Teach Yourself Deep Learning with TensorFlow and Udacity

Posted by Vincent Vanhoucke, Principal Research Scientist

Deep learning has become one of the hottest topics in machine learning in recent years. With TensorFlow, the deep learning platform that we recently released as an open-source project, our goal was to bring the capabilities of deep learning to everyone. So far, we are extremely excited by the uptake: more than 4000 users have forked it on GitHub in just a few weeks, and the project has been starred more than 16000 times by enthusiasts around the globe.

To help make deep learning even more accessible to engineers and data scientists at large, we are launching a new Deep Learning Course developed in collaboration with Udacity. This short, intensive course provides you with all the basic tools and vocabulary to get started with deep learning, and walks you through how to use it to address some of the most common machine learning problems. It is also accompanied by interactive TensorFlow notebooks that directly mirror and implement the concepts introduced in the lectures.

The course consists of four lectures which provide a tour of the main building blocks that are used to solve problems ranging from image recognition to text analysis. The first lecture focuses on the basics that will be familiar to those already versed in machine learning: setting up your data and experimental protocol, and training simple classification models. The second lecture builds on these fundamentals to explore how these simple models can be made deeper, and more powerful, and explores all the scalability problems that come with that, in particular regularization and hyperparameter tuning. The third lecture is all about convolutional networks and image recognition. The fourth and final lecture explore models for text and sequences in general, with embeddings and recurrent neural networks. By the end of the course, you will have implemented and trained this variety of models on your own machine and will be ready to transfer that knowledge to solve your own problems!

Our overall goal in designing this course was to provide the machine learning enthusiast a rapid and direct path to solving real and interesting problems with deep learning techniques, and we're now very excited to share what we've built! It has been a lot of fun putting together with the fantastic team of experts in online course design and production at Udacity. For more details, see the Udacity blog post, and register for the course. We hope you enjoy it!

Making online learning even easier with a re-envisioned Course Builder

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Pavel Simakov, Technical Lead, Course Builder Team

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education blog)

The Course Builder team believes in enabling new and better ways to learn (for both the instructor and learner). Today's release of Course Builder v1.10 furthers these goals in three ways, by being easier to use, embeddable and applicable to more types of content.

Easier to use
We took a step back and re-envisioned the menus and navigation of the administrative interface based on the steps instructors take as they create a course. These are designed to help you through the process of creating, styling, publishing and managing your courses. This re-imagined design gives a solid foundation for future versions of Course Builder.

A completely redesigned navigation simplifies content authoring and configuration.

To support this redesign, we’ve also completely revamped our documentation. There’s now one home for all of Course Builder’s materials: Google Open Online Education. Here, you’ll find everything you need to conceptualize and construct your content, create a course using Course Builder, and even develop new modules to extend Course Builder’s capabilities. The content now reflects the latest features and organization. This re-imagined design gives a solid foundation for future versions of Course Builder.

Embeddable assessment support
What if you want to use some of Course Builder’s features but already have an existing learning site? To help with these situations, Course Builder now supports embeddable assessments (graded questions and answers with an optional due date). Simply create your assessments in Course Builder, copy the JavaScript snippet and paste it on any site. Your users will be able to complete the assessments from the comfort of your existing site and you’ll be able to benefit from Course Builder’s per-question feedback, auto-grading and analytics with just two short lines of code that are automatically generated for you.

We started with embeddable assessments because evaluation is so important to learning, but we don’t plan to stop there. Watch for additional embeddable components in the future.

Applicable to more types of content
Many types of online learning content, like tutorials, exercises and documentation, are a lot like online courses. For instance, they might involve presenting content to users, having them do exercises or assessments and allowing them to stop and return later. Yet, you might not think of them as traditional courses.

To make Course Builder a better fit for a broader set of online content, we’ve added a new “guides” experience. Guides are a new way for students to browse and consume your content. Compared to typical online courses -- which can enforce a strict linear path (from unit 1 to unit 2, etc.) -- guides present your content as a non-numbered list. Users are free to enter and exit in any order. It also allows you to show the content for many courses together.

You could imagine each guide being a documentation page or tutorial section. Guides also work with any existing Course Builder units and can be made available by simply enabling that feature in the dashboard. Here are a couple of our courses, when viewed as guides:

Within each guide, the user is guided through the steps, which could be portions of a docs page or lessons in a unit, as in this example from the “Power Searching with Google” sample course:

By letting users jump in and out of the content as they like, guides are ideally suited to the on-the-go learner and look great on phones and tablets. It’s our first foray into responsive mobile design... but it won’t be our last.

Guides currently support public courses, but we’ll be adding registration, enhanced statefulness and interface customization, as well as elements of dynamic learning (think of a personalized list of guides).

This release has focused on making Course Builder easier to use and more relevant. It sets up the framework to give future features a natural home. It adds embeddable assessments to make Course Builder useful in more places. And it introduces guides, a new, less linear format for consuming content.

For a full list of features, see the release notes, and let us know what you think. Keep on learning!

Google’s Course Builder 1.9 improves instructor experience and takes Skill Maps to the next level

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Pavel Simakov, Technical Lead, Course Builder Team

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

When we last updated Course Builder in April, we said that its skill mapping capabilities were just the beginning. Today’s 1.9 release greatly expands the applicability of these skill maps for you and your students. We’ve also significantly revamped the instructor’s user interface, making it easier for you to get the job done while staying out of your way while you create your online courses.

First, a quick update on project hosting. Course Builder has joined many other Google open source projects on GitHub (download it here). Later this year, we’ll consolidate all of the Course Builder documentation, but for now, get started at Google Open Online Education.

Now, about those features:

• Measuring competence with skill maps
  In addition to defining skills and prerequisites for each lesson, you can now apply skills to each question in your courses’ assessments. By completing the assessments and activities, learners will be able to measure their level of competence for each skill. For instance, here’s what a student taking Power Searching with Google might see:

This information can help guide them on which sections of the course to revisit. Or, if a pre-test is given, students can focus on the lessons addressing their skill gaps.

