Showing posts with label MOOC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MOOC. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Opening up Course Builder data
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.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
We are joining the Open edX platform
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
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.
Friday, September 6, 2013
A Comparison of Five Google Online Courses
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.
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| *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).
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| 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
- 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
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.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Some Innovative MOOCs
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.
Monday, June 3, 2013
The Story Behind Course Builder
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.
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Explore more with Mapping with Google
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.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Advanced Power Searching with Google: Lessons Learned
Large classes are something you normally want to avoid like the plague. So the idea of being in a class with tens of thousands of students seems like a completely crazy idea.
But in January, 2013, Google offered a free “MOOC” (a Massive Open Online Course) to teach Advanced Power Searching (APS) to a wide variety of information professionals.
The wholly online class ran for two weeks covering advanced research skills in a challenge-based format. It also had a bit more than 35,000 students sign up for the class.
In this case, the large class size was a boon to the students. Not only was there a vigorous discussion of the material in the social media, but with a class this large, anytime you had a question, someone else in the class had almost certainly asked the same question and had an answer ready. As in many MOOCs, the large online class size did not stress any lecture hall capacities, but it did give the students the benefit of multicultural classmates that were effectively always present in the social spaces of the MOOC.
A typical Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is a simple progression through a series of mini-lectures--usually a short video followed by reflective questions, problem sets and a few assessments. MOOCs can have huge numbers of students; dozens have been offered with over 150,000 students enrolled. Based on our experiments with Power Searching with Google in 2012, we wanted to do something different. When we offered Advanced Power Searching with Google (APS) in January of 2013, we decided to try out a number of new ideas.
Through this course, we wanted to enable our students to solve complex research questions using a variety of tools, such as Google Scholar, Patents, Books, Google+, etc.. We defined complex problems that had more than one right answer and more than one way to find those answers.
Unlike a traditional MOOC, the APS course had twelve challenges that students could tackle in any order they liked. There were four easy, four medium and four difficult challenges. Part of the design of the class was to have students discover the skills they’d need to solve the challenges and select appropriate video or text lessons. Students could also access case studies that showed how others solve similar problems.
We called our MOOC design “Choose your own adventure.” Each challenge presented a research question like this:
“You are in the city that is home to the House of Light. Nearby there is a museum in a converted school featuring paintings from the far-away Forest of Honey.
What traditional festival are you visiting?”
In this class, the large cohort of 35,000 students worked through the materials together, using online forums to ask questions as well as Google+ Hangouts to attend office hours and collaborate on solving challenges. Instructor Dan Russell and a group of teaching assistants monitored students’ activities and provided support as needed.
If they needed additional help, students could post a question on the forum or see how others solved the challenge. Students could post their solutions to challenges in a special “Peer explanations” section; a feature that many students appreciated as it let them see how others in the class approached the problem in their own ways.
In analyzing the data, we found that there were a decreasing number of views on each challenge page, indicating that students most likely tried the challenges in the order given. While some liked the ability to jump around, most tended to go through the content linearly. Most students who completed the course tried (or at least looked at) all twelve challenges. Many students who did not complete the course tried three or fewer challenges.
To earn a certificate of completion, students submitted two detailed case studies of how they solved a complex search challenge. Students provided great examples of how they used Google tools to research their family’s history, the origins of common objects, or trips they anticipate taking. In addition to listing their queries, they wrote details about how they knew websites were credible and what they learned along the way.
To assess their work, we experimented with letting the students grade their assignments based on a rubric. We collected their scores and compared them with a random sample of assignments graded by TAs. There was a moderate yet statistically significant correlation (r=0.44) between student scores and TA scores. In fact, the majority of students graded themselves within two points of how an expert grader assessed their work. This is a positive result since it suggests that self-graded project work in a MOOC can be valuable as a source of insight into student performance.
The challenge format seemed to be effective and motivating for a small, dedicated population of students. We had 35,000 registrants for this advanced course, and 12% earned a certificate of completion. This rate is somewhat lower than what we saw for Power Searching with Google, a more traditional MOOC. Students who did not complete the course reported a lack of time, and difficulty of the content as barriers.
