Google Course Builder

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

I have suspected for awhile that Google is interested into moving deeper into education. I don't mean Google Apps for Education. I think they are interested in providing a way to deliver online courses - a learning management system that ties into other Google apps and tools.

Course Builder is an early foray for Google into online education. It was used to build their Power Searching with Google online course. In that course, Dan Russell took "students" through locating information and solving
search problems. Google’s Course Builder
toolkit was developed by Peter Norvig. He is the person who taught the original
open Artificial Intelligence class at Stanford with Sebastian Thrun that helped popularize MOOCs. The frameworks and templates that Russell used for his
courses were then open-sourced by Google.

Course Builder contains software and instructions for presenting your course material. It can be connected to other Google products to create a course community and to assess the effectiveness of your course.

Course Builder requires technical
skills that are more like a webmaster than an instructor. You would need some background in HTML and JavaScript.
But from the reviews that I have seen online, some designers/developers say that Course Builder is more user-friendly than other open source tools, such as those from edX. (Similar course-building tools from Coursera and Udacity get good reviews but are not yet widely available.)

Right now, Course Builder is not suitable for teachers to use without technical help. And Google is not the place to go to host your course or MOOC. But, I suspect that may not be the case in a few years.






Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
BBCode format allowed
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.
To leave a comment you must approve it via e-mail, which will be sent to your address after submission.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA