Oppia is Google’s new tool for creating “explorations”. By “exploration” the creators mean a personalised and tracked journey through some learning materials.
It seems that Google believe that, although a growing amount of educational content is now delivered via video and and other media, the approach remains static and asynchronous. They believe that digitizing a lecture or presentation isn’t enough. I agree with them. Too many developments badged as distance learning aren’t really anything more than on-line textbooks, perhaps with videos or animations replacing static images and, if you’re really lucky, some in-text or end-of-chapter MCQs with a little feedback in the “hard luck, try again” style. Now that’s probably OK for blended learning or flipped classroom approaches, but I don’t think we can call it distance learning.
So is Oppia the answer? Well it (or something like it) might be a start.
It’s still based on asynchronous and individual use of learning materials, but it allows educational developers to design paths through the materials that are adapted to the individual’s responses to on-line questions. Now these things have been possible for a long time in good VLEs and on-line assessment packages, but what Oppia does is make it easier for the developer to design more sophisticated paths and to use analytics to continually improve the paths. Not new, but easier and potentially much more powerful.
Have a look at the demo at
What does it not do? Well, I still think the best learning requires discussion, student-student collaboration and student teacher dialogue. I still think we need to include the synchronous. So far I don’t see much in Oppia that helps with that. Nevertheless, I really like the approach to making the asynchronous and individual part of the learning pattern more responsive and easier to design. Well worth considering.