Web Application Developer

We are looking for a volunteer software developer to collaborate on building features for an open source education platform that aims to make high-quality basic education accessible for everyone. The volunteer would contribute to the development of tools that enable the community to translate lessons into multiple languages, or improve the learning experience for under-resourced learners around the world who use the platform to learn.

Important! To get started, please don't submit an application through VolunteerMatch. Instead, please follow the instructions on our GitHub wiki page:

• Web: https://github.com/oppia/oppia/wiki/Contributing-code-to-Oppia#setting-things-up

This is important because we receive multiple applications per day through VolunteerMatch and don't have the capacity to reply to each one. In contrast, the wiki instructions above provide all the information needed for you to get started with the project in a fully self-service way :)

Who Are We?

The Oppia Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the mission to provide high quality education to all. We do this through the creation and maintenance of our platform, Oppia (https://www.oppia.org), the coordination of our passionate contributors, and the development of critical partnerships with NGOs in the communities we aim to serve.

Even before COVID-19, students around the world were facing difficulties accessing quality education due to conflict, discrimination, lack of teacher training, and more. However, with COVID-19 forcing everyone to stay quarantined in their own homes, students now more than ever need access to free, quality education to ensure that they can continue to learn even if they cannot attend school.

Why Oppia is an Organization You Want to Work With

• Oppia has served over 2,000,000 users.
• Oppia focuses on effectiveness, and conducts rigorous user testing and RCTs to validate the lessons we offer. Learners using Oppia’s lessons have seen gains of 50+% from pre-test to post-test.
• Oppia's contributors actively help to provide students around the world with basic education. Please see https://medium.com/@ebelubhuhiose/86b97283edf4 and https://medium.com/@ojobusayo99/6e783aaddb74 for examples of our current work.
• Oppia has a community of hundreds of passionate volunteers from across the globe, so our meetings are held online at flexible times.

What our Software Development team contributes

Software developers will work closely with other volunteer developers around the world, Oppia's design team, and NGOs in various countries who are in direct contact with students, in order to implement features and key functionality to help learners and translators. The team is very collaborative and has a culture of providing and receiving constructive feedback through code reviews. Some examples of projects we're working on include:

• Adding functionality in the "contributor dashboard" to ease the process of translating lessons
• Fixing small issues in the lesson player that confuse students who haven't used a phone before
• Finding ways to make the site faster and more performant on low-end devices

Don't worry if you're new to "open source", or if you're still a student -- many of our contributors are, too, and we'd be more than happy to provide mentorship and support if this is your first time contributing to an open source project! The main thing is that you care deeply about helping people around the world to learn things better, and that you're responsible and reliable.

If you'd like to help out, please follow the instructions on our GitHub wiki page to get started:

• Web: https://github.com/oppia/oppia/wiki/Contributing-code-to-Oppia#setting-things-up

We look forward to meeting you!