Conducting research with students

One of Oppia's aims is to make it easy for people to create and share high-quality lessons online, so that others can learn anything they want to in an effective and enjoyable way. In order for this to happen, we need to learn what "high-quality" means, and would like to facilitate research that aims to answer this question. We also care about ensuring that Oppia's lessons are accessible to and effective for all students, regardless of the student's background or individual circumstances.

If you'd like to help others learn a topic, and you have a hypothesis about the effectiveness of different ways of conveying it, you can test this hypothesis by going to Oppia.org and creating one exploration that exhibits it and another exploration that does not. In order to control the results, you could also incorporate the same "pre" and "post" questions in both explorations. The exploration editor will then allow you to see where learners get stuck, what they reply (in aggregate), and how of them complete your exploration, which could help you improve rough spots and get deeper insights into how learning works.

We'd like to make these insights available to everyone, so that the quality of learning material on the Internet as a whole improves. As a contributor, you are welcome to do the following individually:

• Conduct experiments and tell the Oppia team about your work. If you have an idea for a research project, you can email admin@oppia.org with a research plan. If there is additional functionality you need in order to conduct such experiments, we may be able to add it, especially if the results have educational value and are likely to be useful for other creators.

• Compile best practices (substantiated by research) for creating great learning experiences. If you do experiments and write them up, please let us know, since we may be able to feature it and it may be useful for other exploration creators. Over time, as we develop our understanding of what ways of creating an exploration work better than others, we hope to improve the Oppia editor to make it easy to create good explorations from the get-go.

There are also ways to contribute as part of a larger effort. Here is a list of our current projects and how you can help (note that being a professional researcher is not a prerequisite for any of these):

Improving Oppia's basic mathematics lessons

Currently, a large part of the team is focusing on creating a set of lessons to teach basic mathematics, in a way that ensures that everyone in the world can access and learn effectively from these, no matter what their background. (This is important because more than half of children and adolescents worldwide aren't achieving minimum proficiency in these skills.) Here are some of the existing lessons we've created, with more on the way: Fractions, Ratios and Negative Numbers.

We'd like to do some usability studies to ensure that these lessons are effective for students in various demographics. This involves letting students play through a lesson, and making notes on stumbling blocks and confusion points. Such feedback is very useful to the lesson creators, because it helps ensure that the lessons can be improved for future students.

If you'd like to help out with this project, please fill out this form, and we'd be happy to help you get started!