. We have some basic instructions for it. We also have people who can help you with it Okay, this thing is sloping So so please Please make sure that that content is on your land. It's very easy to do I think many of you have Wi-Fi on your college campus is easy for students to access this content once It's on your land. They don't have to go on the internet. You can still keep YouTube blocked, you know All of that is still possible. So please please make sure that you do this This is a very important step in case you need help. Please call us. We'll help you and how to do the installation and all Okay, so very important So this is something okay one more thing I should tell you about this is our content keeps on increasing Okay, so just because you get a hard drive at one point. Don't think that you have all the content. Okay every month we add about I think the way it's going like a terabyte or something we add every month Okay, so it's a huge amount of information that gets added every month right now So please make sure that your content is also up to date and for local chapters We do updation anytime you ask. Okay, so please make sure your content is up to date And it's possible for you to add to the existing content So in your server when you're installing don't exactly install nine terabytes You know have some additional space or at least possibilities to have additional space because in the next three four years This content is going to double either way the way which we're going. Okay, so make sure that you keep Enough space there and keep adding to it every month. I would say you keep updating the content Okay, and for the online courses that your students are doing actively You should make sure that the videos are updated as and when they are released. Okay, whenever we release videos on the Online courses portal. We also put up downloadable versions on NPTEL.ac.n or it's a YouTube video. You know how to download YouTube videos It's easy to download YouTube videos today You have to download those videos and make sure that they are also available on your local land Once it's available on your local land students are able to see it without going on the Internet So you've downloaded it once and everybody sees it Okay, so it's very important to do please use some system admin help or something for that and you can also ask us Make sure that you do that and keep your cut content up to date because the content keeps on increasing Okay, so here is something some sort of a structure that we suggest for how the local chapter can run Okay, so of one of course This is only a suggestion you might have your own way in which you're doing it I'll ask you to share some of these experiences as we go along But this is a suggestion that I have I would say you should have one SPOC Who's kind of going across multiple departments, but he or she needs to be helped by Individuals in a few departments. Okay, so it's possible. It's impossible otherwise to keep track of how things are going If there's only one person for the entire college or institution is just too big That's one thing and also I think the specializations the courses we offer the titles We provide will not make sense to only one someone who knows only one department or one branch No, we might have civil engineering courses mechanical engineering courses are these basic courses are these advanced courses It's not easy for people to figure that out. So you need people from multiple departments at least Multiple streams in some sense so that they can make sense of the kind of courses that we are offering. Okay, so that's very important and We also suggest, you know, this is one thing. We have not pushed too much But I'll really suggest that you try and get student volunteers. Okay now You can you can give them, you know official names If you like a student representatives of the NPTEL local chapter, we are very happy to involve with engage with them We can also engage with them in some official way if you like So this is something that will help you a lot, you know Students tend to be a little bit more resourceful sometimes doing some of the tasks that you might set them You know downloading a certain video putting it up in some webpage students might be able to do it more routinely Then you then you might be able to you might have some additional tasks, etc In your college students are relatively free. They might be able to do this So please try and get student volunteers into this system as well So that way you have everybody working together and that helps Helps things a lot Okay, so now Right now we are we are in this state.  You're on July The second case we have two weeks to go before the run of the course Okay, this is a crucial time in my opinion as an SPOC and a local chapter. You have to spend Some time in this two weeks to understand what courses are on offer. Okay, so this is very very important Okay, so we always keep saying there are 93 courses all 93 courses are not the same They are not first of all and all they're not all in the same department. Okay, clearly They're not in the same department. They are not all of the same level of mathematical difficulty They are not all of the same, you know, same year or same Semester, so they're all different types of courses that will be appealing to different types of students in different stages in your college Okay, they're not all the same courses. So you you cannot for instance say here is a poster Which has the list of 93 courses students will take what they like. Okay, so that's that's not a very good path in my opinion Okay, so you know your students best. Okay, so so what the first homework to do, which is very important is The SPOC and the local chapter the people