At Oppia, we believe that learning should be interactive, effective, and fun. However, this isn’t the case for many students in rural and impoverished areas around the world. The reasons vary: some schools face a serious shortage of teachers, some lack access to comprehensible textbooks, others suffer from overcrowding and lack of funds. Regardless of the specific reasons, this adversely affects students’ abilities to meet their potential and fulfill their aspirations, with many dropping out of school at an early age.
From the outset, Oppia has set its sights on alleviating the problem by using innovative technology to increase the supply of free and effective educational material online. The Oppia team realizes that this isn’t an easy task, but in 2017, we are pleased to report significant progress on multiple fronts that will allow Oppia to have a greater impact in 2018. Let’s take a look back at 2017!
Technology
A central part of Oppia’s work is our platform for creating interactive lessons, hosted at Oppia.org. When determining our platform roadmap, the team’s priority in 2017 was effectiveness: how do we make it easy to create effective lessons, and how do we make sure students who need these lessons most stay engaged?
Making an online lesson truly effective is not straightforward, and requires several iterations. In 2017, we conducted a series of user studies in India in order to gain feedback on the lessons. Through these, we learned what students liked and found useful, and also identified areas for improvement.
The Oppia team adopts a continuous improvement mindset. We go through iterations of creation and testing, and incorporate feedback into our processes and platform. One of our major learnings this year was that making the lessons accessible didn’t just involve students being able to access or operate their devices; in our target demographic, significant language barriers hindered students from being able to learn. Even when the subject matter of the lesson was mathematics, students needed to understand the feedback, story and instructions in order to stay engaged.
In order to overcome this, the Oppia team introduced multilingual audio support to the Oppia platform. Audio translations can now be added to both the main story card and subsequent hints, as shown in the screenshot below:
In addition, alternate languages are offered in a prominent spot so that students can easily see them when playing the lessons:
The introduction of this functionality led to a significant difference in students’ comprehension of the lessons. As you’ll see in more detail below, students in India loved them!
Team Engagement and Lesson Process Improvements
However, the platform is only part of the story. Having a platform that can result in effective lessons doesn’t mean that any lesson created on that platform is effective. In 2017, the Oppia team worked to gain a deeper understanding of how to create effective lessons, so that we can then find ways to create such lessons at scale and make them widely available.
Surprisingly, this is still a somewhat open problem. Many online education efforts have focused more on scale/quantity than on quality, and tend to be targeted at learners who are already reasonably proficient. On the contrary, Oppia’s goal is to make lessons that work well for everyone as widely available as possible, particularly for students who do not have access to quality education and consequently lack a strong grasp of the subject.
Fortunately, Oppia has been able to recruit a diverse set of volunteers from around the world to the team. Many of our volunteers, especially those from developing countries, have witnessed the inequality of education first-hand, and are working together to try and create lessons that are universally enjoyable, effective, and easy to relate to. Through this collaboration and periodic user testing, we’ve started developing a reliable and scalable process to create story-based lessons that support scaffolded skill-based instruction and target particular misconceptions.
This process has been formalized into a program that we’ve been using to onboard, assign, and drive the creation of enjoyable, effective lessons on our platform. The result of this is an exemplar set of story-based mathematics lessons that follows a young student, Matthew, as he faces various challenging math-related situations in the real world. You can check out a sample lesson here: https://www.oppia.org/collection/4UgTQUc1tala
User Studies
In 2017, the Oppia team also started taking our model lessons out into real-world situations. We did this by partnering with EvalDesign, an education evaluation firm, to bring our math lessons to schools in Delhi, India.
We conducted several user studies, with the last one taking place over five days at a government school in Delhi attended by students from low-income families. The results were great: students didn’t want to put the phones down at the end of the lessons, and they also couldn’t wait to get started again the next day! When asked to compare the Oppia lessons to those they had at school, they thought the Oppia lessons were much better, citing the audio translations, friendly hints, story and images, and the fact that the lessons contain lots of very good questions.
Here’s a sample quote from one of the students:
I liked learning the lessons on mobile because in the mobile we get very good questions and if we get something wrong we are told how to correct it and we are not scared when we are doing this. Because in this we get hints also. I really liked this app. I am not very interested in the lessons we learn in school because if we get a question wrong, we get a beating for it. That is why I am not interested in the teaching we have in school.
These studies demonstrate Oppia’s potential: it provides students with a way to learn that is helpful, understandable, and easily accessible with just a mobile phone.
Plans for 2018
Our momentum from 2017 carries into 2018. In Q1, we plan to conduct a randomized controlled trial in a government school in Delhi, India. The trial will be conducted in a population with a similar demographic to that of the user studies. The aim of this trial is to validate the effectiveness of the Fractions lessons we’ve created, in order to ensure that the Oppia platform makes it possible to create lessons that are not only enjoyable, but also effective.
The result of the trial will be an important driver of our 2018 roadmap. If the trial does not succeed, we will figure out what went wrong, and try again. If it does succeed, then this would be a major success for our work to date, since it will demonstrate that our methodology leads to measurable improvements in learning outcomes. We will then look into distribution and scaling, in order to ensure that these lessons can reach more students who need them.
If you would like to help out, please visit Oppia Foundation’s Get Involved page to discover how you can make a difference in the lives of learners around the world. And, in the meantime, stay tuned to our blog for the RCT results, as well as other exciting updates throughout 2018!