One interesting point was that labeling the challenges as easy, medium or difficult likely had an unintentional effect. The first challenge was marked as “easy,” but many people found it difficult. This may have de-motivated students from attempting more difficult challenges. Next time, we plan to ask students if the first challenge was too easy, or too challenging, and then send them to a challenge at an appropriate level of difficulty.
Watch for more MOOCs on our products and services in the coming months. And watch for more experimentation as we apply what we have learned, and try more ideas and new approaches in future online courses.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Advanced Power Searching with Google -- Registration Opens Today
Cross-posted at Inside Search Blog
What historic cafe inspired a poem by a Nobel Laureate? In the last three barista world championships, which winners did not use beans from their home country? If you were preparing a blog post on “Curious Trivia of Coffee Culture,” how would you find the answers to these questions? What else would you discover? Now you can sign up for our Advanced Power Searching with Google online course and find out.
Building on Power Searching with Google, Advanced Power Searching with Google helps you gain a deeper understanding of how to become a better researcher. You will solve complex search challenges similar to those I pose in my blog, or a Google a Day, and explore Google’s advanced search tools not covered in the first class.
Oftentimes the most intriguing questions invite you to explore beyond the initial answer, and there’s no single correct path to get there. When looking for questions that can’t be solved with a single query, “search” can quickly turn into “research.” Google Search offers a palette of tools to help you dive deeper into the web of knowledge.
Visit www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com to learn more about our online search courses, and review our search tips on the Power Searching with Google Quick Reference Guide. Advanced Power Searching begins on January 23 and ends on February 8th.
Friday, December 14, 2012
Continuing the quest for future computer scientists with CS4HS
Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) began five years ago with a simple question: How can we help create a much needed influx of CS majors into universities and the workforce? We took our questions to three of our university partners--University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, and UCLA--and together we came up with CS4HS. The model was based on a “train the trainer” technique. By focusing our efforts on teachers and bringing them the skills they need to implement CS into their classrooms, we would be able to reach even more students. With grants from Google, our partner universities created curriculum and put together hands-on, community-based workshops for their local area teachers.
Since the initial experiment, CS4HS has exploded into a worldwide program, reaching more than 4,000 teachers and 200,000 students either directly or indirectly in more than 34 countries. These hands-on, in-person workshops are a hallmark of our program, and we will continue to fund these projects going forward. (For information on how to apply, please see our website.) The success of this popular program speaks for itself, as we receive more quality proposals each year. But success comes at a price, and we have found that the current format of the workshops is not infinitely scalable.
This is where Research at Google comes in. This year, we are experimenting with a new model for CS4HS workshops. By harnessing the success of online courses such as Power Searching with Google, and utilizing open-source platforms like the one found in Course Builder, we are hoping to put the “M” in “MOOC” and reach a broader audience of educators, eager to learn how to teach CS in their classrooms.
For this pilot, we are looking to sponsor two online workshops, one that is geared toward CS teachers, and one that is geared toward CS for non-CS teachers to go live in 2013. This is a way for a university (or several colleges working together) to create one incredible workshop that has the potential to reach thousands of enthusiastic teachers. Just as with our in-person workshops, applications will be open to college, university, and technical schools of higher learning only, as we depend on their curriculum expertise to put together the most engaging programs. For this pilot, we will be looking for MOOC proposals in the US and Canada only.
We are really excited about the possibilities of this new format, and we are looking for quality applications to fund. While applications don’t have to run on our Course Builder platform, we may be able to offer some additional support to funded projects that do. If you are interested in joining our experiment or just learning more, you can find information on how to apply on our CS4HS website (or click here).
Applications are open until February 16, 2013; we can’t wait to see what you come up with. If you have questions, please email us at cs4hs@google.com.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Power Searching with Google is back
If you missed Power Searching with Google a few months ago or were unable to complete the course the first time around, now’s your chance to sign up again for our free online course that aims to empower our users with the tools and knowledge to find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily.
