Over the past couple of years Google has been improving Google Classrooms with small additions but unfortunately has only been open to those with a G Suite for Education account. Recently Google opened up Classrooms to anyone with a Google account and today they have taken it a step further,

Google, realising that educators and students are not always sitting in a classroom, opened up Classrooms to anyone with a Google account. This allowed anyone, in any setting, to attend classes, manage assignments and instantly collaborate with others. The thing that was missing though was the ability of anyone to create classes but today that is here too.

Google have had some educators testing out this feature for the past few weeks creating many new classes for adult education, hobbies and after-school programs. The examples given show how users were able to create classes and then share the links through social media and have users join the classes form all over the world.

The class gives the ability for every single announcement, assignment and question to have it’s own link and therefor be easy to refer to. The educators are seeing a lot of interactions and generous sharing between from all involved which is one of the hardest things to get right when it comes to educating online.

As someone who runs several post-graduate subjects online I hope this is rolled out to the major universities very soon. The interaction between students and educators is something that is very hard to get right, no matter how much encouragement is given. While Google Classroom is just getting started it seems like it could possibly be the way of the future.

What are your thoughts? Do you think it is a way you would like to learn?

Source: Google Blog.

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Peter Verwey

Doesn’t work for enterprise google accounts, potentially the group that would get the most benefit from this feature.