Google Classroom has finally become available. In my research and my classes, I use social media such as Google+ and Facebook, so I was looking at this from the perspective of how well it integrates with Google apps.

A major feature is that assignment functionality is implemented via Google Drive. You can manage assignments in Google Drive, both when setting them and when submitting them. You can also manage the number of submissions and pending submissions. For distributed materials, you can configure settings such as whether to give students editing permissions or whether to distribute them individually (a copy of the distributed material is created in the student’s Drive). Also, if you want to use video content, you can easily incorporate YouTube videos. Of course, even without using Drive, you can upload and share regular assignment files to Drive, or set assignments by linking to external systems (it seems that submission/non-submission counting is not possible unless you manage assignments using Drive’s functionality).
It feels like an assignment management tool centered on Google Drive. It can be said to be a useful tool if you make full use of Google Drive.

Looking ahead, here is what I would like to see (from my perspective as someone who wants to use it for university classes):

1: I want to register students from external domains as participants
Currently, it is not possible to register people outside the domain registered in Google Apps for Education. I have registered with my own domain, not with kyushu-u.ac.jp. Therefore, it is a pain that I cannot register Kyushu University students. Also, in recent years, Open Education has been spreading, so the current Google Classroom is likely unsuitable if you are looking for an educational platform that includes people outside the university using external educational resources.

2: I want to register participants in bulk using CSV, etc.
Currently, participant registration is done by reading your contact list and registering (inviting) them. Furthermore, registration is not completed unless the participant responds to the invitation. I have been creating class communities on Google+ to do this, but since there are first-year university students who cannot use computers properly, it would be desirable to have a mechanism to force registration.

3: Integration with Google+!
Integration with Drive and YouTube is good, but I want integration with tools that directly support learning activities such as collaborative learning, like Google+ and others. It is tough that there is no integration here at the moment. I think the only way to think about it currently is to develop using the Google+ API. Since various apps are already provided, I would like to expect integration with many apps in the future.

I think that they will continue to listen to feedback from the field and improve and enhance the functionality, so there is no doubt that I have high expectations for future developments (or so I believe).

At present, if you want to support group activities as well with a system, it might be better to use Google Drive on an LMS like Moodle. Moodle can integrate with Google Drive and supports a Google doc repository, so I think that is good.

Regarding my research, I think it is also possible to consider an LMS that can be managed on Facebook, which is one of the daily tools for students. There is a way to run Facebook on Moodle, but as someone who has been researching the use of Facebook in classes for three years, I have obtained research findings that it would be desirable to run Moodle on Facebook, so I would like to think in that direction (if there are any researchers who are thinking the same thing around here, I would like to work together).

However, since there are people who want to limit their use of Facebook to private use, and many students have Gmail accounts, there is no doubt that the Google platform is also a useful platform.