Description of Administrative tool
Course Builder is Google's experimental first step into the world of online education. Little wonder at this considering that the world of online education has been very much in the news in recent times.
From the launch of the free edX online education to the novel and strategic educational partnerships between Coursera and top universities in the world amongst many similar such stories, it has been a time of intense excitement for the world of online learning.
Google's Course Builder packages the software and technology that Google used to build its Power Searching with Google online course. The Power Searching with Google is an online course by Google to teach searchers how to become better at using Google search engine.
Eligibility / Eligible groups
Anyone can REGISTER and make use of the Course Builder software application.
Participating Institutions/ Fields of study
Google advocates use of the tool to "...create your own online courses, whether they're for 10 students or 100,000 students. You might want to create anything from an entire high school or university offering to a short how-to course on your favorite topic.
Reason for Google's Course Builder
Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, talks on the reason behind creating the power searching online course and the course-building software.
“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” said Norvig. “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”.
“We feel that by sharing the code that we’ve generated, we can impact more people in the education space. There is a lot of experimentation going on in the industry at this point, and we felt that contributing an open source project would be a beneficial starting point that could help everyone.”
Watch the video below!
| Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research speaks |
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Method of Application
According to Google, "Course Builder contains software and instructions for presenting your course material, which can include lessons, student activities, and assessments. It also contains instructions for using other Google products to create a course community and to evaluate the effectiveness of your course.
To use Course Builder, you should have some technical skills at the level of a web master. In particular, you should have some familiarity with HTML and JavaScript."
Contact
If you have technical issues or feature requests, please report them in Google's Issues Tracker.
For access to the code, documentation, user forum, and information about the Hangouts, visit the Course Builder Open Source Project Page.
To see what is possible with the Course Builder technology, register for Google’s next version of Power Searching.
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