Founder Spotlight: An Interview with Sean Lip

It was at university when Sean Lip first formed an idea to improve educational accessibility and experience. A nascent passion for teaching combined with an opportunity to improve educational outcomes inspired Sean to create the free, online learning platform we know today. Oppia has evolved over the years and while the path ahead was not always clear, the team remained steadfast in its mission to help anyone learn anything in an effective and enjoyable way.

Read on to learn more about the origins of Oppia, the steps it took to get here, and what Sean and team have planned for the future!

What’s your story? How did you start the organization? What inspired you to create Oppia and its mission?

When I was at university, I did a lot of teaching, ranging from helping out at summer schools to after-school clubs to conducting small-group tutorials and running a lecture series. One day, on a plane flight, I was thinking about what the best thing I could do was, after finishing up my doctorate, that would have the biggest societal impact. It struck me that a lot of the systems that existed for education at the time were suboptimal, especially since real learning requires doing things and getting feedback to improve, rather than just watching lectures. It was not possible to create such lessons online at the time, but unfortunately that didn’t exist yet. So that’s how the idea of Oppia came into being — ultimately, it is important for people to be able to teach well online and for people to learn at scale, because a lot of societal challenges can be traced back to lack of education and therefore lack of empowerment.

In what way is it the same or different than what you initially dreamt it would be?

I originally wanted Oppia to be a place where anyone could go to learn whatever they needed to know. However, over time, we have been focusing 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. At the outset, I had no idea that there were so many students across the world who didn’t even know basic numeracy! That was just something we’d taken for granted that everyone would have been taught in school. But, the more we spoke with folks in places like Ghana and Cameroon, the more we realized that this is totally not the case, and that there were huge gaps in the education of basic skills. I’ve also wanted Oppia to be completely free and accessible, like Wikipedia, so that students can easily learn whenever they need to without barriers. And that ideal still holds true today.

How many teams were there initially? How has Oppia grown over time?

I’m inclined to say maybe around 15. We were initially focused mainly on the technical part rather than the content. We wanted to build a platform that made it easy for people to teach effectively.

However, this creator-focused approach didn’t work so well, because it didn’t provide a good experience for the student. Sometimes, the topic that a student is looking for is missing, or there might be 20 lessons on the topic and they would need to spend time figuring out which is best. And that’s not a great learning experience because as a student, you need some sort of structure, and you need to be able to trust that the lessons you’re using are high-quality. So, that’s why we started moving into the domain of ‘how do we actually create lessons’ and ‘let’s figure out how to make good lessons, so that we can teach other people how to do the same.’ By ‘good lessons’, I don’t just mean lessons that are fun to play — I also want the lessons to be effective and actually result in students gaining skills that they wouldn’t otherwise. This resulted in the scope of the project expanding. The community has grown, which is definitely pretty awesome to see. I believe we have more than 100 people now, contributing to various efforts that are organized into around 28 different teams and subteams. It is quite a lot to coordinate, but we really enjoy working together with the community and appreciate all the help and interest!

What are some challenges you have faced when it comes to Oppia? How have you overcome them or how are you working to address them?

Historically, our team has been lacking experience in marketing, since we’ve been mostly focusing on the lessons and the underlying platform infrastructure. This year, we are focusing much more on awareness, because it is one of the biggest hurdles for students. Through user studies, learner feedback sessions, and reports from nonprofit organizations, we’ve found that the lessons themselves are good, so the biggest remaining hurdle is to ensure that students know that the lessons exist and that they can freely use and benefit from them. This is one of the things that we are currently working to address through a lot of initial strategic work that we’ve been doing to set up the overall marketing team and its structure. We are trying to be very deliberate about how we approach marketing, and ensuring that we take a focused approach.

What are the initiatives you are currently working on?

The first is translations. We want to make sure that we can support full written translations for all the lessons. This is actually quite tricky with what we do because some of our lessons require students to enter answers. Being able to accept answers in other languages, and provide correct guidance in response, is very important from a “learning effectiveness” perspective.

We are also working on finishing the Basic Mathematics Curriculum. We have six topics published that cover a total of about 40 lessons, out of 15 topics in total that we eventually plan to release. Many of those are already in various stages of completion and should become available over the course of the year.

We are also working quite hard on a Contributor Dashboard that allows people to contribute translations and practice questions to the site. We ultimately want this resource to be as easy to edit as Wikipedia, but we also realize that, if you just let anybody edit anything, there is a risk that students may be presented with incorrect content. So, we have set up a contribution dashboard with a lightweight review system. In doing so, we hope to use it as a way to help teach people how to write these lessons well, so that it also becomes a coaching tool, similar to how Pull Requests work on GitHub.