who are involved in the local chapter should definitely look at the courses very closely and Decide to focus on a few courses for which you will help your students Through that semester. Okay, so this is very crucial because like I said, we just don't want numbers We want toppers. Okay, if you just generally introduce core students to courses, they're not going to become toppers in those courses Okay, so you this initial homework you do in these two weeks to understand what courses are on offer What what is the difficulty level of this course? Is this course doable by our students? Okay, is this going to be a understandable course? Are all our students going to be able to top this course? Okay, that's the kind of work that you have to do in these two weeks Okay, and then maybe focus not on all 93 maybe on a few courses Which as a local chapter you will actively support your students do Okay, and then you have to set yourself some targets You have to make sure that at least a few toppers you will produce in that course That's very important. This step is I think a very crucial step So after you go back I would say you study these courses make sure that you understand what these courses are And then maybe even have a workshop for your own students Introducing them to these online course show them the portal how they can log in how they can register And then talk to them about these courses. What are these courses? This course is an important course for your career, etc, etc You have to make that pitch to them and also tell them that the college will help you do these courses We'll appoint a mentor as a faculty a faculty member as a mentor will help you do really well in this course You register for this course now This step is a crucial step that you have to do in your college if you don't do that if you just say Okay, these are the courses you register on your own and you do whatever you want It's very unlikely that you'll be producing toppers Okay, so for producing toppers you have to really actively hand hold your students and it starts now The process starts now you to look at the course understand what the courses and then advise your students Counsel your students on why they should do what course and how they should go about doing it And how you will help them in that course Okay, so local chapters which do this process are considerably more successful than local chapters which say These are the 93 courses. Whatever you do, we'll support you in support you and just providing internet access, etc Internet access today is not the most crucial thing local chapters are providing Okay, the hand-holding that you do is the most important thing So many local chapters use this also the other method they follow is the first run of the course They ask their faculty members to do the course Make sure that they are comfortable with that material and the next time the course is being rerun They enroll their students into it so that there is the faculty member was well qualified to guide the students through those courses Okay, and then faculty members may be keep doing newer and newer courses So they also become better at it. They can also guide more and more students So you should have an internal plan like this and I don't know what the best plan is I'm just suggesting one such plan whatever works in your college is great And later on I'll ask some of the colleges which have produced stoppers here who are here already How is their system working? Okay, so they'll be able to talk about it and maybe you will get some ideas as well, okay So this is very important publicizing the courses not just for the sake of getting numbers But for the sake of getting toppers identifying the good students who are going to benefit from this Okay, next is the enrollment like I mentioned enrollment is a simple process you go on the website and you click join button But then there are things in that form which need attention particularly the local chapter part of it needs a lot of attention Make sure that they pick your colleges a local chapter and they enter the college roll number so that we can give that information back to you Later on and you know who is doing it. Okay, so it's very important Yeah, so so as an SPOC or a local chapter or a faculty or a principal even of a college I would even suggest that you enroll in a course. Okay, so you might say, you know, I'm offended How can you ask me? I'm already a teacher you're asking me to learn I myself have enrolled in several online courses I'll learn from them. Okay, so learning is a continuous process Everybody learns there's no reason to stop learning the reason why I'm asking you to do is when you do that First of all, you learn something and I promise you you'll find some course in this 93, which you like okay There will be nothing It's unlikely that even humanities courses soft-skill courses. You will find something that you like okay simply enroll in it Just for the fun of it and go through it. It gives you a solid understanding of the processes What is the meaning of a lecture? What is the meaning of a lesson? What is an assignment? How do you submit as in what is a deadline? What happens if you miss a deadline? What is the procter exam? How do you register for it? You've gone through that yourself once. Okay, there's nothing like that You have fantastic experience after that and then when you guide your students, you'll really be in a good shape So for instance in Geetham University in Vizag, I think I don't know if people are here from Vizag. Maybe they're not here There is one SPOC there. He has four certificates. We're not wrong. All of them are in programming courses He's gone got a light plus gold medal and everything. Okay, so it's a really Impressive feed from him and when he goes and tells students, you know, you do this you really benefit Students will listen to you, right? So otherwise if they say, you know, you are not doing it Why should I do it just doesn't work? Okay, so it's very very important for you to do it as well It first of all it tells you about the processes. You understand the mechanism What is the difference between an online course and a regular course? You understand everything and you also understand how to help your students go through this and become toppers Okay, so it's very important to do that. I mentioned about choice of courses This is really really crucial. Okay, so what I'm going to do like I said, there are various types You know, are these courses math intensive? Are these courses core or elective? Are they industry related? Are they going to be little easier to do in some sense? All these choices you have to help your students make So what I'm going to do is maybe go through the list of courses a little bit and then say a few words about Each of these courses just based on my experience just to give you an idea of why these things are important The list of courses, I think Pratap already flashed it for you I'll just go through that a little bit and I'll also ask Madhavan Mukun to come up here and talk about his course a little bit after I go through This Rajesh also yeah, I think Deepak also walked in so I'll ask some of the faculty members to talk briefly about Their courses that are coming up in July But before that I just want to go through the list to tell you I mean how to go about thinking about it I told you to look at it. I'm sure you will have your own way of looking at it I'll just walk you through those courses and highlight some of them and say what but how it's going to run etc Okay So so as you go through this course the first thing is of course discipline wise So so if you look at chemistry this one, okay, so let me step back a little bit These are the 10 hour four week courses. Okay, so you have to start distinguishing based on that first there are four week courses eight week courses and 12 week courses First thing you have to see is how many of your students are going to be doing the 12 week course Which is kind of long right? It starts on July 18th. It goes till Something like October 1st or 2nd week are there holidays in the middle will students not be able to do a significant part of it Those are the decisions only you will know believe me the holidays in West Bengal or UP are very different from the holidays in Tamil Nadu in a particular semester Okay, so you have to be able to look at the college calendar and see what is the duration which is ideal for your students? Okay, the four week course for instance starts on July 18th and ends in August 20 Okay, so it's very quick and eight week Is the most successful duration usually most colleges like the eight week course It's the ideal content and it finishes well before you know starts on July 18th It ends sometime in the September 2nd week the exams are also over in September And then students can focus on any other semester exam or anything like that So they really like the eight week content So first thing you have to look at is look at the run of the course and then see your college calendar and figure out Which matches best but not as nice about a 12 week courses. You really comprehensively learn something You know I mean it's a it's a it's good content. It's sizable content. You really comprehensively learn something So there are advantages to everything, you know, that's why we have all these multiple options Otherwise, you wouldn't have multiple options. So please make sure you look at it and First decide which are the which is the time duration which is good for you and for your students as well So after that once you look at a particular duration, then you have to look at discipline Okay, so here is where I think just having one SPOC will hurt you No, I mean you look at even 10 week courses. You have chemistry computer science Design earth science electrical engineering humanities mathematics mechanical engineering even a multidisciplinary course Okay, not when one person is it's very hard for one person to know what all these areas are what are all this jargon is Is very hard. So that's why you need to have a few Faculty from different areas working with the SPOC to go through this list and maybe isolate some three or four Which you will suggest for your students and for yourself. Okay, so now that exercise is very important if you go through this I mean you can quickly identify which are the maybe the basic courses and which are probably more mathematically oriented courses Which are very intense courses for instance software testing I don't know you have to go and see how it is being done There are various ways of doing software testing one could be extremely theoretical. You can go into great Theoretical depth or maybe he's doing more practical things. So you have to go and see what is the type of material that are they are covering So you have to see the introduction page you to see the video introduction video of the instructor Okay, the page that I showed you in online course You should go see it and then get a sense of is this course going to be very theoretical For instance introduction to cryptology again cryptology can be done in so many different ways Okay, just because of the title you can't decide anything you to go there and see what the instructor is saying Okay, a few of the instructors are here. I'll let them speak as well But you have to see and understand what the course content is. Okay, so quite often there is this confusion You know I've done introduction to cryptology in my