Tag Archives: Course Builder

Course Builder now supports scheduling, easier customization and more

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

Over the years, we've learned that there are as many ways to run an online course as there are instructors to run them. Today's release of Course Builder v1.11 has a focus on improved student access controls, easier visual customization and a new course explorer. Additionally, we've added better support for deploying from Windows!

Improved student access controls
A course's availability is often dynamic - sometimes you want to make a course available to everyone all at once, while other times may call for the course to be available to some students before others. Perhaps registration will be available for a while and then the course later becomes read-only. To support these use cases, we've added Student Groups and Calendar Triggers.

  • Student Groups allow you to define which students can see which parts of a course. Want your morning class to see unit 5 and your afternoon class to see unit 6 -- while letting random Internet visitors only see unit 1? Student groups have you covered.
  • Calendar Triggers can be used to update course or content availability automatically at a specific time. For instance, if your course goes live at midnight on Sunday night, you don't need to be at a computer to make it happen. Or, if you want to unlock a new unit every week, you can set up a trigger to automate the process. Read more about calendar triggers and availability.

You can even use these features together. Say you want to start a new group of students through the course every month, giving each access to one new unit per week. Using Student Groups and Calendar Triggers together, you can achieve this cohort-like functionality.

Easier visual customization
In the past, if you wanted to customize Course Builder's student experience beyond a certain point, you needed to be a Python developer. We heard from many web developers that they would like to be able to create their own student-facing pages, too. With this release, Course Builder includes a GraphQL server that allows you to create your own frontend experience, while still letting Course Builder take care of things like user sessions and statefulness.

New course explorer
Large Course Builder partners such as Google's Digital Workshop and NPTEL have many courses and students with diverse needs. To help them, we've completely revamped the Course Explorer page, giving it richer information and interactivity, so your students can find which of your courses they're looking for. You can provide categories and start/end dates, in addition to the course title, abstract and instructor information.
In v1.11, we've added several new highly requested features. Together, they help make Course Builder easier to use and customize, giving you the flexibility to schedule things in advance.

We've come a long way since releasing our first experimental code over 4 years ago, turning Course Builder into a large open-source Google App Engine application with over 5 million student registrations across all Course Builder users. With these latest additions, we consider Course Builder feature complete and fully capable of delivering online learning at any scale. We will continue to provide support and bug fixes for those using the platform.

We hope you’ll enjoy these new features and share how you’re using them in the forum. Keep on learning!

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 Research 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!

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!

Finding Math in the Everyday with Sesame Street and Google’s Course Builder

Posted by Kayla Nalven, Sesame Street

Editor's note: Today’s guest author is Kayla Nalven, Content Specialist in Sesame Street’s U.S. Social Impact department. Through her work, Kayla aims to support the many adults in children's lives in their use of Sesame Street content and resources. She managed the content development for the “Make Believe with Math” course.

To date, more than 5,000 early childhood educators have enrolled in a free online course from Sesame Street, “Make Believe with Math”, created through Google’s Course Builder platform. The course - which will run through October 31st - emphasizes finding everyday opportunities for math in any setting and seeing pretend play as a tool for math learning.
This self-paced, three-hour experience includes videos featuring Sesame staff members, short activity challenges, discussion boards for reflection, and access to new content, so educators can bring activity ideas and strategies into their own settings.
Built with Google’s Course Builder platform, the course was a natural extension of Sesame’s legacy as the “first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC),” according to a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Course Builder gave us a way to continue this work more literally by creating a modern online course with a goal of reaching thousands with no cost to the user; furry monsters and giggles included.

Although creating virtual classroom experiences for adults is an area we’re growing into, the process guiding us is a familiar one—in essence, it’s no different than the method behind making an episode of Sesame Street.

Our team at Sesame Street started with a goal and a concept. We wanted to make the task of incorporating math into the early childhood setting less intimidating for educators by highlighting opportunities that exist to “find the math” in everyday moments and interactions. Research describing the benefits of combining math―which relies on language as well as object/people relationships―with a highly social activity like pretend play inspired the approach featured in the course.

Next, we engaged our end users. We asked expert teachers to provide guidance on how to present information to fellow educators in a way that would add value and adhere to the standards they must follow. We developed the course curriculum based on their feedback and the Sesame Street Framework for School Readiness (which aligns with National Head Start and National Research Council math standards).

We then tested our ideas in a formal research setting. We held a focus group with educators and program directors, and heard from them that the course needed to look and feel like Professional Development―except “Muppetized”.


To ensure what we were offering felt unique, we focused on providing actionable tips and strategies that could be used by educators right away. We worked to streamline the course format and include relatable imagery and additional, single-page resources, all based on what educators told us they wanted to see and experience.

We then held a pilot offering in August, and monitored closely to ensure educators were completing activities successfully and finding value in every aspect of the course.

After the pilot, we knew there was still more work to be done. We followed up with participants and listened closely to their feedback. The data from the first launch was promising. We saw an above-average percentage of course completion, and educators told us there was a strong likelihood that they would implement strategies offered in the course in their own settings.

Finally, we set our sights on iterating. For the current offering, we applied what we learned from rich Course Builder analytics and survey data to continue making this online learning experience worthwhile for educators. We also partnered with multiple states to offer credit/contact hours to educators in those states who complete the course.

We hope to continue learning from our users so we can offer more free trainings directed at educators, parents, and community providers―and continue doing what we do best: reaching learners wherever they are. Course Builder was a natural platform to enable us to do just that.

So get your thinking caps and imaginations ready, and join us in class! Register now at www.sesamestreet.org/makebelievewithmath. The course will run through October 31st, so don’t wait until the “number of the day” is 0.

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.