Meet Oppia: Google's new open source project for interactive ELearning

Google has launched a new open source project titled Oppia that aims at creating eLearning content. Oppia allows users to create online interactive activities that Google calls explorations. These activities or explorations can be built and contributed to by multiple people across the world and doesn’t require any programming.

Basically, Google wants users to creative online activities or explorations that others can learn from. Oppia does this by modeling a mentor who poses questions for the learner to answer. Then, based on the learner’s responses, the mentor decides what question to ask next, what feedback to give, whether to delve deeper, or whether to proceed to something new, reveals the official Google Open Source blog .

One of the key highlights of Oppia is its ability to allow multiple people across the world to create and collaborate on explorations. Moreover, the explorations created on an Oppia server can be embedded in any web page.

The blog states, “Oppia gathers data on how learners interact with it, making it easy for exploration authors to spot and fix shortcomings in an exploration. They would do this by logging in, finding an answer that many learners are giving but which the system is not responding to adequately, and creating a new learning path for it, based on what they would actually say if they were interacting in-person with the learner.”

Oppia further uses this feedback for future learners.

Oppia is capable of dealing with numeric, text, and multiple choice inputs, and also clickable map and a code evaluator. Google has also built an extensible framework that lets developers extend the range of input types that Oppia can understand.