A colleague at work alerted me to the news that Google has a new free LMS for schools. Google Classroom will be the new tool that adds a Learning Management System to Google Apps for Education.

Campus Technology has a brief piece of news here, and Google has a page where you can sign up for an invite.

There is a certain degree of déjà vu all over again with the news. Google has released, or announced, similar initiatives in the past:

• CloudCourse. Launched in 2010 as a course scheduling system, but no longer maintained.
• OpenClass. Announced in 2011, this was a collaboration between Pearson and Google. Abilene Christian University migrated to the system in 2013, but many faculty found the system with too simplistic and started using Blackboard’s CourseSites.
• Course Builder. Released in 2012, this was Google’s free tool for building online classes. Google helpfully provides a list of courses built with the tool here.
• edX. In September of 2013, Google announced that they would continue to maintain Course Builder, but would focus on edX (and provide an upgrade path).

Google is known for discontinuing great products and services (such as Lively, Wave, Google Reader), seemingly because a product manager leaves or moves on to another project. Whilst being a free option, there may be some risk in committing to the new Google Classroom.