university Okay, so now believe me even though we have some standard university syllabus What one percent teachers is very different from what another person teaches and particularly in IIT is where we don't have a fixed syllabus for anything What one percent teachers will be completely different from what another percent teachers? Okay, so don't just go by names the names don't mean anything case introduction to cryptology is a name You cannot understand much from the course from the name. You have to go see the weekly content Only then you will know what is going on. Okay, same thing. I'll say for almost every course So so go through watch the introduction and make sure that it's that you understand what it is The humanities courses are also particularly interesting You should encourage your students to do humanities courses as well ask them to go through What these things are okay, so this is very important the last course down here I'll look at it and highlight it a little bit. It's biology for engineers and non biologists Okay, so that is likely to be an open course which is for everybody Biology for engineers is an open course It's for all disciplines and it's probably a slightly easier course and you can see the content and understand what it is Okay, so please do this Please do this exercise. It's it's it's very very important and then here are the 12 week courses 18 of them are there coming up in this July semester. You have basic courses once again Look at the discipline, you know, there's so many disciplines. There are two pages at the one page full of courses. There are various disciplines here We have aerospace chemical civil computer science Even computer science. There are three different courses. I want to highlight a couple of courses one is artificial intelligence search methods for problem-solving professor Deepak Amani is here. He'll talk about it Hopefully a little while and another course is mobile computing. Okay, so I'm going to highlight this course Because it's likely once again that you'll hear about this course soon enough This course is actually on Android programming. Okay, Android development. Okay, how to do Android development? We are partnering with we're trying to partner. I think we've already partnered the administrative things have to take over We're partnering with Google for this so Google will also be So many of you know Google plays a very active role in Android development So Google is partnering with us in this course. It's a 12-week course It will start with basic Java and then slowly people take people into Android development It's Android as you might know is a big-ticket job course. It's a lot of people can get jobs with it So it's a pop pretty popular course think about it and electrical engineering You have various different things you have basic courses advanced courses, etc. And humanities we have Different courses is one in mechanical engineering I'm just trying to see if there's anything else I should talk about physics of materials is a course that Prasaprathap is offering Maybe he'll also say a few words about that course itself. So various different courses are here That appeal to various different kinds of students. Okay, so please do this homework Make sure you understand what these courses are and you can present them to your students in a good way Okay, so these are like I said the eight week courses. These are the most popular Okay, our most popular courses are eight week courses and you'll see we have 59 of them Okay, it's quite a few numbers of them and again all disciplines are covered various Different topics here. I mean, I'm not going to go through them and great detail I'll just highlight a couple of things to tell you that you can't just blindly throw this list at your students Okay, there's a course here called modern algebra Okay, it's by a professor Manindra Agarwal from IIT Kanpur I don't know how many of you have heard about professor Manindra Agarwal from IIT Kanpur Few of you maybe no, maybe not. Okay, so it says modern algebra. Okay, so what do you think that course will be? Okay, so it's going to be Mathematically intense, right? So you have to make the judgment You have to again go and see and look at it But you know this course might still be accessible to some of the more bright students in your college So you don't want to just rule it out but go and see what the course is being pitched at Okay, so is he going to be pitching the course at for everybody or is he going to say it's a specialized course You have to go see that then make your judgment on whether or not this course is good for your students Okay, and for instance, there are other courses that is programming data structures and algorithms in Python Which is again being offered by mother one. So that course is more or less pitched for everybody Okay, I think I'm right. He'll also come and talk about it. Okay So you have to again make your judgment on that on the other hand algorithms for big data Okay, it's very tempting big data is a very famous word today, but believe me That's a slightly specialized course. Okay, it's not even a basic algorithms course It's slightly advanced algorithms course. We just tuned towards big data. So that's the kind of judgment You have to make inside computer science. There are these different courses There is modern algebra this programming in C++ programming in Python and then algorithms for big data and artificial intelligence, etc So you have to classify them as what year students can probably do it There is some information in the course introduction page, but for your college you have to make that judgment Okay, so since our faculty are here now, I think it's a good point for me to invite the faculty For