Google Launches Its Own Open Source Learning Platform – CloudCourse

In an arena dominated by Moodle, Google launches its own open source learning platform: CloudCourse.

According to the blog “Open Source at Google”, the application was released with the intention of driving developers to develop Web applications with Google’s App Engine. The team encourages developers to look into the source code to find out how specific Web application development challenges were overcome. The team of developers at Google hopes CloudCourse to become a sort of poster child for App Engine.

But what can CloudCourse do? According to the developers:

Built entirely on App Engine, CloudCourse allows anyone to create and track learning activities. CloudCourse also offers calendaring, waitlist management and approval features.

CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar and can be further customized for your organization with the following service provider interfaces (replaceable components):

• Sync service – to sync CloudCourse data with your internal systems
• Room info service – to schedule classes in your locations
• User info service – to look up user profile (employee title, picture, etc)

The technologies used to develop CloudCourse are: App Engine, Django, Python and the Closure Javascript library. According to the team that developed it: should be a breeze to install…

Let me know (in the comments here) what your experience is like if you do try to use ClourCourse.