To determine how successful the content is at teaching the desired skills across all students, an instructor can review students’ competencies on a new page in the analytics section of the dashboard.

• Improving usability when creating a course Course Builder has a rich set of capabilities, giving you control over every aspect of your course -- but that doesn’t mean it has to be hard to use. Our goal is to help you spend less time setting up your course and more time educating your students. We’ve completely reorganized the dashboard, reducing the number of tabs and making the settings you need clearer and easier to find.

We also added in-place previewing, so you can quickly edit your content and immediately see how it will look without needing to reload any pages.

For a full list of the other features added in this release (including the ability for students to delete their data upon unenrollment and removal of the old Files API), see the release notes. As always, please let us know how you use these new features and what you’d like to see in Course Builder next to help make your online course even better.

In the meantime, take a look at a couple recent online courses that we’re pretty excited about: Sesame Street’s Make Believe with Math and our very own Computational Thinking for Educators.

Young people who are changing the world through science

Posted by Andrea Cohan, Google Science Fair Program Manager

(Cross-posted from the Google for Education Blog)

Sometimes the biggest discoveries are made by the youngest scientists. They’re curious and not afraid to ask, and it’s this spirit of exploration that leads them to try, and then try again. Thousands of these inquisitive young minds from around the world submitted projects for this year’s Google Science Fair, and today we’re thrilled to announce the 20 Global Finalists whose bright ideas could change the world.

From purifying water with corn cobs to transporting Ebola antibodies through silk; extracting water from air or quickly transporting vaccines to areas in need, these students have all tried inventive, unconventional things to help solve challenges they see around them. And did we mention that they’re all 18 or younger?

We’ll be highlighting each of the impressive 20 finalist projects over the next 20 days in the Spotlight on a Young Scientist series on the Google for Education blog to share more about these inspirational young people and what inspires them.

Then on September 21st, these students will join us in Mountain View to present their projects to a panel of notable international scientists and scholars, eligible for a $50,000 scholarship and other incredible prizes from our partners at LEGO Education, National Geographic, Scientific American and Virgin Galactic.

Congratulations to our finalists and everyone who submitted projects for this year’s Science Fair. Thank you for being curious and brave enough to try to change the world through science.

The Thorny Issue of CS Teacher Certification

Posted by Chris Stephenson, Head of Computer Science Education Programs

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

There is a tremendous focus on computer science education in K-12. Educators, policy makers, the non-profit sector and industry are sharing a common message about the benefits of computer science knowledge and the opportunities it provides. In this wider effort to improve access to computer science education, one of the challenges we face is how to ensure that there is a pipeline of computer science teachers to meet the growing demand for this expertise in schools.

In 2013 the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) released Bugs in the System: Computer Science Teacher Certification in the U.S. Based on 18 months of intensive Google-funded research, this report characterized the current state of teacher certification as being rife with “bugs in the system” that prevent it from functioning as intended. Examples of current challenges included states where someone with no knowledge of computer science can teach it, states where the requirements for teacher certification are impossible to meet, and states where certification administrators are confused about what computer science is. The report also demonstrated that this is actually a circular problem - States are hesitant to require certification when they have no programs to train the teachers, and teacher training programs are hesitant to create programs for which there is no clear certification pathway.

Addressing the issues with the current teacher preparation and certification system is a complex challenge and it requires the commitment of the entire computer science community. Fortunately, some of this work is already underway. CSTA’s report provides a set of recommendations aimed at addressing these issues. Educators, advocates, and policymakers are also beginning to examine their systems and how to reform them.

Google is also exploring how we might help. We convened a group of teacher preparation faculty, researchers, and administrators from across the country to brainstorm how we might work with teacher preparation programs to support the inclusion of computational thinking into teacher preparation programs. As a result of this meeting, Dr. Aman Yadav, Professor of Educational Psychology and Educational Technology at Michigan State University, is now working on two research articles aimed at helping teacher preparation program leaders better understand what computational thinking is, and how it supports learning across multiple disciplines.

Google will also be launching a new online course called Computational Thinking for Educators. In this free course, educators working with students between the ages of 13 and 18 will learn how incorporating computational thinking can enhance and enrich learning in diverse academic disciplines and can help boost students’ confidence when dealing with ambiguous, complex or open-ended problems. The course will run from July 15 to September 30, 2015.

These kind of community partnerships are one way that Google can contribute to practitioner-centered solutions and help further the computer science education community’s efforts to help everyone understand that computer science is a deeply important academic discipline that deserves a place in the K-12 canon and well-prepared teachers to share this knowledge with students.

Should My Kid Learn to Code?

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, Google

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Over the last few years, successful marketing campaigns such as Hour of Code and Made with Code have helped K12 students become increasingly aware of the power and relevance of computer programming across all fields. In addition, there has been growth in developer bootcamps, online “learn to code” programs (code.org, CS First, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Blockly Games, etc.), and non-profits focused specifically on girls and underrepresented minorities (URMs) (Technovation, Girls who Code, Black Girls Code, #YesWeCode, etc.).

This is good news, as we need many more computing professionals than are currently graduating from Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) programs. There is evidence that students are starting to respond positively too, given undergraduate departments are experiencing capacity issues in accommodating all the students who want to study CS.

Most educators agree that basic application and internet skills (typing, word processing, spreadsheets, web literacy and safety, etc.) are fundamental, and thus, “digital literacy” is a part of K12 curriculum. But is coding now a fundamental literacy, like reading or writing, that all K12 students need to learn as well?