each of them to come here and speak briefly about their course. I would like to start with Rajesh Kumar Who will maybe say a few words about his upcoming course on language and mind? Is that right applied linguistics? I'm sorry. Okay, so we'll start with him and then move on to the other You want to go later The course is ready so I can talk about it any time. It's not a not a problem As you have seen it's a part of the 30 weeks 30 hours course for 12 weeks The I'll tell you very briefly the Basics of this course and as Andrew was telling you please do encourage people in your colleges and Centers to take these courses and here is why you should you should encourage people to take these courses The name is applied linguistics. So give me a minute to tell you what linguistics is linguistics is the science of language It it I Asked you to ask yourself two questions. How did you learn the language that you speak? Answer to this question is not simple what linguists do is to find out underlying algorithm of learning language through natural process and that underlying Algorithm when it has been found out through the science of language is applied in various domains for problem-solving And if one domain which is going to be interesting to you is language teaching So it's for both When we want to learn a new language and when we want to teach a new language in both the domains the findings of the science of language is going to be relevant and I'm sure in All your colleges you do have a domain and component on teaching at least English and The findings of this are going to be helpful in doing so We are going to be available all the time online through emails through All kinds of contact information is given there At any point in time whether or not you are enrolled in the course if you want to know more about this Please get in touch with NPTEL or us directly. We will be happy to answer your questions. Thank you Talks for two minutes and get claps. I spoke for so long. I never got a single All right, so maybe Deepak Okay, so my name is Deepak Khimani I work here in the department of computer science and I'm teaching this course which is listed Between civil and computer science here. It's actually a computer science course called artificial intelligence search methods for problem-solving it's a course which we which I offered last year as well and Last year it was a 15 week course and this year Andrew and Bharti have said that it's too much So we have cut it down to a well big course, but you have also added those last three weeks of lectures in case students who are interested now It's a very basic course in computer science It's the first course in artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence as you know Everyone is talking about Google or you know Facebook or whatever But I would like to just clarify one thing is that you should not confuse this course with machine learning Because very many whenever many people talk about AI nowadays. They say it is they talk about start talking about machine learning This course is not about machine learning. It's a very fundamental course In fact, there are two separate courses on machine learning being offered one by I think Sureshna Sarkar and one called reinforcement learning by my colleague. He has been done So if you want to do machine learning, those are the courses this course talks about basic problem solving essentially How can you solve a problem? What are the methods that you can use and basically they are trial and error based search kind of methods So for example, if you are given a new puzzle, you try out different combination different possibilities and then find a solution So this course is mostly about that It's a first course in artificial intelligence any student who has basic exposure to data structures should be able to do the courses Okay, so one thing I would like to say about the course I mean courses in general in NPTEL is that we find that we have a large initial enrollment And then that paid Peters of very rapidly essentially and part of the reason is that Students are not able to sustain Interest maybe they have other things and so on but I'm hoping this time that since you are from colleges And you're going to kind of guide your students. You must encourage them to be more active Online so we have this forum in which you can pose a question and anybody can answer including other students And we also try to answer and if students are more active in the forum. They are more likely to be Surviving throughout the course essentially so it's a 12 week course and We cover the basic algorithms for problems solving So if there are any more questions, I will take them up during lunch Thanks mother so mother one is doing two courses and We'll talk about both Thanks, Andrew. Yeah, so I have so as you can see I'm listed twice on this page so at the bottom there's design and analysis of algorithms and Halfway down the page. There is this course on programming data structures and algorithms and Python So the algorithms course the one at the bottom is actually been Conducted on NPTEL more than once earlier and so it's a fairly what I would consider a fairly stable course It's a fundamental course in computer science and I think many students Do need to have a good background in this. I've tried to make it Accessible and one of the things which is makes it a little bit different from maybe the way algorithms is done in regular courses is that there is a Programming assignment associated with each week's material. So there are about five or six I Mean there are weekly quizzes which are multiple choice, but there are five or six reasonably interesting and hopefully doable but challenging programming assignments so like