IMAD (Introduction to Modern Application Development)www.imad.tech
A course brought together jointly by IIT Madras & Hasura
What is this all about? Knowing how to build an app is one of the most coveted skills in today’s world – from the perspective of well-paying jobs to starting up your own firm to solving problems around you. IMAD (Introduction to Modern Application Development) tackles this head on via the format of a MOOC. Hasura & IIT Madras will bring together a combination of theory and practice to convey the principles of building applications on the cloud. By the end of this 8 week course, you would have learnt about the internet & the fundamentals of app-development while actually building your own application. In the previous offering of IMAD, we had more than 57,000 registrations for the course, and this was the largest ever MOOC in India. Stats from the previous course are listed in Annexure I. The second offering of the course starts from January 23rd. Registrations are open till the same day. You can register for the course here.
Highlights of the Course It’s for free, for anyone, anywhere! The course strives to achieve the right balance between theory & practice; to build an application quickly, but also ensure that it never breaks. The short 20 minute course videos will be available online and can be watched anytime. The course will have graded assignments, and a final test which will help you remain focussed through the course.
- 8 week course. Free videos on YouTube.
- This is a hands-on course! Students will be building a web-application as they learn the basic concepts behind building an app.
- Premier internship interview opportunities will be provided to the course toppers (top 5% of the cohort). The previous edition of the course saw over 25 companies including Mastercard, Swiggy, HackerEarth, Furlenco offer interviews to students who completed the course. The full list of internship companies can be viewed here: http://www.imad.tech/#internships
- On writing the official final exam, students are eligible for a certificate from IIT Madras.
- Completing the course also gives students the opportunity to build apps using Hasura.
Benefits of the Course
- Learn skills that are seen as very important in today’s job market.
- Give your CV a boost by getting a certification from India’s premier technical institute, IIT Madras.
- If you want to build out your own idea, this course will give you right set of ingredients to get started.
- There is an opportunity to gain experience in technology and broaden your skills.
Course Outline The course will be broken into 5 modules that will be covered over 8 weeks:
- Will give you an introduction to the Internet, and its common network protocols
- You get to build a basic but complete web application
- Learn the how and why of modelling data for your application using databases
- Learn about performance and how to ensure security for an application
- We will teach you how to build your own mobile application.
Do I need to know programming? Basic knowledge in programming is preferred. There are prerequisite courses mentioned on the website, that can be taken before the course.
Internships The course toppers will have the tangible benefit of having a shot at getting interview opportunities at some of the top tech startups/companies in India. More than 25 companies including Swiggy, Mastercard, Hackerearth and Furlenco tied up with us in 2016 to provide interview opportunities to the students after the course. This is a testament to the usefulness of the skills that the course will be teaching.
Course Instructors Dr. Gaurav Raina is a faculty in the Dept. of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, and also a visiting research fellow in the Statistical Laboratory at Cambridge University. Tanmai Gopal is the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and co-founder of Hasura, a core technology startup. He is also an alumnus of IIT Madras from the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering.
Here is what motivated the instructors to offer the course:
Gaurav Raina: “Our larger objective is to get youth excited about technology, and about building solutions for both local and global problems. The course will teach students some of the technical skills that are integral to the modern digital economy.”
Tanmai Gopal: “In this new space of application/web development almost everyone is self-taught because the technical underpinnings are not taught anywhere, and universities are yet to catch up. Our motivation is to address this gap. In the true spirit of education we want to address the hardest challenges that people face in this field – getting started on a solid foundation.”
About Hasura: Hasura.io is a technology company that builds tools for developers to build apps fast. For example: a working backend of an app like BookMyShow can be built in under a day. Apps built on Hasura are built on some of the most cutting edge technologies today adopted by tech giants like Amazon, Pokemon-Go, Netflix, SoundCloud & Flipkart. Hasura abstracts away these tools to help developers set up a sophisticated architecture in a few clicks. Building on Hasura is the fastest way for a developer to go from an idea to a live application that is inherently production grade and cloud native!
Course begins on the 23th of January, 2017.
IMAD’s first offering was in September 2016. These are the stats from the event:
Geographic distribution of students
Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka – 76% of registrations
Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal – 12% of registrations
Outside India (20 countries) – 1000 registrations
Student Profiles
College Students – 60%
Working Professionals – 23% (more than 13,000 registrations)
Faculty and Educators – 1.5% (more than 900 registrations)
Demographic distribution of students
20-40 years age group – 60%
13-20 years age group – 32%
40+ years age group – 7%
Female participation – 29%
For details, visit www.imad.tech and for a short video about the course, see the IMAD video. Registration for the course is free and all the course videos will be available online (NPTEL/YouTube). Upon completion of the course, one can also get certification from IIT Madras.