In order to gain a deeper understanding of the devices and applications they use everyday, it’s important for all students to try coding. In doing so, this also has the positive effect of inspiring more potential future programmers. Furthermore, there are a set of relevant skills, often consolidated as “computational thinking”, that are becoming more important for all students, given the growth in the use of computers, algorithms and data in many fields. These include:

• Abstraction, which is the replacement of a complex real-world situation with a simple model within which we can solve problems. CS is the science of abstraction: creating the right model for a problem, representing it in a computer, and then devising appropriate automated techniques to solve the problem within the model. A spreadsheet is an abstraction of an accountant’s worksheet; a word processor is an abstraction of a typewriter; a game like Civilization is an abstraction of history.
• An algorithm is a procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps that can involve repetition of operations, or branching to one set of operations or another based on a condition. Being able to represent a problem-solving process as an algorithm is becoming increasingly important in any field that uses computing as a primary tool (business, economics, statistics, medicine, engineering, etc.). Success in these fields requires algorithm design skills.
• As computers become essential in a particular field, more domain-specific data is collected, analyzed and used to make decisions. Students need to understand how to find the data; how to collect it appropriately and with respect to privacy considerations; how much data is needed for a particular problem; how to remove noise from data; what techniques are most appropriate for analysis; how to use an analysis to make a decision; etc. Such data skills are already required in many fields.

These computational thinking skills are becoming more important as computers, algorithms and data become ubiquitous. Coding will also become more common, particularly with the growth in the use of visual programming languages, like Blockly, that remove the need to learn programming language syntax, and via custom blocks, can be used as an abstraction for many different applications.

One way to represent these different skill sets and the students who need them is as follows:

All students need digital literacy, many need computational thinking depending on their career choice, and some will actually do the software development in high-tech companies, IT departments, or other specialized areas. I don’t believe all kids should learn to code seriously, but all kids should try it via programs like code.org, CS First or Khan Academy. This gives students a good introduction to computational thinking and coding, and provides them with a basis for making an informed decision on whether CS or IT is something they wish to pursue as a career.

The Computer Science Pipeline and Diversity: Part 2 - Some positive signs, and looking towards the future

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, Google

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

The disparity between the growing demand for computing professionals and the number of graduates in Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) has been highlighted in many recent publications. The tiny pipeline of diverse students (women and underrepresented minorities (URMs)) is even more troubling. Some of the factors causing these issues are:

• The historical lack of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) capabilities in our younger students; lack of proficiency has had a substantial impact on the overall number of students pursuing technical careers. (PCAST Stem Ed report, 2010)
• On the lack of girls in computing, boys often come into computing knowing more than girls because they have been doing it longer. This can cause girls to lose confidence with the perception that computing is a man’s world. Lack of role models, encouragement and relevant curriculum are additional factors that discourage girls’ participation. (Margolis 2003)
• On the lack of URMs in computing, the best and most enthusiastic minority students are effectively discouraged from pursuing technical careers because of systemic and structural issues in our high schools and communities, and because of unconscious bias of teachers and administrators. (Margolis, 2010)

Over the last 3-4 years, however, we have seen some significant positive signals in STEM education in general, and in CS/IT in particular.

• Math¹ and Science² results as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have improved slightly since 2009, both in general and for female and minority students.
• Over the last 10 years, there has been an increase in the number of students earning STEM degrees, but the news on women graduates is not as positive.

“Overall, 40 percent of bachelor's degrees earned by men and 29 percent earned by women are now in STEM fields. At the doctoral level, more than half of the degrees earned by men (58 percent) and one-third earned by women (33 percent) are in STEM fields. At the bachelor's degree level, though, women are losing ground. Between 2004 and 2014, the share of STEM-related bachelor's degrees earned by women decreased in all seven discipline areas: engineering; computer science; earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences; physical sciences; mathematics; biological and agricultural sciences; and social sciences and psychology. The biggest decrease was in computer science, where women now earn 18 percent of bachelor's degrees (18 percent). In 2004, women earned nearly a quarter of computer science bachelor's degrees, at 23 percent.” - (U.S. News, 2015)

• There has been a steady growth in investment in education companies, particularly those focused on innovative uses of technology.

• The number of publications in Google Scholar on STEM education that focus on gender issues or minority students has steadily increased over the last several years.

Results from Google Scholar, using “STEM education minority” and “STEM education gender” as search terms

• Successful marketing campaigns such as Hour of Code and Made with Code have helped raise awareness on the accessibility and importance of coding, and the diverse career opportunities in CS.
• There has been growth in developer bootcamps over the last few years, as well as online “learn to code” programs (code.org, CS First, Khan Academy, Codecademy, Blockly Games, PencilCode, etc.), and an increase in opportunities for K12 students to learn coding in their schools. We have also seen non-profits emerge focused specifically on girls and URMs (Technovation, Girls who Code, Black Girls Code, #YesWeCode, etc.)
• One of the most positive signals has been the growth of graduates in CS over the past few years.

Source: 2013 Taulbee Survey, Computing Research Association

So we are seeing small improvements in K-12 STEM proficiency and undergraduate STEM and CS degrees earned, a significant growth in investment in education innovation, more and more research on the issues of gender and ethnicity in STEM fields and increased opportunities for all students to learn coding skills online, through non-profit programs, through developer boot camps or in their schools.

However, an interesting, and potentially threatening development resulting from this positive momentum is the lack of capacity and faculty in CS departments to handle the increased number of enrollments and majors in CS. Colleges and universities, as a whole, aren’t adequately prepared to handle the surge in CS education demand - Currently there just aren’t enough instructors to teach all the students who want to learn.

This has happened in the past. In the 80’s, with the introduction of the PC, and again during the dot-com boom, interest in CS surged. CS departments managed the load by increasing class sizes as much as they possibly could, and/or they put enrollment caps in place and made CS classes harder. The effect of the former was some faculty left for industry while the effect of the latter was a decrease in the diversity pipeline.

“These kinds of caps have two effects which limit access by women and under-represented minorities:

• First, the students who succeed the most in intro CS are the ones with prior experience.
• Second, creating these kinds of caps creates a perception of CS as a highly competitive field, which is a deterrent to many students. Those students may not even try to get into CS.”

