Google today launched a new online education tool called Oppia, currently an open source project with the goal of making it easy for anyone to create online interactive activities that others can learn from. Called explorations, these activities can be built and contributed to by multiple people from around the world through a Web interface, without any programming required.
Here is how Google describes its latest venture:
Oppia does this by modeling a mentor who poses questions for the learner to answer. 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. You can think of this as a smart feedback system that tries to “teach a person to fish,” instead of simply revealing the correct answer or marking the submitted answer as wrong.
And in typical Google style, here’s the YouTube video:
Google says Oppia does more than just present content: it gathers data on how learners interact with it and offers it to exploration authors so they can fix shortcomings in an exploration. For example, if many learners are giving an answer to which an exploration is not responding adequately (for example, the difficulty changes abruptly, or the next question appears to be unrelated), an author could create a new learning path for it. In this way, the exploration continues to get better.
Here’s Oppia’s current feature list:
- Learners receive personalized, customizable feedback after submitting answers
- Explorations are embeddable in any webpage
- An online analytics dashboard that allows explorations to be improved easily over time
- A full online editor GUI
- A comprehensive extension framework allowing straightforward integration of new interactions and classification rules
- Parameters can be associated with a learner in order to create a richer interactive experience
- Collaborative creation and editing of explorations with version control
- (in progress) Responsive UI for mobile devices
Unfortunately, there’s no indication of the amount of resources Google plans to dedicate to Oppia. The disclaimer “Oppia is not a Google product” seems to suggest the company is hoping a community forms and takes over.
Google’s reasoning for why Oppia exists is simple: the company believes online education can be delivered via more than just video, audio, and text. In learning, feedback is key, and as the company says: “one does not learn to play the piano by watching videos of many virtuoso performances.”
Top Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
It seems like authorities in China’s various cities are still trying to figure out a way for taxi-booking apps to exist in the transport ecosystem, seeking to strike a balance between their usefulness and the lack of accountability within the industry.
The latest move to regulate such taxi-booking apps comes from authorities in Shanghai — where private car hire service Uber officially launched earlier this month — as they announced new rules aimed at cracking down on such apps.
The new regulations, published in a notice on the website of the Shanghai Municipal Transport and Port Authority (via Reuters), state that taxi drivers are banned from using taxi-booking apps during peak hours and should not pick up calls or use their smartphones while ferrying passengers.
“We think that while taxi-booking apps have changed the pre-booking model for taxis and increased their operational efficiency, the marketing methods, price increases and the lack of regulations in terms of driver registration have affected the fair and equitable operation of the taxi industry,” the notice says.
More notably, Shanghai authorities have also banned the use of booking apps entirely by private cars contracted for hire starting March 1 — which could be a major roadbump for Uber if the rules are strongly enforced, given that private car chauffeurs do tend to use Uber in their free slots. It is expected that Uber will take steps to maneuver its way around the regulations via discussions with authorities, but it remains to be seen what the solution will be.
After all, even after authorities in Beijing took steps to regulate the taxi-booking app industry in July last year, such apps have been growing and getting funding from Chinese Internet giants.
Beijing’s transport authorities gave four apps the green light to operate in the city, including Didi Dache, which recently secured a $100 million funding round from investors that included Chinese Internet giant Tencent. Previously, e-commerce giant Alibaba invested an estimated $1 million in Kuaidi Dache, while car rental firm Yonchi — which runs Dache Xiaomi — was said to have landed a round in the ‘tens of millions of dollars’ bracket.
We have reached out to Uber for comment and will update with any response provided.
Read – Uber is bullish about its potential in China, but it won’t discuss rivals or reveal figures
Image Credit: Mark Ralston via AFP/Getty Images
Livefyre pushes the limits of its technology with Oscars red carpet photo booth that tweets for fans
Feb27
The Academy Awards’ #MyOscarPhoto campaign, powered by Livefyre and Twitter, offers a good look at the power of Livefyre’s platform and its ability to use technology and social media to connect fans with their favorite celebrities.
Award shows are becoming a prime site for testing offline-to-online social integrations. Twitter, for instance, has been taking its 360-degree Vine booth and Twitter Mirror around to red carpet events like the Golden Globes and the Grammys. Livefyre is upping the stakes at this year’s Academy Awards.
When it debuts this Sunday, the #MyOscarPhoto booth will take selfies tweeted by fans, display them at a rate of 10 images per second next to a celebrity, snap a photo with a slow motion camera, and then tweet it back out to individuals. It’s a clever trick that gives users a neat point of contact with a movie star while using technology to make the experience seamless for the performer.
Introducing #MyOscarPhoto — your chance to see yourself on the red carpet at the #Oscars! http://t.co/8Nx5wTNjMb pic.twitter.com/nhbdeYoBoX
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) February 25, 2014
The sheer ambition of the setup got our attention, so we chatted with Livefyre CEO Jordan Kretchmer to learn more about how Livefyre built the booth.
“It’s definitely the most interesting thing I’ve ever worked on,” Kretchmer said, adding that it was also the most intensive.
To build the booth, Livefyre tapped its StreamHub platform to aggregate all the user photos from Twitter. It then reworked an Image Gallery app to enable it to stream those photos onto a TV in 10-second bursts at 10 frames per second. An algorithm then uses histogram analysis to take the resulting video file and chop it up into frames for each user. Each image is then rematched with the metadata from users’ original tweets and combined with the celebrity’s name. In the final step, human moderators double-check the automated work before approving the images to go back out as tweets.
The whole interaction is hardly deep social engagement, but it is perfectly situated to delight users.
Livefyre’s focus on creating scalable realtime infrastructure for real-world events is paying off. The startup certainly has experience with scale, now that it hosts over 2 billion page views a month, but #MyOscarPhoto is the most ambitious custom project yet for the company’s platform.
The implementation might get reused at future events, like the Country Music Awards, but Kretchmer said he’s more interested in using the project to showcase the kinds of custom real-time streaming applications that can be built on Livefyre’s infrastructure. According to him, the company built the installation in just two weeks.
“I think we’ll start to see a lot of other interesting use cases like this that aren’t exactly this execution,” he added.
As social media becomes an increasingly important part of mainstream events like the Super Bowl and the Oscars, firms like Livefyre are establishing the infrastructure required to bridge the offline and online worlds. Even if faux celebrity selfies aren’t your thing, the #MyOscarPhoto campaign offers an interesting glimpse at the future of social.
Image credit: Joe Klamar / AFP / Getty Images
Dovetailing with Google’s announcement of a developer conference for its Project Ara modular smartphone effort, Time’s Harry McCracken has a fascinating inside look on the makings of the project.
McCracken goes into the development process at Motorola’s Advanced Technology And Projects (ATAP) group and why a smartphone made entirely of user-replaceable parts might just be the phone of the future for the next five billion users.
Between Project ARA and the ambitious Project Tango 3D-sensing smartphone prototype, ATAP is doing some killer work that should have you excited about how our phones will evolve in the next few years.
➤ Project Ara: Inside Google’s Bold Gambit to Make Smartphones Modular [Time]
Image credit: Google ATAP