Last week was a big one for Google fans in higher education. Google Wave opened its doors, and Google Voice now lets students get calls forwarded from their old numbers to their new phones.
Google made one more announcement last week—about a new course-scheduling system, CloudCourse—that could potentially have implications for higher education. CloudCourse is integrated with Google Calendar and allows users to schedule classes, look up user profiles, and sync the service’s data with internal university systems. CloudCourse was built entirely on Google’s App Engine, which allows users to build and host Web apps. Google hopes that CloudCourse can serve as an example of how to use the App Engine.
One potential use for CloudCourse is to manage class rosters with tools that allow users to look at enrolled versus waitlisted students, mark student attendance, and change a student’s enrollment status in a course.
Universities typically already have an internal system to complete the tasks CloudCourse can perform. Irwin Boutboul, a Google software engineer, said in an e-mail to The Chronicle that Google designed this system with businesses, and not universities, in mind.
“Nevertheless, CloudCourse can certainly help university administrators, who most likely don’t have the time or resources to worry about hardware hosting and dealing with traffic bursts like the ones that occur during class enrollment periods,” Mr. Boutboul said. “We’d love to see universities pick up this platform and code additional features on top of it to make it more relevant to the higher-education ecosystem.”
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7 Responses to Google Launches New Course-Scheduling System
aliceharra - May 24, 2010 at 6:00 pm
Interesting. We had talked at one point about tying Connect with student schedules and calendars — Google is taking a step there.
earthscienceprof - May 24, 2010 at 6:10 pm
It would be great to see Google get into learning systems for online learning. There is so much potential and current learning systems are in the dark ages, compared to what could be done.
cclaiborne - May 24, 2010 at 7:14 pm
I second the need for Google to do something with the educational software, particularly blackboard. I think that course material management could be a lot more simple.
billso - May 24, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Interesting find. Any university that offers classroom courses has some kind of course scheduling system. The larger the university, the more likely it is that the scheduling system is automated in some manner. There’s another open source project called UniTime that has more features and is at version 3.1. It uses Java on the client side and MySQL for its database. UniTime also includes a constraint solver that lets faculty input enter their schedule preferences, and uses that information along with other inputs to help develop an optimum university or department schedule. http://www.unitime.org/Google’s CloudCourse project is based on Python, and uses a web browser as its client. For a 1.0 release, it’s a nice start. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Huo-SuB7VFI
bwatwood - May 25, 2010 at 8:08 am
On the one hand, this sounds like the direction many web applications are going. On the other hand, it sounds like it may violate FERPA. Anyone know?
wise1inmo - May 25, 2010 at 8:54 am
to bwatwood’s comment “On the other hand, it sounds like it may violate FERPA. Anyone know?” – In what way would it violate private student information? A list of waitlisted/enrolled students does not seem to. As an instructor, again, accessing what I already have access to does not violate FERPA anymore than using the college system already in place.
jlaster - May 25, 2010 at 9:29 am
Good comments… Thanks for weighing in! -Jill Laster