-(Guzdial, 2014)

If we allow the past to repeat itself, we may again find CS faculty leaving for industry and less diversity students going into the field. In addition, unlike the dot-com boom where interest in CS plummeted with the bust, it’s unlikely we will see a decrease in enrollments, particularly in the introductory CS courses. “CS+X”, which represents the application of CS in other fields, is illustrated by the following sample list of interdisciplinary majors in various universities:

• Yale: "Computer Science and Psychology is an interdepartmental major..."
• USC: "B.S in Physics/Computer Science for students with dual interests..."
• Stanford: "Mathematical and Computational Sciences for students interested in..."
• Northeastern: "Computer Science/Music Technology dual major for students who want to explore connections between..."
• Lehigh: "BS in Computer Science and Business integrates..."
• Dartmouth: "The M.D.-Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology..."

The number of non-major students taking CS courses, particularly the introductory ones, is growing, which makes the capacity issues worse.

At Google, we recently funded a number of universities via our 3X3 award program (3 times the number of students in 3 years), which aims to facilitate innovative, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to address these scaling issues in university CS programs. Our hope is to disseminate and scale the most successful approaches that our university partners develop. A positive development, which was not present when this happened in the past, is the recent innovation in online education and technology. The increase in bandwidth, high-quality content and interactive learning opportunities may help us get ahead of this challenging capacity issue.

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¹Average mathematics scores for fourth- and eighth-graders in 2013 were 1 point higher than in 2011, and 28 and 22 points higher respectively in comparison to the first assessment year in 1990. Hispanic students made gains in mathematics from 2011 to 2013 at both grades 4 and 8. Fourth- and eighth-grade female students scored higher in mathematics in 2013 than in 2011, but the scores for fourth- and eighth-grade male students did not change significantly over the same period. (Nation’s Report Card)

²The average eighth-grade science score increased two points, from 150 in 2009 to 152 in 2011. Scores also rose among public school students in 16 of 47 states that participated in both 2009 and 2011, and no state showed a decline in science scores from 2009 to 2011. A five-point gain from 2009 to 2011 by Hispanic students was larger than the one-point gain for White students, an improvement that narrowed the score gap between those two groups. Black students scored three points higher in 2011 than in 2009, narrowing the achievement gap with White students. (Nation’s Report Card)

The Computer Science Pipeline and Diversity: Part 1 - How did we get here?

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, Google

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

For many years, the Computer Science industry has struggled with a pipeline problem. Since 2009, when the number of undergraduate computer science (CS) graduates hit a low mark, there have been many efforts to increase the supply to meet an ever-increasing demand. Despite these efforts, the projected demand over the next seven years is significant.

Source: 2013 Taulbee Survey, Computing Research Association

Even if we are able to sustain a positive growth in graduation rates over the next 7 years, we will only fill 30-40% of the available jobs.

“By 2022, the computer and mathematical occupations group is expected to yield more than 1.3 million job openings. However, unlike in most occupational groups, more job openings will stem from growth than from the need to replace workers who change occupations or leave the labor force.” -Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Projection Report, 2012.

More than 3 in 4 of these 1.3M jobs will require at least a Bachelor’s degree in CS or an Information Technology (IT) area. With our current production of only 16,000 CS undergraduates per year, we are way off the mark. Furthermore, within this too-small pipeline of CS graduates, is an even smaller supply of diverse - women and underrepresented minority (URM) - students. In 2013, only 14% of graduates were women and 20% URM. Why is this lack of representation important?

• The workforce that creates technology should be representative of the people who use it, or there will be an inherent bias in design and interfaces.
• If we get women and URMs involved, we will fill more than 30-40% of the projected jobs over the next 7 years.
• Getting more women and URMs to choose computing occupations will reduce social inequity, since computing occupations are among the fastest-growing and pay the most.

Why are so few students interested in pursuing computing as a career, particularly women and URMs? How did we get here?

One fundamental reason is the lack of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) capabilities in our younger students. Over the last several years, international comparisons of K12 students’ performance in science and mathematics place the U.S. in the middle of the ranking or lower. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, less than one-third of U.S. eighth graders show proficiency in science and mathematics. Lack of proficiency has led to lack of engagement in technical degree programs, which include CS and IT.

“In the United States, about 4% of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2008 were in engineering. This compares with about 19% throughout Asia and 31% in China specifically. In computer sciences, the number of bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded decreased sharply from 2004 to 2007.”  -NSF: Higher Education in Science and Engineering.

The lack of proficiency has had a substantial impact on the overall number of students pursuing technical careers, but there have also been shifts resulting from trends and events in the technology sector that compound the issue. For example, we saw an increase in CS graduates from 1997 to the early 2000’s which reflected the growth of the dot-com bubble. Students, seeing the financial opportunities, moved increasingly toward technical degree programs. This continued until the collapse, after which a steady decrease occurred, perhaps as a result of disillusionment or caution.

Importantly, there are additional factors that are minimizing the diversity of individuals, particularly women, pursuing these fields. It’s important to note that there are no biological or cognitive reasons that justify a gender disparity in individuals participating in computing (Hyde 2006). With similar training and experience, women perform just as well as men in computer-related activities (Margolis 2003). But there can be important differences in reinforced predilections and interests during childhood that affect the diversity of those choosing to pursue computer science .

In general, most young boys build and explore; play with blocks, trains, etc.; and engage in activity and movement. For a typical boy, a computer can be the ultimate toy that allows him to pursue his interests, and this can develop into an intense passion early on. Many girls like to build, play with blocks, etc. too. For the most part, however, girls tend to prefer social interaction. Most girls develop an interest in computing later through social media and YouTubers, girl-focused games, or through math, science and computing courses. They typically do not develop the intense interest in computing at an early age like some boys do – they may never experience that level of interest (Margolis 2003).

