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!

Announcing the Google MOOC Focused Research Awards

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations, and Aimin Zhu, University Relations Manager, APAC

Last year, Google and Tsinghua University hosted the 2014 APAC MOOC Focused Faculty Workshop, an event designed to share, brainstorm and generate ideas aimed at fostering MOOC innovation. As a result of the ideas generated at the workshop, we solicited proposals from the attendees for research collaborations that would advance important topics in MOOC development.

After expert reviews and committee discussions, we are pleased to announce the following recipients of the MOOC Focused Research Awards. These awards cover research exploring new interactions to enhance learning experience, personalized learning, online community building, interoperability of online learning platforms and education accessibility:

• “MOOC Visual Analytics” - Michael Ginda, Indiana University, United States
• “Improvement of students’ interaction in MOOCs using participative networks” - Pedro A. Pernías Peco, Universidad de Alicante, Spain
• “Automated Analysis of MOOC Discussion Content to Support Personalised Learning” - Katrina Falkner, The University of Adelaide, Australia
• “Extending the Offline Capability of Spoken Tutorial Methodology” - Kannan Moudgalya, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India
• “Launching the Pan Pacific ISTP (Information Science and Technology Program) through MOOCs” - Yasushi Kodama, Hosei University, Japan
• “Fostering Engagement and Social Learning with Incentive Schemes and Gamification Elements in MOOCs” - Thomas Schildhauer, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Germany
• “Reusability Measurement and Social Community Analysis from MOOC Content Users” - Timothy K. Shih, National Central University, Taiwan

In order to further support these projects and foster collaboration, we have begun pairing the award recipients with Googlers pursuing online education research as well as product development teams.

Google is committed to supporting innovation in online learning at scale, and we congratulate the recipients of the MOOC Focused Research Awards. It is our belief that these collaborations will further develop the potential of online education, and we are very pleased to work with these researchers to jointly push the frontier of MOOCs.

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.

Helping teachers teach computer science

Posted by Karen Parker, Education Program Manager and Jason Ravitz, Education Evaluation Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google for Education Blog)

Since 2009, Google’s CS4HS (Computer Science for High School) grant program has connected more than 12,000 computer science (CS) teachers with skills and resources to teach CS in fun and relevant ways. An estimated 600,000 students have been impacted by the teachers who have completed CS4HS professional development workshops so far. Through annual grants, nearly 230 colleges and universities have hosted professional development workshops worldwide.

Grantees use the funds to develop CS curriculum and professional development workshops tailored for local middle and high school teachers. These workshops expose teachers to CS curriculum using real-world applications that spark students’ curiosity. As feedback from those teachers rolls in, we want to share some highlights from what we’ve learned so far.

What went well:

• 89% of participants reported they would recommend their workshop to others
• 44% more participants reported a “high” or “very high knowledge” of CS after their workshop vs. before
• More than half of participants said they would use “most” or “all” of the activities or resources presented during their workshop.
• In 2014 the number of teachers who took part in a CS4HS professional development workshop increased by 50%, primarily due to the funding of multiple MOOCs.

Ways to make a bigger impact:

• Just 53% of participants said they felt a sense of community among the other workshop participants. Research by Joyce & Showers (2002) and Wiske, Stone, & Levinson (1993) shows that peer-to-peer professional development, along with ongoing support, helps teachers implement new content, retain skills, and create lasting change. We’ll explore new ways to build community among participants as we plan future workshops.
• 83% of participants reported being Caucasian, which is consistent with the current demographics of CS educators. This indicates a need to increase efforts in diversifying the CS teacher population.
• Outcome measures show us that the most knowledge gains were among teachers who had no prior experience teaching CS or participating in CS professional development -- a population that made up just 30% of participants. While we see that the workshops are meeting a need, there remains an opportunity to develop materials geared toward more experienced CS teachers while also encouraging more new teachers to participate.

We know there are many challenges to overcome to improve the state of CS teacher professional development. We look forward to sharing new ideas for working in partnership with the CS education community to help address those challenges, in particular by helping more teachers teach computer science.

