Google Joins Open edX 29
lpress writes "Google and MIT have both built open source MOOC platforms and offered innovative MOOCs. They have just announced the establishment of mooc.org, a non-profit organization that will provide a platform to develop, host, and research online courses. The devil is, no doubt, in the details, but this combination of MIT's educational expertise and reputation, Google's vast infrastructure, and the lofty goals of both organizations might turn out to be revolutionary."
From Google's research weblog: "Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform." Course Builder will continue to be maintained for the time being, but eventually Google will "provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder."
*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
Cynically I'm forced to conclude Google is doing this to get access to the information on all of those students to make even more money from.
Optimistically, I think it's potentially a good idea, but we'll see what they actually do.
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
More backdoors implied they already created backdoors in the first place. Currently there is no evidence they created any in the first place.
This is what we do know:
1. Google is required by law to hand over data when they get a request, such as through a NSL.
2. Google said their process for handling this request is to FTP data over to the government. The government never gets direct access to any of their systems.
3. Google publishes a transparency report on what government requests they receive.
4. Google is fighting the US government on the NSL process and suing to make that more transparent.
5. When Bush asked for all search data on all users, Google was the only search engine to refuse.
6. Google went so far as to discuss creating off-shore datacenters to place user data outside the reach of the government.
7. They're encrypting data sent from one Google data center to another to make sure the government can't attempt to intercept it in the middle. And they anonymize user data sooner.
This is the only company we've seen actively fight to protect your data from the government. So why are people creating fiction that Google is the one that is evil here, and not the US government?
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Informative)
They've documented 2.
3 is right fucking here - http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/ [google.com]
4 is documented in their court battle http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/google-fights-nsl/ [wired.com]
5 was documented
6 was documented http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-wins-floating-data-center-patent/17266 [zdnet.com]
7 was documented http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-nsa-google-encryption-20130907,0,3652913.story [latimes.com]
All are verifiable and you're full of shit.