Thus, some boys come into computing knowing more than girls because they have been doing it longer. This can cause many girls to lose confidence and drive during adolescence with the perception that technology is a man’s world - Both girls and boys perceive computing to be a largely masculine field (Mercier 2006). Furthermore, there are few role models at home, school or in the media changing the perception that computing is just not for girls. This overall lack of support and encouragement keeps many girls from considering computing as a career. (Google white paper 2014)

In addition, many teachers are oblivious to or support the gender stereotypes by assigning problems and projects that are oriented more toward boys, or are not of interest to girls. This lack of relevant curriculum is important. Many women who have pursued technology as a career cite relevant courses as critical to their decision (Liston 2008).

While gender differences exist with URM groups as well, there are compelling additional factors that affect them. Jane Margolis, a senior researcher at UCLA, did a study in 2000 resulting in the book Stuck in the Shallow End. She and her research group studied three very different high schools in Los Angeles, with different student demographics. The results of the study show that across all three schools, minority students do not get the same opportunities. While all of the students have access to basic technology courses (word processor, spreadsheet skills, etc.), advanced CS courses are typically only made available to students who, because of opportunities they already have outside school, need it less. Additionally, the best and most enthusiastic minority students can be effectively discouraged because of systemic and structural issues, and belief systems of teachers and administrators. The result is a small, mostly homogeneous group of students have all the opportunities and are introduced to CS, while the rest are relegated to the “shallow end of computing skills”, which perpetuates inequities and keeps minority students from pursuing computing careers.

These are some of the reasons why the pipeline for technical talent is so small and why the diversity pipeline is even smaller. Over the last two years, however, we are starting to see some positive signs.

• Many students are becoming more aware of the relevance and accessibility of coding through campaigns such as Hour of Code and Made with Code.
• This increase in awareness has helped to produce a steady increase in CS and IT graduates, and there’s every indication this growth will continue.
• More opportunities to participate in CS-related activities are becoming available for girls and URMs, such as CS First, Technovation, Girls who Code, Black Girls Code, #YesWeCode, etc.

There’s much more that can be done to reinforce these positive trends, and to get more students of all types to pursue computing as a career. This is important not only to high tech, but is critical for our nation to compete globally. In the next post of this series, we will explore some of the positive steps that have been taken in increasing the diversity of graduates in Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT) fields.

Skill maps, analytics and more with Google’s Course Builder 1.8

Posted by Adam Feldman, Product Manager and Pavel Simakov, Technical Lead, Course Builder Team

Over the past couple of years, Google’s Course Builder has been used to create and deliver hundreds of online courses on a variety of subjects (from sustainable energy to comic books), making learning more scalable and accessible through open source technology. With the help of Course Builder, over a million students of all ages have learned something new.

Today, we’re increasing our commitment to Course Builder by bringing rich, new functionality to the platform with a new release. Of course, we will also continue to work with edX and others to contribute to the entire ecosystem.

This new version enables instructors and students to understand prerequisites and skills explicitly, introduces several improvements to the instructor experience, and even allows you to export data to Google BigQuery for in depth analysis.

• Drag and drop, simplified tabs, and student feedback

We’ve made major enhancements to the instructor interface, such as simplifying the tabs and clarifying which part of the page you’re editing, so you can spend more time teaching and less time configuring. You can also structure your course on the fly by dragging and dropping elements directly in the outline.

Additionally, we’ve added the option to include a feedback box at the bottom of each lesson, making it easy for your students to tell you their thoughts (though we can't promise you'll always enjoy reading them).

• Skill Mapping

You can now define prerequisites and skills learned for each lesson. For instance, in a course about arithmetic, addition might be a prerequisite for the lesson on multiplying numbers, while multiplication is a skill learned. Once an instructor has defined the skill relationships, they will have a consolidated view of all their skills and the lessons they appear in, such as this list for Power Searching with Google:

Instructors can then enable a skills widget that shows at the top of each lesson and which lets students see exactly what they should know before and after completing a lesson. Below are the prerequisites and goals for the Thinking More Deeply About Your Search lesson. A student can easily see what they should know beforehand and which lessons to explore next to learn more.

Skill maps help a student better understand which content is right for them. And, they lay the groundwork for our future forays into adaptive and personalized learning. Learn more about Course Builder skill maps in this video.

• Analytics through BigQuery

One of the core tenets of Course Builder is that quality online learning requires a feedback loop between instructor and student, which is why we’ve always had a focus on providing rich analytical information about a course. But no matter how complete, sometimes the built-in reports just aren’t enough. So Course Builder now includes a pipeline to Google BigQuery, allowing course owners to issue super-fast queries in a SQL-like syntax using the processing power of Google’s infrastructure. This allows you to slice and dice the data in an infinite number of ways, giving you just the information you need to help your students and optimize your course. Watch these videos on configuring and sending data.

To get started with your own course, follow these simple instructions. Please let us know how you use these new features and what you’d like to see in Course Builder next. Need some inspiration? Check out our list of courses (and tell us when you launch yours).

Keep on learning!

Google Computer Science Capacity Awards

By Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations and Chris Busselle, Google.org

One of Google's goals is to surface successful strategies that support the expansion of high-quality Computer Science (CS) programs at the undergraduate level. Innovations in teaching and technologies, while additionally ensuring better engagement of women and underrepresented minority students, is necessary in creating inclusive, sustainable, and scalable educational programs.

To address issues arising from the dramatic increase in undergraduate CS enrollments, we recently launched the Computer Science Capacity Awards program. For this three-year program, select educational institutions were invited to contribute proposals for innovative, inclusive, and sustainable approaches to address current scaling issues in university CS educational programs.

Today, after an extensive proposal review process, we are pleased to announce the recipients of the Capacity Awards program:

Carnegie Mellon University - Professor Jacobo Carrasquel
Alternate Instructional Model for Introductory Computer Science Classes
CMU will develop a new instructional model consisting of two optional mini lectures per week given by the instructor, and problem-solving sessions with flexible group meetings that are coordinated by undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants.