At the University of Sydney CS4HS workshop teachers are learning how to teach

Computer Science without a computer during a CS Unplugged activity.

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.

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.

Making Sense of MOOC Data

Posted by Julia Wilkowski, Staff Instructional Designer

In order to further evolve the open education system and online platforms, Google’s course design and development teams continually experiment with massive, open online courses. Recently, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s recent Learning@Scale conference in Atlanta, GA, several members of our team presented findings about our online courses. Our research focuses on learners’ goals and activities as well as self-evaluation as an assessment tool. In this post, I will present highlights from our research as well as how we’ve applied this research to our current course, Making Sense of Data.

Google’s five online courses over the past two years have provided an opportunity for us to identify learning trends and refine instructional design. As we posted previously, learners register for online courses for a variety of reasons. During registration, we ask learners to identify their primary goal for taking the class. We found that just over half (52.5%) of 41,000 registrants intended to complete the Mapping with Google course; the other half aimed to learn portions of the curriculum without earning a certificate. Next we measured how well participants achieved those goals by observing various interaction behaviors in the course, such as watching videos, viewing text lessons, and activity completion. We found that 42.4% of 21,000 active learners (who did something in the course other than register) achieved the goals they selected during registration. Similarly, for our Introduction to Web Accessibility course, we found that 56.1% of 4,993 registrants intended to complete the course. Based on their interactions with course materials, we measured that 49.5% of 1,037 active learners achieved their goals.

Although imperfect, these numbers are more accurate measures of course success than completion rates. Because students come to the course for many different reasons, course designers should make it easier for learners to meet a variety of objectives. Since many participants in online courses may just want to learn a few new things, we can help them by releasing all course content at the outset of the course and enabling them to search for specific topics of interest. We are exploring other ways of personalizing courses to help learners achieve individual goals.

Our research also indicates that learners who complete activities are more likely to complete the course than peers who completed no activities. Activities include auto-graded multiple-choice or short-answer questions that encourage learners to practice skills from the course and receive instant feedback. In the Mapping with Google course, learners who completed at least sixty percent of course activities were much more likely to submit final projects than peers who finished fewer activities. This leads us to believe that as course designers, we should be paying more attention to creating effective, relevant activities than focusing so heavily on course content. We hypothesize that learners also use activities’ instant feedback to help them determine whether they should spend time reviewing the associated content. In this scenario, we believe that learners could benefit from experiencing activities before course content.

As technological solutions for assessing qualitative work are still evolving, an active area of our research involves self-evaluation. We are also intrigued by previous research showing the links between self-evaluation and enhanced metacognition. In several courses, we have asked learners to submit projects aligned with course objectives, calibrate themselves by evaluating sample work, then apply a rubric to assess their own work. Course staff graded a random sample of project submissions then compared the learners’ scores with course staff’s scores. In general, we found a moderate agreement on Advanced Power Searching (APS) case studies (55.1% within 1 point of each other on a 16-point scale), with an increased agreement on the Mapping projects (71.6% within 2 points of each other on a 27-point scale). We also observed that students submitted high quality projects overall, with course staff scoring 73% of APS assignments a B (80%) or above; similarly, course staff evaluated 94% of Mapping projects as a B or above.

What changed between the two courses that allowed for a higher agreement with the mapping course? The most important change seems to be more objective criteria for the mapping project rubric. We also believe that we haven’t given enough weight to teaching learners how to evaluate their own work. We plan to keep experimenting with self-evaluation in future courses.

Since we are dedicated to experimenting with courses, we have not only applied these findings to the Making Sense of Data course, but we have also chosen to experiment with new open-source software and tools. We’re exploring the following aspects of online education in this class:

• Placing activities before content
• Reduced use of videos
• Final project that includes self-reflection without scores
• New open-source technologies, including authoring the course using edX studio and importing it into cbX (running on Google’s AppEngine platform) as well as Oppia explorations

We hope that our research and the open-source technologies we’re using will inspire educators and researchers to continue to evolve the next generation of online learning platforms.

