TALKS+Social Good: A Conversation with Oppia
To help share inspiring stories about technology and social impact, CS+Social Good is launching a series of interviews with amazing organizations that are making a difference.
Our first interview is with Oppia, an open source project that aims to make it easy for anyone to create and share interactive lessons with the world. The CS+Social Good team talked with Amit and Sean, a designer and an engineer who are both leads on the Oppia project.
What is your vision for the project?
We want everyone to have their own personal tutor, so that they can easily learn anything they want in an effective and enjoyable way. We also want to increase opportunities for people to teach others, and to do so at scale.
The Oppia.org site is a free, open commons to which anyone can contribute interactive lessons that the community can improve over time. We plan to create lots of activities based on what people want to learn or on areas where they are struggling, and make these easily available so that they can be freely used by individual learners, in classroom settings, or in more structured online courses.
Ideally, a user would come to Oppia.org and pick something they’d like to learn, such as programming. Oppia would then serve as a learning assistant, suggesting exercises and activities, and having an interactive conversation with the user, similar to what a human tutor might do. We’d also like to make as much of this as possible available offline, so that we can help as many learners as possible, especially those in areas with low Internet connectivity.
We also want to continue maintaining the volunteer-driven and collaborative ethos of the Oppia community, and we welcome anyone who wants to contribute, especially students.
What is one cool way you see Oppia being used today?
It’s very nice to see the community coming together and creating learning material for others, and we’ve been pretty impressed at what they’ve come up with to date, especially since we still have some way to go towards organizing the site and making it really easy to contribute!
Here are some examples of lessons people have built: topics range from Latin to statistics to logic. In all cases, Oppia tries to give useful feedback to students who play through these activities, just like a human tutor would. In the future, we hope to make it really easy for anyone to update these lessons based on answers given by learners, so that the learning material can become even better over time.
What’s the biggest challenge that you have faced in this project?
Managing our own expectations. We think that Oppia is a transformative project, since it puts the tools for creating interactive learning experiences in everyone’s hands — so we want to complete it as quickly as possible. It’s a fine balance, though, and sometimes we probably need to try and be a bit more patient.
What is your advice for people who want to innovate in the social problems space?
Just do it. It’s probably going to take longer than you expect, and it probably won’t go exactly as you’d have expected at the outset, but that’s all part of the learning experience. Try not to succumb to ‘analysis paralysis’ or second-guess yourself too much, though; at some stage, you’re likely to learn more by doing. To keep things manageable, try to break off a small bit of the problem so that you can take a first step that leads to some clear outcome, and then you can build on from there. And don’t forget to celebrate small successes on the path to larger ones!
