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 to solving problems around you. IMAD (Introduction to Modern Application Development; www.imad.tech) tackles this head on via the format of a MOOC. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are online courses, designed for a world where information is accessible from anywhere at the tap of a button. IMAD will bring together a combination of theory and practice to convey the principles of building applications on the cloud. By the end of this 5 week course, you would have learnt about the Internet and the fundamentals of app-development while actually building your own application.

The course strives for the right balance between theory and practice -- build an application quickly, but also ensure that it never breaks. There is a lot of flexibility in taking the course. The short 20-min course videos will be available online (NPTEL/YouTube) and can be watched anytime. You can take the course even from the comfort of your home. The course will have graded assignments, and a final test -- this will help you remain focussed through the course.

In addition, anyone who completes the course can get a certificate from IIT Madras

The course begins September 5 (Teacher’s Day) 2016 and ends September 30, 2016. It is taught by Dr. Gaurav Raina, who 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, and Tanmai Gopal, who is Head of Technology 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.

“Our larger objective is to get the youth excited about technology, and about building solutions for both local and global problems. The course will teach students some of the technology skills that are integral to the modern digital economy,” Dr. Raina says.

“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,” adds Tanmai Gopal.

The basics of the course are to (i) Learn skills that are seen as very important in today’s job market, (ii) Give your CV a boost by getting a certification from India’s premier technical institute, IIT Madras, (iii) If you want to build out your own idea, then this course will give you the ingredients to get started, and (iv) there is an opportunity to gain experience in technology and broaden your skills.

The course will be broken into 5 modules: (i) Will give you an introduction to the Internet, and its common network protocols, (ii) You get to build a basic but complete web application, (iii) Learn the how and why of modelling data for your application using databases, (iv) Learn about performance and how to ensure security for an application, and finally (v) we will teach you how to build your own mobile application.

To sign up, you will need the basics of computer programming, and on www.imad.tech, the resources required to learn, or to brush up, the required basic programming skills are provided. The course, however, is open to anyone and there are no age restrictions.

You can register here.

For more information, see:

FB: https://www.facebook.com/IMAD.mooc/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/IMAD_mooc
IMAD website: http://www.imad.tech/
NPTEL: https://onlinecourses.nptel.ac.in/noc16_cs23/preview

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