Community Guidelines

1. Once published, explorations can be played and commented on by anyone in the Oppia community. With everyone's input, we can continuously improve explorations and make learning as perfect as possible.

2. Use good judgement when publishing explorations. Explorations should have significant educational value and cannot contain advertising, spam, vandalism and/or abuse.

3. Be a good citizen. Creating multiple accounts, using explorations to trick users, circumventing features meant to encourage improvement of explorations or other such antisocial behavior will not be tolerated and may result in account suspension.

If you're unsure about an exploration topic or need clarification on guidelines, you can ask us on our forum.

Publication criteria

These publication criteria ensure explorations can be meaningfully tested, continually developed, and refined in a way that makes them fit to be featured. They're meant to be objective and precise so you can easily determine whether an exploration is fit for publication.

An exploration should:

Teach something meaningful - Present information that's new to the target audience. Don't just test knowledge the target audience is already assumed to have.

Teach more than a single factoid - Explorations should be either "deep" or "broad". "Deep" means an involved, tricky concept that has nuances and depth. "Broad" means a collection of related, interesting facts the learner can understand and better remember after completing the exploration.

Give informative feedback - Don't just tell learners if they're correct or incorrect — explain reasoning. Tell learners why something is right or wrong, and how to correct it if necessary. Make your exploration more than just a quiz!

Avoid duplicating existing explorations - The beauty of Oppia is that everyone works together to make explorations maximally effective. If you'd like to teach an existing topic, first try submitting feedback for the current exploration or improving it. Only if you use a significantly different teaching style should you create a completely new exploration.

"Featured" criteria

Featured explorations are educational, are interesting to learners, and use our interactive, discovery-based learning style. For help on crafting useful feedback and creating explorations that fit these "Featured" criteria, check out our Design Tips page!

A featured exploration is:

More than memorization - The exploration does more than simply provide facts to memorize. It helps the user genuinely understand interesting concepts.

Learning, not assessment - The exploration doesn't just quiz the learner. It presents and builds upon new concepts.

Interactive - Users learn by doing. They have a chance to reason about concepts, try out new knowledge, and receive useful feedback on responses.

Formative feedback - The exploration's feedback gives learners new, useful insights. It finds a good middle ground between telling the learner they're wrong (or right), and giving the entire answer away. Also, the feedback should cover a wide range of potential replies.

Complete and polished - Not only is the exploration free of typos, factual errors and bugs, it's well-written and easy to read. Additionally, it delivers all the content promised in the learning objective and in the exploration itself.

Publication policy

The following policies help Oppia moderators enforce the criteria for publishing and featuring explorations.

Any owner of a private exploration can publish it at any time. However, if the exploration does not fit the publication criteria, the site moderators may unpublish or delete it. (The norm is to unpublish; deletion is only likely in egregious cases, such as outright spam.)

Explorations are meant to be polished and developed until they're "featured exploration" material. An exploration that hasn't been edited for a long time may be considered "orphaned". In this case, ownership may be handed to the community at large (at moderator discretion), so that Oppia community members can continue to improve it.

Note that when you embed a particular version of your exploration in your site, it won't change unless the original exploration is unpublished or deleted. This means that even if you or other community members make changes to the exploration, the version embedded on your website will remain the same.

We hope to make the exploration-release process community-driven soon, but here's how it works now: When an owner of an exploration — or anyone involved in the process — thinks the exploration is ready to be featured, they can post to the Moderator Requests forum. A moderator will play through the exploration, look at its structure, and decide whether it fits the "Featured" criteria. If it does, the exploration will be marked as featured. If it doesn't, the moderator will work with the creator(s) to improve the exploration.