It's hard to learn to play the piano just by watching a video of a great pianist. Interactive learning is much more effective! oppia.org helps you make embeddable interactive educational "explorations" that let people learn by doing.
The second experiment, quietly announced on Google's Open Source Blog, was the launch of Oppia, a project that aims "To make it easy for anyone to create online interactive activities" that others can learn from.
Google's new open source project essentially aims to take the headache or mystery out of the process by providing the framework by which anyone can quickly create these types of interactive learning experiences and add them to their site.
In describing Oppia, Google says that one can think of it as a "Smart feedback system," which is an attempt to begin automating how we "Teach a person to fish" - to use its example.
On the technical side, Google says that it's based Oppia on an extensible framework, allowing developers to add their own inputs and extend the range of potential formats and types of responses that Oppia understands.
Explorations, as Google calls the lessons users can build through its system, that are created on an Oppia server can be embedded in any web page, and embeddings can "Refer to a particular version" of the exploration so that future changes don't mess with the principle version, Google explained.
As with many Google projects of this kind, it's not totally clear how much attention and support Google intends to throw at Oppia going forward.
The project's home page conspicuously says that Oppia is not officially a Google product, which would seem to imply that Google isn't planning to dedicate a ton of manpower or resources to the project.
More on Oppia at home here and in Google’s YouTube explainer below:
