Google’s CloudCourse is an open source alternative for educational scheduling.

Cheers to ReadWriteWeb for the heads up on this, and kudos to Google for releasing more open-source code.

Google’s CloudCourse is a Google Calendar-integrated scheduling application that is chocked full of features.  Though the app wasn’t designed with schools in mind, Google concedes that the use is certainly there.

…we designed it as a course scheduling tool for enterprises. Nevertheless, CloudCourse can certainly help school 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.

As Google pushes more into the workforce (just do a search for Gone Google for proof), offering a free, open-source alternative to staid programs is a welcome change.  The RWW article notes a major point, in that the code as it stands is not ready to overtake the world, but that’s the beauty of open source.

The possibilities of this are pretty huge.  As Google notes in the Open Source Blog, they have experts in many fields, but have a hard time scheduling teaching sessions.  Integration with Google Calendar will allow users to see what items are available in their own time zone, and the scheduling application gives lots of options for customization.

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With a few (or a lot of, depending on your goal) code changes, businesses and universities will have a full on learning and scheduling platform in their hands for little to no money.  When we’re still making every penny count, philanthropy like this makes a lot of business sense.