Making Sense of Data with Google

Posted by John Atwood, Program Manager

In September 2013, Google announced joining forces with edX to contribute to their open source platform, Open edX. Since then we’ve been working together to expand this open education ecosystem. We’re pleased to announce our first online course built using Open edX. Making Sense of Data showcases the collaborative technology of Google and edX using cbX to run Open edX courses on Google App Engine.

The world is filled with lots of information; learning to make sense of it all helps us to gain perspective and make decisions. We’re pleased to share tools and techniques to structure, visualize, and analyze information in our latest self-paced, online course: Making Sense of Data.

Making Sense of Data is intended for anybody who works with data on a daily basis, such as students, teachers, journalists, and small business owners, and who wants to learn more about how to apply that information to practical problems. Participants will learn about the data process, create and use Fusion Tables (an experimental tool), and look for patterns and relationships in data. Knowledge of statistics or experience with programming is not required.

Like past courses, participants engage with course material through a combination of video and text lessons, activities, and projects. In this course, we will also introduce some new features that help create a more engaging participant experience. For example, participants will be able to access instant hangouts and live chats from the course web page for quick help or for direct feedback. As with all of our MOOCs, you’ll learn from Google experts and collaborate with participants worldwide. You’ll also have the opportunity to complete a final project and apply the skills you’ve learned to earn a certificate.

Making Sense of Data runs from March 18 - April 4, 2014. Visit g.co/datasense to learn more and register today. We look forward to seeing you make sense of all the information out there!

Unique Strategies for Scaling Teacher Professional Development

Posted by Candice Reimers, Senior Program Manager

Research shows that professional development for educators has a direct, positive impact on students, so it’s no wonder that institutions are eager to explore creative ways to enhance professional development for K-12 teachers. Open source MOOC platforms, such as Course Builder, offer the flexibility to extend the reach of standard curriculum; recently, several courses have launched that demonstrate new and creative applications of MOOCs. With their wide reach, participant engagement, and rich content, MOOCs that offer professional development opportunities for teachers bring flexibility and accessibility to an important area.

This summer, the ScratchEd team out of Harvard University launched the Creative Computing MOOC, a 6 week self paced workshop focused on building computational thinking skills in the classroom. As a MOOC, the course had 2600 participants, who created more than 4700 Scratch projects, and engaged in 3500 forum discussions, compared to the “in-person” class held last year, which reached only 50 educators.

Other creative uses of Course Builder for educator professional development come from National Geographic and Annenberg Learner who joined forces to develop Water: The Essential Resource, a course developed around California’s Education and Environment Initiative. The Friday Institute’s MOOC, Digital Learning Transitions, focused on the benefits of utilizing educational technology and reached educators across 50 states and 68 countries worldwide. The course design included embedded peer support, project-based learning, and case studies; a post-course survey showed an overwhelming majority of responders “were able to personalize their own learning experiences” in an “engaging, easy to navigate” curriculum and greatly appreciated the 24/7 access to materials.

In addition to participant surveys, course authors using the Course Builder platform are able to conduct deeper analysis via web analytics and course data to assess course effectiveness and make improvements for future courses.

New opportunities to experience professional development MOOCs are rapidly emerging; the University of Adelaide recently announced their Digital Technology course to provide professional development for primary school teachers on the new Australian curriculum, the Google in Education team just launched a suite of courses for teachers using Google technologies, and the Friday Institute course that aligns with the U.S. based Common Core State Standards is now available.

We’re excited about the innovative approaches underway and the positive impact it can have for students and teachers around the world. We also look forward to seeing new, creative applications of MOOC platforms in new, unchartered territory.

Opening up Course Builder data

Posted by John Cox and Pavel Simakov, Course Builder Team, Google Research

Course Builder is an experimental, open source platform for delivering massive online open courses. When you run Course Builder, you own everything from the production instance to the student data that builds up while your course is running.