Duke University - Professor Jeffrey Forbes
North Carolina State University - Professor Kristy Boyer
University of North Carolina - Professor Ketan Mayer-Patel
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PEER TEACHING FELLOWS: Scalable Evidence-Based Peer Teaching for Improving CS Capacity and Diversity
The project hopes to increase CS retention and diversity by developing a highly scalable, effective, evidence-based peer training program across three universities in the North Carolina Research Triangle.

Mount Holyoke College - Professor Heather Pon-Barry
MaGE (Megas and Gigas Educate): Growing Computer Science Capacity at Mount Holyoke College
Mount Holyoke’s MaGE program includes a plan to grow enrollment in introductory CS courses, particularly for women and other underrepresented groups. The program also includes a plan of action for CS students to educate, mentor, and support others in inclusive ways.

George Mason University - Professor Jeff Offutt
SPARC: Self-PAced Learning increases Retention and Capacity
George Mason University wants to replace the traditional course model for CS-1 and CS-2 with an innovative teaching model of self- paced introductory programming courses. Students will periodically demonstrate competency with practical skills demonstrations similar to those used in martial arts.

Rutgers University - Professor Andrew Tjang
Increasing the Scalability and Diversity in the Face of Large Growth in Computer Science Enrollment
Rutger’s program addresses scalability issues with technology tools, as well as collaborative spaces. It also emphasizes outreach to Rutgers’ women’s college and includes original research on success in CS programs to create new courses that cater to the changing environment.

University of California, Berkeley - Professor John DeNero
Scaling Computer Science through Targeted Engagement
Berkeley’s program plans to increase Software Engineering and UI Design enrollment by 500 total students/year, as well as increase the number of women and underrepresented minority CS majors by a factor of three.

Each of the selected schools brings a unique and innovative approach to addressing current scaling issues, and we are excited to collaborate in developing concrete strategies to develop sustainable and inclusive educational programs. Stay tuned over the coming year, where we will report on program recipients' progress and share results with the broader CS education community.

Google Science Fair 2015: what will you try?

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google for Education team

(Cross-posted from the Google for Education Blog)

Science is about observing and experimenting. It’s about exploring unanswered questions, solving problems through curiosity, learning as you go and always trying again.

That’s the spirit behind the fifth annual Google Science Fair, kicking off today. Together with LEGO Education, National Geographic, Scientific American and Virgin Galactic, we’re calling on all young researchers, explorers, builders, technologists and inventors to try something ambitious. Something imaginative, or maybe even unimaginable. Something that might just change the world around us.

From now through May 18, students around the world ages 13-18 can submit projects online across all scientific fields, from biology to computer science to anthropology and everything in between. Prizes include $100,000 in scholarships and classroom grants from Scientific American and Google, a National Geographic Expedition to the Galapagos, an opportunity to visit LEGO designers at their Denmark headquarters, and the chance to tour Virgin Galactic’s new spaceship at their Mojave Air and Spaceport. This year we’re also introducing an award to recognize an Inspiring Educator, as well as a Community Impact Award honoring a project that addresses an environmental or health challenge.

It’s only through trying something that we can get somewhere. Flashlights required batteries, then Ann Makosinski tried the heat of her hand. His grandfather would wander out of bed at night, until Kenneth Shinozuka tried a wearable sensor. The power supply was constantly unstable in her Indian village, so Harine Ravichandran tried to build a different kind of regulator. Previous Science Fair winners have blown us away with their ideas. Now it’s your turn.

Big ideas that have the potential to make a big impact often start from something small. Something that makes you curious. Something you love, you’re good at, and want to try.

So, what will you try?

Learning Digital Skills online with Google Activate

Posted by Michel Benard, University Relations Manager and Cova Soto, Product Marketing Manager, Business Marketing Madrid

According to Eurostat data, over 5 million people under age 25 are currently out of work in Europe, in contrast to an increasing demand for people with digital skills such as Digital Marketing, Big Data, Ecommerce, Mobile App Development and Cloud Computing. In particular, Spanish employers are finding it difficult to find individuals with the right skills, due to the lack of the digital education available.

In an effort to make contributions towards solving Spain’s unemployment in this sector, Google Spain, the Spanish Ministry of Industry through their business school EOI, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) are collaborating to build Google Activate, a series of massive open online courses (MOOCs) dedicated to teach digital skills to the young unemployed people in Spain. This is an example of how online education can be scaled to address educational and economic issues.

The inspiration for Google Activate began with the summer 2012 launch of Course Builder, an experimental platform developed on Google technologies designed to provide the capability for anyone to create an online environment that can be used for a wide variety of education-related activities. In September of that same year, Course Builder was made available in Europe, as part of the Google Faculty Summit in London.

Among the early adopters of Course Builder in Europe was a partnership that included the University of Alicante, who in October 2012 launched Unimooc Aemprende, a MOOC for entrepreneurs. This is just one example of the use of Course Builder to build a MOOC designed to solve a broad problem, in this case the acquisition of skills for launching a small business. More than 30,000 people have participated in Unimooc since its launch.

As of today, more than 148,000 people have registered for Activate with 13% of participants earning a certificate, which is obtained after 13 exams certified by either the EOI, Universidad Complutense de Madrid or or the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). Such certificates are being used by the awardees in their LinkedIn profile to position themselves for a job in the digital economy, where many jobs are being created. More than 19,000 students are already certified in one of the 5 digital areas.

Google Activate has plans to increase the number of students with digital skills reaching 160,000 with plans to expand further to other countries in the world.

MOOC Research and Innovation

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Recently, Tsinghua University and Google collaborated to host the 2014 APAC MOOC Focused Faculty Workshop in Shanghai, China. The workshop brought together 37 professors from 12 countries in APAC, NA and EMEA to share, brainstorm and generate important topics that are of mutual interests in the research behind MOOCs and how to foster MOOC innovation.

During the 2-day workshop, faculty and Googlers shared lessons learned and best practices for the following focus areas:

• Effectiveness of hybrid learning models.
• Topics in adaptive learning and how they can tailor to individual students by Integrating MOOCs into a student's timetable / semester / curriculum.
• Standards and practices for interoperability between online learning platforms.
• Current focuses and important topics for future MOOC research.

