Google Releases “Course Builder,” an Open Source Platform for Building Your Own Big Online Courses

Ear­li­er this year, we saw Udac­i­ty and Cours­era take flight, two online ven­tures ded­i­cat­ed to offer­ing Mas­sive Open Online Cours­es (MOOCs) and democ­ra­tiz­ing edu­ca­tion. Caught off-guard, tra­di­tion­al uni­ver­si­ties have scram­bled to get a foothold in this brave new world of e‑learning, and 16 uni­ver­si­ties have already signed agree­ments to offer their own MOOCs through Cours­era. We wel­come that trend. But, if you talk with profs at these uni­ver­si­ties, they often ask these ques­tions: Why are we pay­ing good mon­ey to devel­op cours­es that will build Cours­er­a’s busi­ness (which is for-prof­it and VC-backed)? Or why are we cre­at­ing cours­es for a plat­form that we don’t con­trol or have a stake in? They ask these ques­tions when they’re not oth­er­wise ask­ing “what will hap­pen to our jobs and beloved uni­ver­si­ties in 20 years?”

For schools ask­ing those ques­tions, Google might have an answer. Accord­ing to an announce­ment yes­ter­day, Google is releas­ing the code base for Course Builder, a new open source plat­form that will give indi­vid­ual edu­ca­tors and uni­ver­si­ties the abil­i­ty to cre­ate MOOCs of their own. As Peter Norvig, Google’s Direc­tor of Research, explains above, the com­pa­ny gave the plat­form a test dri­ve this sum­mer when it offered Pow­er Search­ing with Google, a course attend­ed by 155,000 reg­is­tered stu­dents. Now you can try it out too and bring MOOCs in-house, under your own con­trol. You can find doc­u­men­ta­tion to get start­ed here. But, as Norvig warns, you’ll need some tech skills in your toolk­it to make ini­tial head­way. In the future, you can almost guar­an­tee that the soft­ware will become user-friend­ly for every­one straight out of the box.

Already schools like Stan­ford, Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty, and UC San Diego are giv­ing Course Builder a look. Keep an eye on it.

Update: Stan­ford reports today that it is try­ing out its own open source plat­form. It’s called Class2Go. Learn more about it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

500 Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Free Online Cer­tifi­cate Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties: A Com­plete List