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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