In addition to discussing these focus areas, here was ample time for participants to brainstorm and discuss innovative research ideas for the next-steps in potential research collaboration. Emerging from these discussions were the following themes identified as important future research topics:

• Adding new interactions to MOOCs including social and gamification
• Building a data & analytics Infrastructure that provides a foundation for personalized learning
• Interoperability across platforms, and providing access to online content for audiences with limited access.

Google is committed to supporting research and innovation in online learning at scale, through both grants and our open source Course Builder platform, and we are excited to pursue potential research collaborations with partner universities to move forward on the topics discussed. Stay tuned for future announcements on research and collaboration aimed at enabling further MOOC innovation.

Announcing the Google CS Engagement Small Awards Program

Posted by Leslie Yeh Johnson, University Relations

(cross-posted on the Google for Education blog)

College students are more interested than ever in studying computer science. There has been an unprecedented increase in enrollment in Computer Science undergraduate programs over the past six years. Harvard University’s popular introductory CS course CS50 has recently claimed the spot as the most enrolled course on campus. An astounding 50% of Harvey Mudd’s graduates received engineering degrees this year. However, while the overall number of students in introductory computer science courses continue to climb, the number of students who go on to complete undergraduate degrees in this field, particularly among women and under-represented minorities, does not match this increase in individual course enrollment (2013 Taulbee Survey).

Recent findings show that while students may begin a CS degree program, retaining students after their first year remains an issue. Research indicates that one of the strongest factors in the retention of students in undergraduate CS degrees is early exposure to engaging courses and course material, such as high quality assignments that are meaningful and relevant to the student’s life or classroom activities that encourage student-to-student interaction. When an instructor or department imbeds these practices into the introductory CS classroom, students remain excited about CS and are more likely to complete their undergraduate CS degree.

At Google we believe in the importance of preparing the next generation of computer scientists. To this end, we’ve created the CS Engagement Small Grants Program to support educators teaching introductory computer science courses in reaching their engagement and retention goals. We’ll give unrestricted gifts of $5,000 to the selected applicants’ universities, towards the execution of engaging CS1 or CS2 courses in the 2014-2015 school year. We encourage educators who are teaching CS1 and CS2 courses at the post-secondary level to apply to the Google CS Engagement Small Grants Program. Applications will be accepted through November 15, 2014 and will be evaluated on an ongoing basis. If you’re interested in applying, please check out the Call for Proposals.

Sign in to edx.org with Google (and Facebook, and...)

Posted by John Cox, Software Engineer

Google is passionate about online education. In addition to our own Course Builder project, we’re also partners with edX, a not-for-profit that shares our desire for scalable, quality education for everyone. Their software, Open edX, lets people make educational content and deliver it online to anybody, anytime, anywhere. It powers their own site, edx.org, and is also used by companies and universities worldwide.

Today we’re very pleased to announce that you can now sign in to edx.org with your Google or Facebook account:

Until recently, users who wanted to take advantage of the high quality content on edx.org needed to create a new account first. This is a painful, error prone process―really, who wants to worry about yet another password? So we added the ability to use over 60 external authentication providers to Open edX, with support for everything from open standards like OpenID or OAuth 2.0, to custom university single sign-on systems. For their edx.org site, edX decided to let users pick between Google, Facebook, and a custom username and password.

If you run Open edX, you can also use this feature now. The authentication module is extensible so you can add any third-party provider you want if your favorite is not yet supported. And the feature is completely configurable, so you can pick whatever third-party authentication systems are best for your users, including none at all. It’s totally up to you.

By simultaneously increasing user choice, convenience, and security, we hope to make open online education even easier and safer to use, whether people pick Course Builder or Open edX for authoring and delivering courses. We’re very grateful to our partners at edX for working with us in this exciting field.

Course Builder now supports the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) Specification

Posted by John Cox, Software Engineer

Since the release of Course Builder two years ago, it has been used by individuals, companies, and universities worldwide to create and deliver online courses on a variety of subjects, helping to show the potential for making education more accessible through open source technology.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Course Builder now supports the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. Course Builder can now interoperate with other LTI-compliant systems and online learning platforms, allowing users to interact with high-quality educational content no matter where it lives. This is an important step toward our goal of making educational content available to everyone.

If you have LTI-compliant software and would like to serve its content inside Course Builder, you can do so by using Course Builder as an LTI consumer. If you want to serve Course Builder content inside another LTI-compliant system, you can use Course Builder as an LTI provider. You can use either of these features, both, or none—the choice is entirely up to you.

The Course Builder LTI extension module, now available on Github, supports LTI version 1.0, and its LTI provider is certified by IMS Global, the nonprofit member organization that created the LTI specification. Like Course Builder itself, this module is open source and available under the Apache 2.0 license.

As part of our continued commitment to online education, we are also happy to announce we have become an affiliate member of IMS Global. IMS Global shares our desire to provide education online at scale, and we look forward to working with the IMS community on LTI and other online education technologies.

Working Together to Support Computer Science Education

Posted by Chris Stephenson, Computer Science Education Program Manager

(Cross-posted from the Google for Education blog)

Computer Science (CS) education in K-12 is receiving an increasing amount of attention from media and policy makers. Education groups have been working for years to build the infrastructure needed to support CS both inside and outside the school environment, including standards development and dissemination, models for teacher professional development, research, resources for educators, and the building of peer-driven and peer-supported communities of learning.

At Google, we strive to increase opportunities in CS and be a strong contributor to the community of those seeking to improve CS education through our engagement in research, curriculum resource development and dissemination, professional development of teachers, tools development, and large-scale efforts to engage young women and underrepresented groups in computer science. However, despite these efforts, there are still many challenges to overcome to improve the state of CS education.

For example, many people confuse computer science with education technology (the use of computing to support learning in other disciplines) and computer literacy (a very basic understanding of a limited number of computer applications). This confusion leads to the assumption that computer science education is taking place, when in fact in many schools it is not.