Deepak was saying I think one of the main things that Challenges we face in this kind of offline mode of teaching is how to ensure that students stay focused and Keep up and one of the things that they really need to do in any course But I think especially in these kind of courses is you need to work on problems. I think you can't just read or absorb passively the theory and Hope that you understand so unless you actually apply what you have done in a concrete setting I think it you don't really derive the full benefit So I think that's one place where if we have this intermediary group of faculty who are all of you are Represent I think it would be a probably a good way to make sure the engagement is more effective and students they You know focus because also the thing is that It is possible thanks to the material being available to catch up, right? But if you kind of get this feeling that oh, I missed For whatever reason this week and then I should I will never get back So I'll drop out I think that we should try to minimize and try to make sure that people do actually stay To as far as possible on track with the material. So I think it would be great if this Interaction could be improved in that sense as Deepak said, I mean the forum is there. There are a lot of avenues to interact but the students must Have the energy enthusiasm and the stamina to do it. So that's the main thing So the other course I won't talk about too much because it's still work in progress I'm trying to Okay, so honestly speaking I have You know had a lot of Discussions with people about how programming should be taught everybody has their own opinion how programming she thought so I then finally when This question was put to me by NPTEL. I decided okay now having given a lot of theory to other people about how programming should be taught Let me try and Activate my own theory and teach it the way I think it should be taught now It's not guaranteed to be the only way to teach it well But I hope again it will I it'll it should have a substantial Amount of programming you can't teach programming without people like we're writing programs so again, it will require a fair amount of interaction on part of the students to learn the material and the advantage I hope of using a language like Python is that you can get past the Initial difficulty of learning a lot of syntax Which is what happens with languages like Java or C++ and actually start learning concepts much faster And this is what I would like to emphasize in that course. So in a sense, there will be Actually a lot of overlap between these two courses, but one in the sense that some amount of Basic algorithms will come into the programming course, but I think that without teaching Interesting things programming on its own is a very dull activity. It's like learning how to type or you know handwriting or something like that I mean you can't just keep Exercising your knowledge of semicolons and open brackets without having interesting problems to solve and at the same time if the language is Complicated that you can't solve any interesting problems then it's an end in itself just to understand how to write a program So we want to strike a middle ground where quickly people can write interesting programs and start working on things which are relevant This is for all in a way, but it is definitely aimed at computer science students I mean there are again divergent opinions on how programming should be taught to people from other disciplines and what should be the emphasis So from that perspective, it is very much a computer science oriented course, but it is for all I mean it is for a beginning person I have taught this course in a conventional way to people who are studying applied mathematics So it's not that I'm coming at this from a completely You know the accuracy point of view So I do know it can be taught to people who have no programming background and we are not specialists in programming But I'd like to emphasize that this is not going to be something which for example people who are I'm not going to teach Things like scientific computing or something like that, you know how to write Eigenvalue Solving problems Okay, so okay, so anyway, so I hope that all of you will keep your students well informed and Well engaged and that this is initiative when peter will only continue to grow. Thanks We have a few more faculty members of joint as I believe demon is here. Yeah So the man is offering one course this time. He'll talk briefly about that Thank you I am Dheeman Cherajee from mechanical engineering department and Myself and my colleague professor Shamid Bakshi. We are offering a course. We can see that fluid dynamics and turbo machines this course is intended for the undergraduate students and also the master students who would like to I mean refresh the basic concepts and learn some of the details and Maybe also for practicing engineers So this course essentially starts from the fundamentals of fluid dynamics We talk about what is fluid to start with and then Talk about the different conservation equations the mass and momentum equations and Then we move on to certain concepts like boundary layer theory or the pressure drop This first part of the first module on fluid dynamics is covered by my colleague Professor Shamid Bakshi who is also from mechanical engineering department IIT Madras In the second part we talk about the fluid machines or in particular turbo machines The name turbo machines may appear a little unfamiliar, but we all know the examples in our everyday life pumps Turbines fan in our homes. So these are all examples of turbo machines so we start with what constitutes a turbo machine and let's say not a Piston pump which is a positive