Part of being open is making it easy for you to access and work with your data. Earlier this year we shipped a tool called ETL (short for extract-transform-load) that you can use to pull your data out of Course Builder, run arbitrary computations on it, and load it back. We wrote a post that goes into detail on how you can use ETL to get copies of your data in an open, easy-to-read format, as well as write custom jobs for processing that data offline.

Now we’ve taken the next step and added richer data processing tools to ETL. With them, you can build data processing pipelines that analyze large datasets with MapReduce. Inside Google we’ve used these tools to learn from the courses we’ve run. We provide example pipelines ranging from the simple to the complex, along with formatters to convert your data into open formats (CSV, JSON, plain text, and XML) that play nice with third-party data analysis tools.

We hope that adding robust data processing features to Course Builder will not only provide direct utility to organizations that need to process data to meet their internal business goals, but also make it easier for educators and researchers to gauge the efficacy of the massive online open courses run on the Course Builder platform.

We are joining the Open edX platform

Posted by Dan Clancy, Director of Research

A year ago, we released Course Builder, an experimental platform for online education at scale. Since then, individuals have created courses on everything from game theory to philanthropy, offered to curious people around the world. Universities and non-profit organizations have used the platform to experiment with MOOCs, while maintaining direct relationships with their participants. Google has published a number of courses including Introduction to Web Accessibility which opens for registration today. This platform is helping to deliver on our goal of making education more accessible through technology, and enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of cloud platform services.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform. We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform.

We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem, as learning expands in the online world. Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. Our industry is in the early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today.

We appreciate the community that has grown around the Course Builder open source project. We will continue to maintain Course Builder, but are focusing our development efforts on Open edX, and look forward to seeing edX’s MOOC.org platform develop. In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder. We hope that our continued contributions to open source education projects will enable anyone who builds online education products to benefit from our technology, services and scale. For learners, we believe that a more open online education ecosystem will make it easier for anyone to pick up new skills and concepts at any time, anywhere.

Make Your Websites More Accessible to More Users with Introduction to Web Accessibility

Eve Andersson, Manager, Accessibility Engineering

Cross-posted with Google Developer's Blog

You work hard to build clean, intuitive websites. Traffic is high and still climbing, and your website provides a great user experience for all your users, right? Now close your eyes. Is your website easily navigable? According to the World Health Organization, 285 million people are visually impaired. That’s more than the populations of England, Germany, and Japan combined!

As the web has continued to evolve, websites have become more interactive and complex, and this has led to a reduction in accessibility for some users. Fortunately, there are some simple techniques you can employ to make your websites more accessible to blind and low-vision users and increase your potential audience. Introduction to Web Accessibility is Google’s online course that helps you do just that.



You’ll learn to make easy accessibility updates, starting with your HTML structure, without breaking code or sacrificing a beautiful user experience. You’ll also learn tips and tricks to inspect the accessibility of your websites using Google Chrome extensions. Introduction to Web Accessibility runs with support from Google content experts from September 17th - 30th, and is recommended for developers with basic familiarity with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

There’s a lot to learn in the realm of web accessibility, and a lot of work to be done to ensure users aren’t excluded from being able to easily navigate the web. By introducing fundamental tips to improve web usage for users with visual impairments, Introduction to Web Accessibility is a starting point to learn how to build accessibility features into your code. Registration is now open, so sign up today and help push the web toward becoming truly universally accessible.

A Comparison of Five Google Online Courses

Posted by Julia Wilkowski, Senior Instructional Designer

Google has taught five open online courses in the past year, reaching nearly 400,000 interested students. In this post I will share observations from experiments with a year’s worth of these courses. We were particularly surprised by how the size of our courses evolved during the year; how students responded to a non-linear, problem-based MOOC; and the value that many students got out of the courses, even after the courses ended.

Observation #1: Course size
We have seen varying numbers of registered students in the courses. Our first two courses (Power Searching versions one and two) garnered significant interest with over 100,000 students registering for each course. Our more recent courses have attracted closer to 40,000 students each. It’s likely that this is a result of initial interest in MOOCs starting to decline as well as students realizing that online courses require significant commitment of time and effort. We’d like other MOOC content aggregators to share their results so that we can identify overall MOOC patterns.

