Researchers have shown again and again that education has the power to rejuvenate communities, increase economic growth, and disrupt the cycle of poverty. UNESCO predicts that if we achieve universal primary and secondary completion, we could lift more than 420 million people out of poverty. However, of the 61 million children worldwide who cannot attend primary school, 17 million will never step foot into a school if trends continue. Unfortunately, even those who are in school may not be getting the effective education they need, with a disproportionate amount of negative impact happening in low socioeconomic status regions.

Oppia was founded on the belief that everyone deserves access to high quality education, no matter their circumstances, background, or socioeconomic status. Many solutions exist that attempt to close this gap, but many of these resources don’t address the core problems and unique needs of our underserved learners. For instance, many educational tools require high bandwidth internet (from video content), and often don’t allow for the students to “learn by doing,” which has been shown to be a more effective form of learning than more passive alternatives. Many underserved students also fail to get their basic education needs met, which makes it difficult to access tools like MOOCs which are often pitched at the level of higher education.

Oppia sets out to change the educational landscape by effectively addressing these needs. By working closely within the communities we want to help most, we’ve been able to identify and develop features like Audio Translations and text-based, interactive lessons that allow for our lessons to be engaging and universally accessible. We’re also developing a series of comprehensive, basic education courses so that we can ensure that there are high-quality, effective lessons available to all. Each of these lessons are vetted by at least one subject matter expert, and each is also told in the form of a story so that students can engage with concepts in contexts that they are familiar with. After conducting dozens of user studies and one randomized trial (with many more to come!), we feel confident that our lessons can truly narrow the educational outcome gap between low- and high-socioeconomic status students.

Since 2015, we’ve been fortunate to work with over 100 contributors and help over 1.1 million users learn something new on our platform. We were even featured by Hacker Noon as one of the top 100 most valuable GitHub repositories out of the 96 million total on this platform. By becoming a GitHub sponsor, you’ll enable us to scale our efforts to help even more students around the world, by supporting the following initiatives…

• Supporting server costs
• Providing startup funds for local awareness campaigns in underserved communities
• Increasing our digital marketing capacity
• And more!