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 cant promise youll 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!

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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.

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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.

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