displacement machine. So we bring out this through some examples through some drawings and Then we talk about what are the operating principles? How to how does the energy transfer take place from the let's say the blade to the fluid or From the fluid to the blade as the case may be So the first part of the second module that is on turbo machines. We talk more about the general approach and In the second part we talk about the specific machines For example, we talk about pumps Because there is a very common use there are a lot of industrial applications and we can solve the Principles from the first principles we can solve the problems in the second part We have also that hydraulic turbines steam and gas turbines in all these cases both for the first module on fluid dynamics and For the second module on turbo machines. We actually give a in-depth coverage Accompanied by solved problems we solve it and also give tutorial problems every week So we hope that a student who takes let's say all these courses and tutorial seriously We'd have a very good grasp on the subject and then can go on to the advanced courses on fluid dynamics or advanced courses on turbo machines if required And I hope that the students if they take it they will also enjoy it. Thank you Thanks, Damon. I think we have Professor Suresh Kumar. Yeah, please. Yes, so he's Doing the eight four week course Yeah, the biology biology for engineers and other non biologists. Yes, it's always in the bottom Good afternoon to all of you I just finished recording of the last lecture for this particular MOOC. That's why I'm wearing this type of shirt You know they they recommend that we wear pastel colored shirts for appropriate reception on the video I finished that I said I was more interested in hearing from you As to what your thoughts are and that's the reason I attended when I came in I kind of got hijacked into telling you something about the course, which I will do pretty much The same as what I said in the introductory video. See this course Biology for engineers and other non biologists Bend it. Okay, fine Am I better audible now? Should I shout more or okay? I guess I'm able to see better which is which is much nicer Okay, the Title title is biology for engineers and other non biologists I'm sure that Some of the institutions are offering some such courses already We at IIT Madras have offered this course for the past 15 years at least That is because We all have this feeling that it is the century for biology and A lot of great things are expected from biology in this century and so on you know We ourselves are biological beings, okay We haven't understood ourselves much and therefore the level of Manipulations that are possible with us are rather limited at this stage although it may appear large and Irrespective of the field that you are in okay I have a bias towards engineers because I deal with an engineering a set of students Irrespective of what engineer you are it is very highly likely or irrespective of which field you work in It is very likely that your contributions say five years down the line ten years down the line Will be in a biologically related aspect in your own field, maybe and to Prepare you for that Prepare the students for that we offer this course We felt this course is ripe for offering to all And irrespective of the field that you are in you would be benefited by this this My colleague dr. Madhulika Dixit. She's a biologist. I'm a biological engineer I'm basically a chemical engineer from IIT Madras B. Tech and Then went on to do various things and somebody described me as taking the longest route to medicine and so on So you I'm in the department of biotechnology now I fully realize the importance of knowing biological principles to achieve the various different Fantastic possibilities at times and this course gives you the very basics of those We look at some fundamental molecular aspects That you would need to know to be able to first understand get out of the fear of biology many engineers fear biology Okay, they may not accept it, but essentially it's a fear. They don't like the terms Mainly because the way they were introduced to biology in school and so on so forth you memorize this and that's it Memorization is a very good skill. Definitely You know without memory you cannot dance you cannot sing and so on so forth very essential skill but at the same time there's a lot there are more aspects to it and biology is a Field in itself in every I mean in all rights and it's a very useful field This will provide you with the very basic principles just in ten hours and that was a challenge to do We normally do this course over and an entire semester. Oh I was supposed to touch this okay entire semester and That's a good challenge. Okay, I very briefly would like to mention one of the course. I just finished NPTEL online certification course and bioreactors That was earlier done. I'm basically bio biological engineer Which is also available on the NPTEL side if you're interested We will most likely run the course again sometime later if it is appropriate And then you could get benefited by the course which is entirely on bioreactors again in ten hours That is bioreactors is an aspect that I did research on for my PhD and subsequently after that when I began my independent research and It kind of became a mature subject mature aspect any major Development and that needed to come from the industry and so on and so forth and it has gone through a complete cycle complete Developmental cycle and it was a challenge to give that in ten hours. We've done that. It was well received Hopefully you'd have a chance to look at it again. Thank you Okay, I think we have one more faculty member only one more