Google Offers Software To Create Online Classes

Google is getting into the educational technology game by introducing Course Builder.  It's a piece of free software used to manage online classes:

Course Builder is our experimental first step in the world of online education. It packages the software and technology we used to build our Power Searching with Google online course. We hope you will use it 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.

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.

Massive Open, Online Classes, or MOOCs, are getting popular in the general educational world.  I wrote about them recently in how they could impact law schools.  My basic premise is that law schools could use something like this to demystify the law to either the general public or prospective law schools.  As a side note to that discussion, see this story in the Daily Camera (Boulder) which describes how the Law School at the University of Colorado is conducting a set of legal lectures in a “Mini Law School” open to the public for a nominal fee:

In the end, CU officials hope the lectures will help people better navigate the legal system or even get them interested in considering law school.

Imagine doing that online instead of on campus.

Google offers design help through its wiki and other sources.  The company does take a bit of advantage by cross-promoting its own resources, offering other optional information about Course Builder via Hangouts on Google+.  Anyone interested in producing their own online classes should take a look at this.  It might also be useful to produce library instructional material.  [MG]