Jaaga, a Bangalore-based collective for artists and techies is launching Jaaga Study, a one-year course on computer programming, which uses Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) from various sources online to conduct classes offline. Jaaga Study relies on sources such as CodeAcademy, TeamTreeHouse, CodeSchool, Udacity, Stanford, Harvard and MIT, and this could well be a template for schools and colleges to follow for providing learning material beyond the curriculum. Such a system could also be used to introduce students to new concepts (such as gamification or bio-ethics), for which there is a paucity of subject-matter-experts. It's worth noting that MOOCs are gaining in popularity in India; we are the second largest market for MOOCs just behind United States, and 12% of edX's users are from India. The main problem with MOOCs has been the high drop-out rate which hovers around 90 per cent. In Jaaga's case that might not be a big worry as the transfer of information happens in a physical space rather than via a browser, where bunking a class is as easy as closing a tab. There are three learning tracks in the Jaaga Study programme. On the server side there is sysops, database, business logic, security, metrics and on the client side there is HTML5, CSS, Javascript and Ajax. The third track is mobile and deals mostly with Android. Jaaga Study was selected as one of five global winners in the ‘Reclaim Open Learning Innovation Challenge’ conducted by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, the MIT Media Lab, and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, and programme will be launched in…
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