In July 2012, Google hosted a 2-week online, community-based course
called Power Searching with Google. The course showcased search
techniques and how to use them to solve real, everyday problems. We
created Power Searching as a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) by
using a variety of Google's existing products and by writing an App
Engine application for the course material and assessments.

We were quite pleased with the success of Power Searching with
Google. Over 154,000 students from 190 countries enrolled in the
course. Almost 68,000 of the original registrants got started by
filling out a pre-course assessment. And over 20,000 earned a
certificate of successful completion.

Course Builder Experiment represents our decision to open source the
code we used to create Power Searching and to document our use of that
code in conjunction with Google products to create the entire
experience.

For more information, see the documentation at 
https://code.google.com/p/course-builder/wiki/CourseBuilderChecklist.