Google launches open-source Course Builder
September 12, 2012
Google has launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes.
In July, Research at Google ran a large open online course, Power Searching with Google, taught by search expert, Dan Russell. The course was successful, with 155,000 registered students. Through this experiment, we learned that Google technologies can help bring education to a global audience. So we packaged up the technology we used to build Power Searching and are providing it as an open source project called Course Builder. We want to make this technology available so that others can experiment with online learning.
The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance. “We want to use this launch to show that Google believes it can contribute to technology in education,” says Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.
“Along with releasing the experimental open source code, we’ve provided documentation and forums for anyone to learn how to develop and deploy an online course like Power Searching. In addition, over the next two weeks we will provide educators the opportunity to connect with the Google team working on the code via Google Hangouts.”
Google is hoping that big-name universities, such as Stanford and MIT, who have started to put their courses online for free, will adopt the technology.
Comments (8)
by Jackie
My question is this: “Why?” I want to know why Google is moving into online learning.
by Rick Thurman
According to the text above, 155 thousand people registered for the course; per the video, 20 thousand finished. All things told, probably not a bad completion rate. Figuring out what conversion rates count as “successful” should be interesting as this sort of thing scales up. The next big question will be, if this can be certified, how many new students will be brought into each subject versus on-line curricula “poaching” off ‘regular’ schools. When will that become a controversy of the year, for what types of students/ subjects, and should anyone care?
by Yuki Kondera
What made them thinking that people will start learning javascript and stuff…? Why someone just skipped the last week of product preparation to make it really user friendly?
by Simon Anderson
With so many resources coming online so quickly, the transformation of education is going to be bumpy and extreme – a long time overdue though!
by Bri
It seems their focus is in information searching and the future of education, not playing games.
by Marcos Marin
Why would Stanford stop using coursera or mit stop using mitx? This will appeal much more to new entrants, specially smaller ones who could then bypass the costs of current platforms. Except for that, awesome! :-)
by DeBee Corley
Wow! This is accelerating faster than I thought it would. (Big deal, coming from Mr. Nobody.)
Our smartest children will no longer be held back by their “classroom”.
by Shaun Coates
Curious to know if they plan on building gamification features into the platform?