Women and minorities are still underrepresented in computer science education and in the high tech workplace. In her introduction to Jane Margolis’ Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing, distinguished scientist Shirley Malcolm refers to computer science as “privileged knowledge” to which minority students often have no access. This statement is supported by data from the College Board and the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Poverty also has a significant but often ignored impact on access to technology and quality computer science education. At present there are more than 16 million U.S. children living in poverty; these children are the least likely to have access to computer science knowledge and tools in their schools and homes.

There are many organizations and programs which focus on CS education, working hard to address these issues, and others. This gives Google the unique opportunity to analyze gaps in existing efforts and apply our resources towards programs that are most needed. In so doing, we hope to help uncover new strategies and create sustainable improvements to CS education.

Achieving systemic and sustained change in K-12 CS education is a complex undertaking that requires strategic support that complements both existing formal school programs and extracurricular education. Google is proud to be a member of the community committed to making tangible improvements to the state of CS education. In future blog posts, we will introduce you so some of the programs and resources that Google has been working on.

Summer Games: Learn to Program

Posted by Jennifer Vaden Barth, Executive Assistant

Looking for ways to engage your kids in constructive, meaningful learning? We’ve just launched Blockly Games, our next extension of Blockly, a web­-based graphical programming environment. As part of the generation of new programming environments that provide a more accessible introduction to coding, Blockly Games allows users to create and run programs by arranging blocks with a simple click, drag and drop.

Blockly Games requires little or no typing, which facilitates young or novice programmers to learn core coding principles in an intuitive way. By minimizing the use of syntax, users are able to focus on the logic and concepts used by computer scientists, progressing at their own pace as they venture through mazes and more advanced arenas.

Blockly was featured during the 2013 Computer Science Education week where people of all ages tried programming for the first time. Blockly is universally accessible with translations for a number of languages, including German, Vietnamese, Russian and even Klingon.

We encourage you and your child to explore Blockly Games, where novice programmers of any age begin to learn together. With Blockly Games, the whole family can learn and master basic computer science concepts.

A skill-based approach to creating open online courses

Posted by Sean Lip, Software Engineer, Open Online Education

Google has offered a number of open online courses in the past two years, and some of our recent research highlights the importance of having effective and relevant activities in these courses. Over the past decade, the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) at Carnegie Mellon, and now at Stanford, has successfully offered free open online courses that are centered around goal-directed activities that provide students with targeted feedback on their work. In order to improve understanding about how to design online courses based around effective activities, Google and OLI recently collaborated on a white paper that outlines the skill-based approach that OLI uses to create its courses.

OLI courses are focused around a set of learning objectives which identify what students should be able to do by the time they have completed a course module. These learning objectives are broken down into skills, and individual activities in the course are aimed towards developing students’ mastery with these skills. A typical activity from the Engineering Statics course is shown below:

During the course, students’ attempts at questions related to a particular skill are then fed as inputs into a probabilistic model which treats the degrees of mastery for each skill as mathematically independent variables. This model estimates how likely a student is to have mastered individual skills, and its output can help instructors determine which students are struggling and take appropriate interventions, as well as inform the design of future versions of the same course. The paper also outlines the advantages and limitations of the existing system, which could be useful starting points for further research.

We hope that this white paper provides useful insight for creators of online courses and course platforms, and that it stimulates further discussion about how to help people learn online more effectively.

Computer Science Education Recharged!

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

A few days ago, I attended the annual SIGCSE (Special Interest Group, Computer Science Education) conference in Atlanta, GA. Google has been a platinum sponsor of SIGCSE for many years now, and the conference provides an opportunity for thousands of CS educators to come together, share ideas and engage in the resurgence of activity and interest in CS education.

Seven years ago, the number of CS majors at the undergraduate level hit an all time low; the number of students taking the Advanced Placement CS exam fell 15% between 2001 and 2007, and the number of college freshmen intending to major in CS plummeted more than 70% during the same period. This was a concern for CS educators, as advancing U.S. students' understanding of the principles and practices of computing is critical to developing a globally competitive workforce for the 21st century.

Since 2007, though, many significant things have happened. First, a commission of ten secondary and higher education faculty came together to design a new Advanced Placement CS course called CS Principles. This reinvention of AP CS not only introduces students to programming, but also gives them an understanding of the fundamental concepts of computing, its breadth of application and its potential for transforming the world. Additionally, since 2007 the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA), a community that plays a key role in professional development, CS standards definition (another critical stake in the ground), and scaling of the new AP CS, has grown to 16,000+ members.

Finally, late last year, code.org launched Hour of Code with over 29 million students participating, which is an unprecedented scale in CS education. This event raised awareness and provided enormous opportunity for follow-on with teachers and students who realized that coding is not only accessible, but fun. Their next step is to scale Exploring Computer Science this fall to 30 school districts (and counting) including some of the biggest districts in the country, in addition to developing K-5 and middle school curriculum.

Last week at SIGCSE, Google had an opportunity to present two new programs and a transition of an existing program:

• CS First is a pilot program in South Carolina introducing students to CS in a social, collaborative after-school environment. The focus is on raising awareness and helping students understand their potential in the field.
• Engage CS Edu will provide curriculum resources for introductory CS1/CS2 courses that are engaging to both women and men.
• CS4HS continues to experiment this year with online professional development opportunities for teachers. We still support face-to-face CS4HS workshops, but given the success of our MOOC experiments last year, we’d like to continue to see how we might scale to more and more teachers.

The growth in awareness and activity in CS education over the past two years has been amazing and it continues to grow rapidly, thanks to the hard work of many. Google is proud to work with the many organizations in CS education to support and scale their work, through programs and funding. We strive to develop new programs where there are gaps, utilizing our technical infrastructure, our experience with scale, and a deep understanding of the potential of CS to transform the world in positive ways. This has been core to Google’s philosophy since we started 16 years ago.