There’s also lots of work happening on a partnership strategy, since we want to collaborate with organizations around the world that align with our mission in order to accomplish better results for society and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Finally, we are working on an offline Android app. This is very important for students in Africa, because they don’t have good Internet connectivity.

Have you always liked teaching from a young age? When did you start developing that interest?

Interestingly, I only started developing an interest in teaching later on. My first experience teaching was when I was 18 — I was in a government school back home in Malaysia and I was helping cover for a teacher on maternity leave. I did various bits and pieces of teaching all the way through my undergraduate degree, but I only realized that I really liked doing it in the second year of my PhD. So, it was actually a fairly late realization. I enjoyed teaching more than the research I was doing because the rewards were so immediate. You could actually see that students got an ‘aha moment’, and you knew you had helped. This, coupled with the rational view for why education is important in terms of helping empower people, meant that teaching was fulfilling on both an intellectual and a personal level.

What are three words that best encapsulate your character and why?

Committed, constructive, and coach. ‘Committed’, because, if I think a problem is important and I see that there is progress, I am going to stick with it. I’m not really the type of person that does a lot of different things and doesn’t see them through to completion. ‘Constructive’, because I think one thing that helps people a lot is if someone can provide them with a direction to go when they are stuck. That is where constructive feedback comes in — I want to help people by giving them constructive feedback that helps them grow and develop. And I think that this ties into ‘coach’ as well, because that is how I see my relation to a lot of the folks who we are working together with. They are contributing something good to the world, but I also want to make sure that they develop from the opportunity as well, and become more personally empowered.

How would you describe your leadership style? What values are most important to you? How does this affect your role as the Oppia founder?

In general, I try to teach people and then trust them to do a good job. The teaching is important not because contributors are necessarily bad at doing something, but they might just not be familiar with the environment or the skills. But after you’re able to master the skills you need, then I think you should absolutely have the autonomy to make your impact in the world! In terms of values, in addition to empowerment and growth, I do care about open participation and I want to make it easy for people to help with what we do. Part of living a balanced life is being able to give back to the community, but a lot of the ways to give back to the community are really expensive and they require a huge investment on your part. What Oppia wants to do is to make it easy for people to use their expertise to help in small ways that contribute to a greater good. This also helps make the mission more tractable, since, as they say, “many hands make light work”, and it’s also fun to do it as a community! I also care about integrity. Oppia has a very specific mission, and I believe that it is crucial to keep our focus and not deviate from that. We also need to ensure that whatever we work on adheres to the goal of ensuring that everyone in the world gets a good education, no matter what their circumstances are. So, we do a lot of “keeping ourselves honest” by constantly trying to figure out what remaining issues exist from the students’ perspective, and then trying our best to address them.

What are some personal hobbies that you enjoy outside of work?

Sometimes, for fun, I do these things called puzzle hunts with friends, which are basically online events where you work together to solve a series of puzzles, leading to some final challenge. I quite enjoy those because they are a nice way to get together and it’s a bit like playing a collaborative game. I also enjoy singing and musicals. Before the pandemic hit, I was actually participating in a local choir performance of Hamilton with a group in San Jose, and even learned how to rap! I do enjoy stepping into the motivations of the character on stage and trying to understand where they’re coming from — that’s something I find really interesting to do.

What are your goals and your vision for Oppia? What do you want the organization to accomplish 5 to 10 years from now? How do you define “success”?

I want Oppia to ensure that we, to the best of our ability, address the issues that students from underserved communities face. This not only includes under-resourced regions in general, but also students who aren’t in great circumstances, such as refugee centers, war zones, or places where the schools have been burned down. I’m hoping that students in these circumstances will know that they have alternatives and that they can continue to learn and develop their skills. I also hope that we will have more lessons in order to ensure that we have what is needed for students to gain proper skills and live a good life. We also want even parents who are illiterate, or who didn’t get the chance to go to school, to be able to easily take this up and use it. It just needs to be really accessible. We need to figure out what the barriers are to this being possible, such as languages or Internet access or devices, and find ways to address them. So, that’s the goal in a nutshell. The main goal is accessibility (i.e., making sure that everyone can benefit from the lessons), and then the second goal is raising the minimum bar higher and higher, in terms of what students can learn effectively.

If you’re interested in volunteering with the Oppia Foundation or just want to find out more about us, you can do so by going to oppiafoundation.org. You can always check out our effective, interactive lessons for free at oppia.org.