The Jnaapti Journey – Prologue

Jnaapti was founded in May 2011 with the intention of providing quality education to the masses. We intend to build life-long learners, helping them understand the learning process and making the whole process of learning, fun and engaging. It’s been 6 years since we started and it feels like we have just started! We have learnt a lot and it has been an exciting journey so far.

Our post on The Story of Engineering Education in India is one of the most widely read blog posts. Many have praised us for succinctly capturing the key issues, but some have criticized us saying, “We know the issues. What’s the solution?”

Very little is known about what jnaapti has done or is in the process of doing and this series of posts is an attempt to capture some of our salient experiments and our success stories.

29-may-2011

Here are some posts in this series:

Jnaapti(ज्ञाप्ति), short for Jnaan and Praapti is a Sanskrit word for “Acquiring Knowledge”. We wanted a name that broadly meant learning and education. Although we have chosen computer science to experiment with, our vision is to be wherever learning and knowledge is, hence the word. While we had problems in the beginning getting people to pronounce this word, we strongly believe that it is soon going to be a household name.

People we taught

In the last 6 years, we have taught programming to kids, helped engineering students connect concepts to technology and helped organizations relate to emerging trends and migrate their architecture to these new technologies. This has helped us understand learning patterns and how to make training effective irrespective of their age or experience.

In the corporate learning segment, we have delivered training to professionals working in over 30 companies in several technologies. We have built a product called the Jnaapti Virtual Coach through which we deliver personalized training to our clients. We are one of the few companies who can deliver quality, end-to-end, cross-technology training in areas like NodeJS, AngularJS, Amazon Web Services, MongoDB etc. We have trained freshers, engineers, entrepreneurs, system administrators, database architects, senior architects and directors.

Life-long learning

Sangam (our office) is a place for life-long learners. People ask us how we manage to keep up with technology ourselves and we reply, “We never stop learning”. So whether it is Docker, or Angular, or Android, or Arduino, Sangam is a place buzzing with activity.

Our passion for life-long learning reflects in the products that we build. It has a combination of features which is currently unrivaled. At the heart of jnaapti’s Virtual Coach is a skill management engine which can compute the shortest path to learn any technology. This skill engine can help us answer questions like, “If I am an Android developer, what do I need to learn to write iPhone apps”, or, “Given that I know Java, what do I need to learn to write Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs”, or “I am a DBA with good experience in Relational Databases technology. Help me learn MongoDB”. In order to make our courses accessible from anywhere and via any device, we deliver all our courses via the browser using standard technologies. We provide learners with a complete lab setup in the cloud that is delivered in their browser, so that they don’t have to worry about lab setup themselves. We believe in providing scaffolding over tools that learners would use in their day jobs than cooking up a separate tool which completely alienates learners from the actual tools that they would end up using in their job. Our product can comfortably deliver cross-technology training and learners can pick and choose what they want to learn. This can be very broad (a course that they want to take up) or very specific (a skill that they want to pick up).

While we have started with India, we envision to be a global company soon and we feel we have just begun!