We'll have him talk about his offering two courses in the upcoming July semester So now a couple of things that process Suresh Kumar mentioned in case you or your college has participated in this course before Either bioreactors are thinking about participating in any of these courses Please do take the time to meet them and talk to them if they are around they might give you more hints There are a couple of courses. I'm one. I'm offering directly one. I'm coordinating The in the 30 hour course you will see down there The closer to the end. There's a physics of materials course So it's a core course in our department metallurgical and materials engineering but actually a lot of materials and materials engineering departments even electrical engineering department students often need to take and physics students often need to take course on solid-state physics and In my opinion as I mean both when I learned these this material as a student and also when I Prepared myself to teach this course The it's difficult to find the book at the right level to learn this Subject there are you know books which are appropriate for 12 standard students And then suddenly there's a big jump in between there seems to be a big gap And the other books are at you know, they assume a lot of things they assume that you know a lot of things and they deliver at that level and So this course actually bridges that gap very well Or at least that's the intent the intent is that So anybody who's in a who's basically done the first year undergrad courses of you know basic physics and maths can take this course The idea is you know, this talks about why materials have those the properties that they do that's the idea So normally we simply know that you know a metal is a good conductor of heat good conductor of electricity Saraming is not a good conductor of electricity Things like that but we in this course We're trying to understand in a from a first principles approach starting from say an atomic level or even you know band structure level How do how do these properties come about in fact? Why do even bands come about we you know normally we simply say conduction band valence band in all our school education And we you know have a lot of information related to that, but we rarely talk about why should there be even a band? Why why does the material have a band atoms are there separately? Why do the bands appear? So all those things are discussed here Lot of so you know new concepts are presented They're built up from basics and you know derivations are made no assumptions are made on prior knowledge except some basic You know physics and math thing. So that is one the other courses here which will come under General let me just see here Multidisciplinary introduction to research the multidisciplinary course the fourth from the bottom so we actually have several faculty involved in it and That list is not really the correct list anyway So that the courses and it's basically even in our Institute all incoming MS and PhD students have to take something like an introduction to research kind of course It's called different things in different places Basic idea is you know students come with the different backgrounds. Some have done small projects Some have done elaborate projects before this this is their first Experience and carrying out research. So we talk of a lot of things, you know, what is research? We have a lot of discussion with several faculty and this Professor Anand also has a class on it. What is just research? What are some ideas related to research? We talk about you know data analysis. How you do data analysis? How do you do computational work? Then how do you make a presentation? How I mean how do you make a technical presentation? How do you write a journal paper? What are those important things that you need to know to understand what it is? So things like this, how do you do experimental work? What are experimental skills you should have? What about safety in the laboratory? All these things which are you know necessary for a researcher to have And it's something that it would be nice to have research students introduced to it early in their You know career as a researcher in the University Of course, they may not use everything in the first semester that they are there But it's nice for them to know that these are all the aspects that are involved and that it is all Available in an organized way here. Maybe as they proceed into their research You know second year or something they may they may want to revisit some of this material and utilize it So this is a general purpose course about you know, seven eight faculty are involved in it And we try to present it across 20 hours. We'll also have something on intellectual property We'll have something on design of experiments and so on so that's those are the two courses Okay, so we are running a little bit short of time. I think but I think for some angles on there Wants to say something I need to say this. Sorry. I sort of intruded into this but up. I don't want to embarrass you and But I'd still have to say this Here is the message which I received and many of us received from Douglas half-starter Who is a very famous? writer and a physicist Has written many books and one of them the most famous books is the Godel Escher and Bach and the other one is I believe is Metamagical theme us if I remember mathematical themes was written as a pun called the metamagical theme I was is very very famous writer and a physicist from Indiana University See over the past few years for a few months. I've been helping my friend Indu Satija a professor of physics at George Mason University in Virginia in Polishing the chapters of her book called the butterfly in