The community-based course features six 50-minute classes along with interactive activities and the opportunity to hear from search experts and Googlers about how search works. Beginning September 24, you can take the classes over a two-week period, share what you learn with other students in a community forum, and complete the course assessments to earn a certificate of completion.
During the course’s first run in July, people told us how they not only liked learning about new features and more efficient ways to use Google, but they also enjoyed sharing tips and learning from one another through the forums and Hangouts. Ninety-six percent of people who completed the course also said they liked the format and would be interested in taking similar courses, so we plan to offer a suite of upcoming courses in the coming months, including Advanced Power Searching.
Stay tuned for further announcements on those upcoming courses, and don’t forget to register now for Power Searching with Google. You’ll learn about things like how to search by color, image, and time and how to solve harder trivia questions like our A Google a Day questions. We’ll see you when we start up in two weeks!
Helping the World to Teach
In July, Research at Google ran a large open online course, Power Searching with Google, taught by search expert, Dan Russell. The course was successful, with 155,000 registered students. Through this experiment, we learned that Google technologies can help bring education to a global audience. So we packaged up the technology we used to build Power Searching and are providing it as an open source project called Course Builder. We want to make this technology available so that others can experiment with online learning.
The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction. We hope to continue development along these lines, but we wanted to make this limited code base available now, to see what early adopters will do with it, and to explore the future of learning technology. We will be hosting a community building event in the upcoming months to help more people get started using this software. edX shares in the open source vision for online learning platforms, and Google and the edX team are in discussions about open standards and technology sharing for course platforms.
We are excited that Stanford University, Indiana University, UC San Diego, Saylor.org, LearningByGivingFoundation.org, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), and a group of universities in Spain led by Universia, CRUE, and Banco Santander-Universidades are considering how this experimental technology might work for some of their online courses. Sebastian Thrun at Udacity welcomes this new option for instructors who would like to create an online class, while Daphne Koller at Coursera notes that the educational landscape is changing and it is exciting to see new avenues for teaching and learning emerge. We believe Google’s preliminary efforts here may be useful to those looking to scale online education through the cloud.
Along with releasing the experimental open source code, we’ve provided documentation and forums for anyone to learn how to develop and deploy an online course like Power Searching. In addition, over the next two weeks we will provide educators the opportunity to connect with the Google team working on the code via Google Hangouts. For access to the code, documentation, user forum, and information about the Hangouts, visit the Course Builder Open Source Project Page. To see what is possible with the Course Builder technology register for Google’s next version of Power Searching. We invite you to explore this brave new world of online learning with us.
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Teaching the World to Search
For two weeks in July, we ran Power Searching with Google, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) similar to those pioneered by Stanford and MIT. We blended this format with our social and communication tools to create a community learning experience around search. The course covered tips and tricks for Google Search, like using the search box as a calculator, or color filtering to find images.
The course had interactive activities to practice new skills and reinforce learning, and many opportunities to connect with other students using tools such as Google Groups, Moderator and Google+. Two of our search experts, Dan Russell and Matt Cutts, moderated Hangouts on Air, answering dozens of questions from students in the course. There were pre-, mid- and post-class assessments that students were required to pass to receive a certificate of completion. The course content is still available.
We had 155,000 students register for the course, from 196 countries. Of these, 29% of those who completed the first assessment passed the course and received a certificate. What was especially surprising was 96% of the students who completed the course liked the format and would be interested in taking other MOOCs.
This learning format is not new, as anyone who has worked in eLearning over the past 20 years knows. But what makes it different now is the large, global cohort of students who go through the class together. The discussion forums and Google+ streams were very active with students asking and answering questions, and providing additional ideas and content beyond what’s offered by the instructor. This learning interaction enabled by a massive “classroom”, is truly a new experience for students and teachers in an online environment.
Going forward, we will be offering Power Searching with Google again, so if you missed the first opportunity to get your certificate, you’ll have a second chance. Watch here for news about Power Searching as well as some educational ideas that we are exploring.
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