Oppia's Mission

Oppia’s Mission

The Oppia Foundation’s mission is to provide high quality education to those who lack access to it. We do this through the creation and maintenance of the Oppia platform which enables the creation and distribution of high-quality scalable online lessons that are constructed according to established educational principles. We also support this mission through the empowerment and coordination of our volunteer community, and the development of critical partnerships with NGOs in the communities we aim to serve.

Vision

To work towards this mission, the following steps are needed: (i) creating lessons, (ii) ensuring that they are effective in increasing students’ mastery, (iii) ensuring that they retain students, (iv) ensuring that they are universally accessible, and (v) marketing them. The following sections briefly give an overview of existing progress for each of these, and outline the work that remains to be done.

(i) Creation of lessons

We are working towards a full curriculum for Basic Mathematics as a first step, and have developed a lesson creation process that creators have successfully used to build several sets of high-quality lessons. To empower others to create effective lessons on any topic where help is needed, we hope to make this process more self-service and granular via site interface accommodations (including avenues for contributing images and translations, as well as channels for continuously improving existing lessons), as well as make it easier for volunteers around the world to help out with the overall effort.

(ii) Effectiveness of lessons

We’ve verified the effectiveness of our first few Fractions lessons with a randomized controlled trial (RCT). On completion of our initial basic math curriculum and supporting infrastructure (e.g. questions), we plan to conduct more RCTs with lessons in this curriculum to ensure that they continue to be effective, and will also try and set up some long-term analysis of effects of exposure to the lessons on students. In addition, we will enter a phase of improving the lessons, including developing a standardized framework to measure effectiveness. This will make it possible to analyze which changes in lessons lead to student skill improvement, and ensure that the resulting findings make their way into the lessons through the aforementioned channels for lesson improvement.

(iii) Retention of students

We have found a way to write engaging lessons that situate what’s being taught in the context of meaningful real-life stories and situations. We plan to measure the success of this effort through student interviews and analysis of retention metrics. This goal also relies on the learner experience being bug-free.

(iv) Universally accessible lessons

Oppia’s infrastructure for creating lessons currently supports mobile usage, audio subtitles, and affordances for flaky connections (in that, once a lesson is loaded, it stays playable even if the connection subsequently drops). We plan to extend the audio subtitles program and make it easier for translators and voiceover artists to add subtitles to lessons. We also plan to build functionality for lessons to be downloaded for offline use, and to partner with other nonprofits to enable them to use the lessons in a way that is contextually appropriate for their existing programs and students. In addition, we will add support to ensure that Oppia learner-facing functionality works well in poor network conditions.

(v) Marketing and Growth

Once we have created a Basic Mathematics curriculum, we need to market the lessons in order to ensure that students know about them and can use them! We plan to work together with partners in various countries to distribute the lessons to students who need them, as well as provide smooth “getting started” pathways for NGOs, parents and teachers with instructions on how to use the lessons most effectively in their particular context.

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For all the above, we will conduct careful planning in order to operate sustainably so that the members of our open source and volunteer communities have a fulfilling and enjoyable experience. In particular, prioritization is necessary for helping us focus on the things that are most critical for success, since taking on too many projects at a time is a recipe for overload and burnout. We are fully committed to enabling and supporting our volunteer community, and providing meaningful opportunities for people around the world who want to contribute to a beneficial cause with strong social impact.