*based on surveys sent only to course completers. Other satisfaction scores represent aggregate survey results sent to all registrants.

Observation #2: Completion rates
Comparing these five two-week courses, we notice that most of them illustrate a completion rate (measured by the number of students who meet the course criteria for completion divided by the total number of registrants) of between 11-16%. Advanced Power Searching was an outlier at only 4%. Why? A possible answer can be found by comparing the culminating projects for each course: Power Searching consisted of students completing a multiple choice test; Advanced Power Searching students completed case studies of applying skills to research problems. After grading their work, students also had to solve a final search challenge.

Advanced Power Searching also differed from all of the other courses in the way it presented content and activities. Power Searching offered videos and activities in a highly structured, linear path; Advanced Power Searching presented students with a selection of challenges followed by supporting lessons. We observed a decreasing number of views on each challenge page similar to the pattern in the linear course (see figure 1).

Figure 1. Unique page views for Power Searching and Advanced Power Searching

Students who did complete Advanced Power Searching expressed satisfaction with the course (95% of course completing students would recommend the course to others, compared with 94% of survey respondents from Power Searching). We surmise that the lower completion rate for Advanced Power Searching compared to Power Searching could be a result of the relative difficulty of this course (it assumed significantly more foundational knowledge than Power Searching), the unstructured nature of the course, or a combination of these and other factors.

Even though completion rates seem low when compared with traditional courses, we are excited about the sheer number of students we’ve reached through our courses (over 51,000 earning certificates of completion). If we offered the same content to classrooms of 30 students, it would take over four and a half years of daily classes to teach the same information!

Observation #3: Students have varied goals
We would also like to move the discussion beyond completion rates. We’ve noticed that students register for online courses for many different reasons. In Mapping with Google, we asked students to select a goal during registration. We discovered that

• 52% of registrants intended to complete the course
• 48% merely wanted to learn a few new things about Google’s mapping tools

Post-course surveys revealed that

• 78% of students achieved the goal they defined at registration
• 89% of students learned new features of Google Maps
• 76% reported learning new features of Google Earth

Though a much smaller percentage of students completed course requirements, these statistics show that many of the students attained their learning goals.

Observation #4: Continued interest in post-course access
After each course ended, we kept many of the course materials (videos, activities) available. Though we removed access to the forums, final projects/assessments, and teaching assistants, we have seen significant interest in the content as measured by Google and YouTube Analytics. The Power Searching course pages have generated nearly three million page views after the courses finished; viewers have watched over 160,000 hours (18 years!) of course videos. In the two months since Mapping with Google finished, we have seen over 70,000 unique visitors to the course pages.

In all of our courses, we saw a high number of students interested in learning online: 96% of Power Searching participants agreed or strongly agreed that they would take a course in a similar format. We have succeeded in teaching tens of thousands of students to be more savvy users of Google tools. Future posts will take an in-depth look at our experiments with self-graded assessments, community elements that enhance learning, and design elements that influence student success.

Some Innovative MOOCs

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Last summer, we jumped into the world of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with our own course on search skills, Power Searching. Soon after, we open sourced the platform that we developed to present the course -- Course Builder. A large number of courses have been hosted on Course Builder since, with many more coming soon. As can be seen from the list of courses, our goal is to provide the capability for anyone to create a MOOC. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the variety of courses and the creativity of the instructors building on Course Builder.

For example, GivingWithPurpose is an innovative MOOC presented by Learning By Giving, one of Doris Buffett’s foundations for “giving it all away.” Instructor Rebecca Riccio, who teaches philanthropy at both Northeastern and Brandeis Universities, feels that reaching thousands of people in a discussion about how to allocate scarce resources to address the needs of our communities has huge potential. “For all the social, cultural, and economic value we derive from the nonprofit sector, we do shockingly little to educate people about why it is so important and what we can do to help it thrive. So while I believe GivingWithPurpose will be successful in its primary goal of teaching students how to give more effectively, in ways that both satisfy their own motivations for giving and support high-performing nonprofit organizations, my second, perhaps more ambitious goal is to promote more informed civic engagement.”

