IITM Online Teaching Guidelines

We will be starting online classes from Wednesday, April 1, 2020 (this is not an April fool
message!). Every faculty member must follow the instructions in the documents linked below
to upload their lecture.

• The institute Moodle (https://courses.iitm.ac.in/) will be the official record where you
will indicate the content for each lecture that you give. Details of the lecture, with the
date and relevant materials (such as presentations, reading material and links to videos
or other resources), should be uploaded on your Moodle course page and maintained
at least till the end of the semester (whenever that is). You may delete the lectures
after that in the interest of privacy if you so wish.
• You may either record your lecture and upload it, or give it live at the assigned slot
for your course starting April 1. Please give a number for the lectures in sequence.
o If you give the lecture live, you must still record it and upload it, since we
do not know how many students have a good enough connection to participate
live. Even if one student can claim later that he/she was not able to join, we
will be in a quandary. Therefore, it is vital that the lecture be recorded and
uploaded.
o Material for each lecture which is not of large size (< 10 MB per file) may be
uploaded directly to Moodle.
o Material such as video lectures should be made available in a way that is
accessible to all students: examples include Google drive or Owncloud,
provided that you set permissions so that all students can access the material.
All faculty will be given Google accounts on smail.iitm.ac.in and may use this
if needed - all students will by default have smail accounts, so sharing of files
can be restricted if necessary.
• Use Moodle to send email to all students after each lecture is uploaded giving
details. Students are being assured that they can access the lectures whenever feasible
and go through them.
• If you choose to point the students to an NPTEL course or some other publicly
available online material, you must still conduct a Q&A session or problem-
solving session for each scheduled lecture, record it and upload it. You can make up
your own FAQs and/or seek questions from students.
• The on-line classes are primarily for facilitating lecture delivery and Q&A. Faculty
may give assignments only if there is a possibility of doing them offline without
access to licensed software tools
• If you wish to use software tools other than the one suggested in the documents linked
below, you are free to do so, but you must still upload the recorded lecture as
instructed and post the relevant information on Moodle.
• We will keep going in this fashion week after week from April 1, until either we
complete the requisite number of weeks or the Institute re-opens.

We are putting together a handbook of resources for online teaching where information on
usage of various tools is available. The tools mentioned in this document are all available for
use by the faculty and students under license. If you choose to use any other tools, you have
to procure the licenses if necessary on your own. This is an evolving document, and if you
have any specific suggestions for improvement, please contact Prof. Devendra Jalihal
(dj@ee.iitm.ac.in) to get edit access.