Help Provide Quality Education through Oppia
Even before COVID-19, students around the world were facing difficulties accessing quality education due to conflict, discrimination, lack of teacher training, and more. However, with COVID, the challenge has become even greater. Earlier this year, the World Bank released a report estimating the impacts of COVID-19 could result in a loss of 0.6 years of schooling and an increase in the share of children who are below minimum proficiency levels.
Students now more than ever need access to high-quality, low-barrier educational resources to ensure that they can continue to learn even if they cannot attend school.
About Us
The Oppia project aims to address education inequity around the world by creating freely-accessible and effective lessons that any student can use to develop key skills, with a specific focus on addressing systematic barriers that underserved students face in low-resource environments. The project relies on a custom open-source platform that makes it easy to create interactive lessons that go well beyond the passive videos/text that are prevalent in current online educational platforms, by providing support for students who lack language fluency, as well as tutor-like guidance and feedback for when students make mistakes. Studies in India, Cameroon, Palestine, Zimbabwe and the US have shown that students find the story-based lessons enjoyable (each one said they had fun and would recommend to a friend!), and a randomized trial in India found that the lessons led to significant improvements in educational outcomes. By creating a set of free, high-quality, demonstrably effective lessons with the help of educators from around the world, Oppia aims to provide students with quality education — regardless of where they are or what traditional resources they have access to.
Looking Back and Moving Forward
This year has been a particularly exciting one for our project, as we saw the launch of 5 new Basic Mathematics topics (comprising 38 lessons and 90 skills) as well as the new Oppia Classroom experience. We released the math curriculum, which is The Oppia Foundation’s first full curriculum, consisting of 60–70 lessons that teach a range of over 100 skills, and is now available to students worldwide on www.oppia.org/library for free. Building on these successes, our current goals are to create a set of universally accessible basic math lessons that are effective and enjoyable, and partner with nonprofits around the world to distribute these lessons to the students in their communities.
We’ve also continued to see year over year improvements in engagement and outcomes, with increases in sessions and session duration, and our user studies have shown students using our lessons have an over 60% improvement in learning outcomes! We’ve begun to develop our first Android app which will enable millions more students without good access to a data connection to access our free, effective lessons offline. We are continuing to grow and nurture our various international partnerships in Africa, India, and more.
Like our students, we’ve learned and grown a lot in 2020. We are excited by the work ahead of us and are more passionate about our mission than ever.
Help Provide Quality Education
Oppia has functioned off of minimal funding to date, but as we look forward to scaling up our efforts, additional resources will help us exponentially expand our impact — from speeding up our Android app development to enabling localized awareness campaigns. Since we’re a volunteer-run project, you can feel confident knowing that every penny donated will go back to furthering our mission.
We’ve already served over 1 million learners, and we look forward to greatly expanding upon that number in the near future. Thank you for reading and if you are interested in supporting educational equality, and we hope that you’ll consider supporting our project today!
If you’re interested in donating to the Oppia Foundation please visit our donation page at https://www.oppia.org/donate. If you 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.
