A Chance at Quality Education: Oppia

Changing the narrative: one underprivileged (Nigerian) kid at a time

Introduction

I just passed the initial application stage on Outreachy Internhsips and we (applicants) were asked to look through a list of projects and pick one to contribute to. To ‘contribute’ means ‘To give to a common cause, often along with other people’. In free software and open source, people ‘contribute’ to a project or community. That means people working together to improve an open source project. It was my first time contributing to open source and when I saw the Oppia project, I immediately resonated with it. They have a mission that I am passionate about.

The organization — Oppia

By creating tools to enable the creation/distribution of high-quality scalable online lessons, Oppia works to make high-quality education available to those who lack access to it. Unlike most of the systems that exists for education which are suboptimal, (especially since real learning requires doing things and getting feedback to improve, rather than just watching lectures ), Oppia focuses more on learners who are from under-resourced demographics and don’t have access to the proper resources, in order to ensure that they are able to receive at least a basic education.

The Task

We applicants have been tasked with carrying out three tasks.

1. User Research and Go-to-Market activities to increase usage and awareness of Oppia on web and mobile: We are to use the Oppia lessons in our local community in the biggest and most meaningful way we can and document the event/experience through public blog posts (ideally, including videos and photos), demonstrating that students learned from it. Additionally, we will need to submit a report pointing to those blog posts, and describing what worked well and what didn’t.
2. Conduct at least 2 studies out of the following: Android baseline; Web baseline; Lesson effectiveness; and Onboarding + Lesson Player + Learner Dashboard. The study should be conducted in-person or virtually, using the language of the student and a detailed report on our findings.
3. Raise awareness: We were also asked to pick any of these 3 foundational reports that describe the state of education in some of the countries Oppia works in: Brazil, Nigeria, Uganda and use the data in any report we chose to create a brochure, presentation, video, or other artifact(s) that compellingly tells the story of that report to any of this audience.

As an optional task; we could either

1. Sign up as a translator and help with lesson translations for at least two lessons in any of the following languages, to the point where reviewers have approved them — Brazilian Portuguese, Swahili, Pidgin English, French, Arabic, Hindi, Igbo, and Yoruba. Or
2. Create art and images for lessons that help students learn.

Fortunately, I am currently living in Jigawa State, Northern Nigeria. I say this is fortunate because most of the kids in my area lack the access to education, talk more of quality education.

I will be doing one optional task along with all three project tasks. I am looking forward to a wonderful time contributing to Oppia while using creating an opportunity for underprivileged kids in my community to have a shot at quality education.

Watch my space for updates on how this goes…