"Oppia" open source education tool from Google

[Jeremy Ruston]

I belatedly just found this rather interesting open source education tool from Google:

https://www.oppia.org/

Lessons (or "explorations") consist of a sequence of tiddlers that you traverse by answering questions or clicking buttons. Each tiddler is appended to the end, so that you gradually build up a complete document of your learning experience. It's pretty cool, and pretty easy to use.

I suspect that it could be duplicated in TiddlyWiki without trouble. It's pretty much TiddlyWiki minus displayed tiddler titles and minus inline tiddler links. And minus working offline of course. It actually feels a bit sluggish as it goes back to the server for each interaction.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

--

Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jeremy...@gmail.com

[Peter Miller]

I'm slightly conflicted. I agree that an exploration has a nice personal vibe and is a good fit for the river and possibly TiddlyMap too. On the other hand it doesn't seem to have a high profile though it is presently being used by a company promoting their approach to blended learning by means of a book and online "taster" http://morethanblended.com/taster/ . More of Oppia and its (slightly tenuous) association with Google http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/26/meet-oppia-googles-new-open-source-project-that-lets-anyone-create-an-interactive-learning-experience/

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Peter

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 9:49 PM, Peter Miller <pmi...@liv.ac.uk> wrote:

I'm slightly conflicted. I agree that an exploration has a nice personal vibe and is a good fit for the river and possibly TiddlyMap too. On the other hand it doesn't seem to have a high profile though it is presently being used by a company promoting their approach to blended learning by means of a book and online "taster" http://morethanblended.com/taster/ . More of Oppia and its (slightly tenuous) association with Google http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/26/meet-oppia-googles-new-open-source-project-that-lets-anyone-create-an-interactive-learning-experience/

Yes, Google's support for things like this seems quite half-hearted. Perhaps it's the last vestiges of their historic product strategy of throwing lots of things against the wall and investing in the things that stick.

The contrasts between Oppia and TW are quite interesting. There's the online aspect I alluded to above, but also the way that Oppia is a full stack web app that does the single thing that it does, contrasting with TiddlyWiki, where the same functionality is something that Jed Carty (for example) could whip up over a few hours.

I think that difference is profound: the educator can reach inside TiddlyWiki and bend it to their needs, while Oppia is a black box requiring quite a high level of developer expertise to customise or extend. Shifting the locus of control from the developer to the educator then allows educators to experience all the good stuff that makes being a developer so rewarding: the ability to copy, modify and share the work of others to evolve a genuinely diverse ecosystem of artefacts and tools.

To be fair to Oppia, there are benefits from being a centralised system, such as the ability to track statistics and receive comments.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

 

On Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 9:08:55 PM UTC+1, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

I belatedly just found this rather interesting open source education tool from Google:

https://www.oppia.org/

Lessons (or "explorations") consist of a sequence of tiddlers that you traverse by answering questions or clicking buttons. Each tiddler is appended to the end, so that you gradually build up a complete document of your learning experience. It's pretty cool, and pretty easy to use.

I suspect that it could be duplicated in TiddlyWiki without trouble. It's pretty much TiddlyWiki minus displayed tiddler titles and minus inline tiddler links. And minus working offline of course. It actually feels a bit sluggish as it goes back to the server for each interaction.

Best wishes

Jeremy.

--

Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jeremy...@gmail.com

[Peter Miller]

I'm sure educators would find a TiddlyWiki-based solution of value. Investing time in a server-based solution of uncertain longevity would be a worry for many and count against Oppia. On the other hand it's conceptually simple enough to gain significant adoption if it became widely available via TiddlyWiki. It would deploy nicely from a standard LMS/VLE. If getting marks/analytics back from students is an issue presumably this could be stored in the wiki and extracted in some fashion following a subsequent upload to the LMS/VLE?

On Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 9:08:55 PM UTC+1, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

[Richard Smith]

Hi,

One of the really cool things about Oppia is that if someone starts to make something and then abandons it, it gets reclaimed into the public domain.

"Each exploration starts out as private: only the creator of the exploration, any editors they assign, invited playtesters, and the site moderators can see it.

Once the creators of the exploration are ready for it to be publicly playtested, they can publish the exploration, at which point its status changes to public. The exploration becomes viewable in the gallery. Community members can see and play the exploration, and leave feedback and suggestions.
Once the exploration satisfies the criteria for featured status, the exploration is officially marked in the gallery as featured.
The editors of an exploration can retain exclusive editing rights as long as they continue to maintain the exploration and respond to feedback and change suggestions in a timely manner. Otherwise, the exploration will be considered 'orphaned' and ownership of it will revert to the community, who will then be able to collectively improve the exploration over time."

They publish under cc-by-sa and waive the strict attribution requirement, which is (imho) the perfact license for open-ed resources.


Regards,
Richard

[Jed Carty]

It isn't really a clone of Oppia, but I did make a multiple choice quiz thing. For the multiple choice part giving setting different behaviour based on the answers shouldn't be too hard. I am less sure about the string input parts, checking for an exact match to either a single option or from a list wouldn't be hard, but giving guided help based on responses in that case will probably be harder.
Here is what I have thrown together as an initial test.

edit:
I added the option to have one question at a time and to set the next what the next question will be based on the answer given to the current one. It still isn't polished or well documented, but hopefully it will be easy enough to figure out what is going on.

[Jeremy Ruston]

> If getting marks/analytics back from students is an issue presumably this could be stored in the wiki and extracted in some fashion following a subsequent upload to the LMS/VLE?

The plan is to gather marks/analytics using the TinCan API (there is an integration project underway).

Best wishes

Jeremy.

On Fri, Apr 10, 2015 at 5:59 AM, Jed Carty <inmy...@gmail.com> wrote:

It isn't really a clone of Oppia, but I did make a multiple choice quiz thing. For the multiple choice part giving setting different behaviour based on the answers shouldn't be too hard. I am less sure about the string input parts, checking for an exact match to either a single option or from a list wouldn't be hard, but giving guided help based on responses in that case will probably be harder.
Here is what I have thrown together as an initial test.

[Ed Dixon]

Great work Jed and Thank You Jeremy for keeping our xAPI project in mind! We are coming to the close of the xAPI cohort sessions currently #10 of the 14 scheduled and I do have hopes for a last minute, heres what we can do showing there! I know you're doing everything possible to get 5.1.8 out so that you can turn some attention to xAPI and I so appreciate everything you do for us here. Building great examples of how TiddlyWiki can provide content has proven not to be a problem at all and this type of interaction like Jed and others have done brings us even closer to our goal but I feel once we can show that xAPI communication even just one way from TW5 to an LRS we seal the deal as far as proving TW5 as a useful platform in building offline educational systems or other forms of xAPI interaction from. I also feel that those using xAPI in the future ( if / when) they see these capabilities are going to want to take advantage of all the other capabilities TW5 provides to build future projects from adding to the brain power of our community here or at least that is my hope. Thanks guys and WOW 5.1.8 is looking so awesome! I am anxious to get an update and see where we are in all this is there a hangout scheduled anytime soon? 

Thanks guys,