5 lessons from the open source education project — Oppia
This week at erxes we had a great interview with Diana Chen from Oppia. Oppia Foundation is a non-profit that offers an online platform, which makes it easy to create interactive lessons.
These are the key takeaways that really stood out for me, as I spent some time working on global and local education projects.
- I couldn’t agree more with keeping your focus razor sharp when it comes to overall strategy:
We realized it wasn’t very useful to make lots of lessons in many different topic areas, because the lessons had varying levels of quality. So, we decided to narrow our scope to figuring out how to teach a particular topic effectively… The main thing that allows us to maintain momentum is our focus. Having targeted goals ensures that we know what to focus on, and what to work on next.
2. Another great point Diana made was about knowing your capacity and allocating your resources wisely. I think it is especially true to the nonprofit sector. Everyone wears many different hats, funds are limited and volunteers are usually an integral part of the effort. As for open source projects, of course we know all about the developers who dedicate their time by contributing code, fixing bugs, etc.:
By focusing on a select set of channels for the short term, we can dedicate more of our time to creating a better-informed and more effective strategy. This allows us to work smarter, not harder.
3. While it is tempting to design a project that checks all your boxes, the focus should always be on the end-user, as said by Diane:
If we had focused our energy on the learner’s experience from the start, we would have designed a much more cohesive experience.
4. Every organization calls their partnerships person differently. But in the end, they all work toward the same goal of joining forces to maximize their impact by sharing knowledge and insights. I learned that there are a lot of missed opportunities, because everyone is doing their thing and keeps reinventing the wheel. But as seen from Oppia’s experience, partnering with locals or people working on the same problem can be great advantage:
Education is such a vast field that it’s virtually impossible to make a substantial impact on our own, so we knew we had to partner with organizations or teams in the communities we aimed to serve.
One of our most effective ways of gaining momentum has been through word-of-mouth and localized advocacy in the targeted communities. By partnering with local leaders, we develop targeted strategies to help address these.
5. Lastly, all your strategic decisions should be based on evidence, i.e backed by data:
We try to take a data-based approach whenever we have to make larger strategic decisions, so that we can choose the path that objectively seems the most impactful.
I encourage you to read the full interview here, as it gives valuable advice if you are planning or already started an education project.
