If you want to learn about something, the quickest way is to do a search about whatever topic you’re interested in on the Internet.  There are millions of published articles and videos available online, but sometimes these aren’t enough, especially when a search seems to only yield more questions.

This is the issue Google addresses with its newly launched Oppia project. Oppia is an initiative that will allow anyone to create ‘explorations’ or interactive activities which others can learn from.  It’s like an online tutorial, as Oppia models a mentor who gives questions to the learner, and based on the learner’s response, decides how next to proceed.  The mentor can ask more questions to gauge whether the learner has a grasp the topic, or move on to another area of interest related to the topic.

Oppia is designed to cater to multiple participants, so several people can create and collaborate on explorations.  Oppia is able to deal with numeric, text, multiple choice inputs, clickable maps, and a code evaluator, and with its extensible framework, developers can expand the range of input types it can understand.

“Oppia gathers data on how learners interact with it, making it easy for exploration authors to spot and fix shortcomings in an exploration. They would do this by logging in, finding an answer that many learners are giving but which the system is not responding to adequately, and creating a new learning path for it, based on what they would actually say if they were interacting in-person with the learner. Oppia can then give this feedback to future learners,” Google posted on its blog.

You can try Oppia here.

Update to Google+ Hangouts for iOS

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In other Google news, the search giant has updated its Google+ Hangouts app and is now optimized for iOS 7. It  features a cleaner look with a new loading screen and menus, as well as the ability to attach maps to current locations, a feature that has been available on Android for some time now.

Google has also included animated stickers to make messages to friends more interesting, and the app has been optimized for use on iPads by adding picture-in-picture video calling.

image source: Google Oppia