Building on Course Builder with New Features and Improvements

Posted by Robyn Im, Course Builder Community Manager

People all over the world use Course Builder to pursue their online education goals. Whether it’s professional development for educators in Australia or entrepreneurship courses for the general public in Spain, Course Builder helps teachers of all kinds create and deliver online learning. As we continue our own experiments in online education, we want to ensure that people using the tool can create content that reaches as many students as possible in the best way possible.

Rewriting content for an online course can be time-consuming. Course Builder integrates with Google Drive so you can insert content into your courses without rewriting, reformatting, or cutting and pasting. You can also create new content using Google Docs, store it in Drive, and deliver it to hundreds of thousands of students in Course Builder. We’re working to support other apps along with Google Docs to make this integration even better.

You might be familiar with the complexity of translating course content into different languages—creating it in one environment, and translating in another, often with multiple people communicating via email about changes and delivery. We’ve created a collaborative translation management system in Course Builder that automatically identifies and “breaks up” your content into translatable chunks. The course author gives the translator permission to work on specific content and accepts or rejects their suggested work. The software notifies the translator with any changes to a piece of content.

Analytics is an important part of Course Builder. We’ve added new visualizations and Dashboard metrics to help you better understand your course and your students better. Teachers of small and medium courses can now see scores at the individual student level to get details beyond aggregate data.

With certificates, Course Builder automatically gives students a way to celebrate completing a course. The course author specifies the passing criteria for a course. Students who satisfy this criteria will get a personalized certificate in their Progress Dashboard.

We've made a number of improvements in the current release which you can learn about in our documentation. You can download Course Builder and build an online course yourself here.