We’ve also hosted MOOCs on evaluating and selecting soccer players, how to search for a job, and how to develop digital learning opportunities for students in public schools. We have many university courses such as Game Theory from Stanford and Information Visualization from Indiana University.

Course Builder’s support of both traditional and non-traditional education opportunities is core to its mission. We’ll continue to build features that help university professors, K12 teachers and anyone else who has something important to teach.

The Story Behind Course Builder

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Last summer, we ran a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on Power Searching. Soon after, we open sourced Course Builder, the platform that we developed on Google technologies to present the course. Since then, we have released four versions of Course Builder adding features such as user-friendly content development, administrative support, dashboards on student performance and behavior, new assessment types including peer review, accessibility, internationalization, etc. A large number of courses have been hosted on Course Builder, with many more in the pipeline.

This work started with the observation that we have all the component technology one needs to create a platform for delivering a learning experience similar to other MOOCs that were being offered on Coursera and Udacity. So we set about wiring together these components (YouTube, App Engine, Groups, Apps, Google+ and Hangouts, etc.) to create the first version of Course Builder.

As we talked with faculty and others who wanted to create online learning experiences, we saw an opportunity for Course Builder to play an important role in the MOOC space. Our goal is to provide the capability for anyone to create a MOOC or even an “OOC”. We believe that an online environment can be used for a wide variety of education-related activities beyond just the standard university course. We have implemented a feature set that supports this goal.

Our users include not only colleges and universities, but also non-profits and K12 organizations. We host academic courses such as Information Visualization and Game Theory, as well as short courses including Mapping with Google, Digital Learning in K12, YouTube Creator Academy, and Giving with Purpose. Supporting this diversity in users, content and format is why we created Course Builder.

Hosting the platform on App Engine has provided additional capabilities that are essential for our users, particularly colleges and universities. It’s possible to brand a MOOC anyway the user wants. The user also owns the relationship with the student directly, and owns any data that they collect to use anyway they like. Given Course Builder is open source, it is possible to easily add customized features. Add to that App Engine’s scalability, self-managed hosting and the extensible component architecture built into Course Builder, and you have a powerful, flexible platform that can support any number of students and any type of content.

We will continue to support this diverse user base, and work to get even more great teachers and innovative learning designers involved in experimenting in this brave new world of online learning. The potential for positive disruption and change is enormous.

Explore more with Mapping with Google

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Program Manager

In September 2012 we launched Course Builder, an open source learning platform for educators or anyone with something to teach, to create online courses. This was our experimental first step in the world of online education, and since then the features of Course Builder have continued to evolve. Mapping with Google, our latest MOOC, showcases new features of the platform.

From your own backyard all the way to Mount Everest, Google Maps and Google Earth are here to help you explore the world. You can learn to harness the world’s most comprehensive and accurate mapping tools by registering for Mapping with Google.

Mapping with Google is a self-paced, online course developed to help you better navigate the world around you by improving your use of the new Google Maps, Maps Engine Lite, and Google Earth. All registrants will receive an invitation to preview the new Google Maps.

Through a combination of video and text lessons, activities, and projects, you’ll learn to do much more than look up directions or find your house from outer space. Tell a story of your favorite locations with rich 3D imagery, or plot sights to see on your upcoming trip and share with your travel buddies. During the course, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from Google experts and collaborate with a worldwide community of participants, via Google+ Hangouts and a course forum.

Mapping with Google will be offered from June 10 - June 24, and you can choose whether to explore the features of Google Maps, Google Earth, or both. In addition, you’ll have the option to complete a project, applying the skills you’ve learned to earn a certificate. Visit g.co/mappingcourse to learn more and register today.

The world is a big place; we like to think that you can make it a bit more manageable and adventurous with Google’s mapping tools.