India’s Largest MOOC Offers Free Skills Upgrades to Techies, Students

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM:
With the widening gap between skill sets and market needs fuelling fears of impending job cuts in the IT sector, a cutting-edge, free-of-cost online course – affiliated with IIT-Madras – is helping both working professionals and students as young as 13 catch up with the latest in technology development.
Since its launch in September 2016, nearly 1.5 lakh students have registered for IMAD (Introduction to Modern Application Development) – making it India’s largest and most popular tech massive open online course or MOOC – over the two intakes thus far.
The third session begins on Monday (July 24). Applicants for the next intake can register at https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/noc17_cs40/preview​. Details of the course are available in http://www.imad.tech/.
Developed by Hasura, a core-tech startup, in partnership with IITM, the eight-week course blends theory and practice to convey the principles of building web applications. The course features video lectures, an app development portal for students to build web applications as they learn concepts and a discussion forum for peer-to-peer learning.
Subjects covered include an introduction to the Internet and networking protocols, the fundamentals of app-development, modeling data and serving content using databases, analysing performance and testing security besides actually building web and mobile applications. IMAD has already led to the development of some 6,700 apps.
Students who successfully complete the course will receive an official, e-verifiable certificate from IIT Madras. Course toppers will also have the opportunity to take part in an 8-week product development internship at Hasura, thus helping the best students hone their application development skills in the real world.
Over that two-month period, interns will build a product from an idea of their choice, gain valuable experience in technical writing, product development, debugging and collaboration, besides being mentored by Hasura engineers and other industry experts. More than 430 students have already got internships at various start-ups after completing the course.