Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Google's new online Course Builder tool, open source

By Vasudev Ram


Google has launched a new product called Course Builder to let anyone create an online course.

Note from the site: "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."

Edudemic article about Course Builder. It has a video of Dr. Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, explaining why they built it.

Excerpt from a message from Dr. Norvig, mentioned in the article:

[ 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.
...
We are excited that Stanford University, Indiana University, UC San Diego, Saylor.org, LearningByGivingFoundation.org, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and a group of universities in Spain led by Universia, CRUE, and Banco Santander-Universidades are considering how this experimental technology might work for some of their online courses. ]

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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