Google Season of Docs 2022 with Learning Equality
| After successful participation in the first edition of GSoD in 2019, two projects during the 2020 edition, and another in 2021, this year we are again eager to welcome tech writing contributions through the Google Season of Docs program, to work on establishing a workflow for creating easily localizable video tutorials for Kolibri using the Text To Speech (TTS) technology. |  |
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Learning Equality (LE) is a non-profit organization based in the United States that creates and supports tools to enable equitable access to high-quality educational opportunities, with an emphasis on supporting effective education technology interventions in low-connectivity contexts. |
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Learning Equality’s work emerged out of the recognition that the same global populations that have the least access to quality education also have the least access to the growing wealth of learning resources available online.
We work closely to co-design the product with a core network of collaborators, including national NGOs, UN agencies, government, and corporate partners, while also taking a needs-based approach to its development through insights gathered from Kolibri’s global user community. Through its do-it-yourself adoption model and strategic collaborations, Kolibri has reached learners and educators in more than 205 countries and territories.
Launched in 2017, Kolibri is an end-to-end suite of open-source tools, content, and DIY support materials, designed for offline-first teaching and learning. Centered around an offline learning platform that runs on a variety of low-cost and legacy devices, Kolibri Product Ecosystem also includes a curricular tool, a library of open educational materials, and a toolkit of resources to support training and implementation. These tools are available in a variety of languages, to better support learners and educators globally.
Core to executing LE’s mission is the ability to support the varied learning needs of the underserved populations in their own local languages, which is why we take internationalization (i18n) so seriously, and have made our Kolibri Learning Platform available in 30 languages, and our Kolibri Studio curricular tool available in 5 languages thus far.
Alongside the learning platform, we offer the Kolibri Edtech Toolkit - a comprehensive collection of resources to support training and implementation in formal, informal, and non-formal learning environments, intended for anyone to be able to independently adapt and use for training in their contexts. This toolkit contains a set of video tutorials for the different account types that can be viewed on the Kolibri demo site, accompanied by captions in 6 languages in VTT format.
As the Kolibri Learning Platform develops through new versions and releases, many of these video tutorials need to be re-recorded, and transcripts and captions translated again to reflect the new features. At this time, we are making the captions available in only 6 languages over the same video in English. Our long term objective is to have video tutorials produced in all the languages Kolibri itself is localized into, with both the narration and the recorded UI in the given language, for the best learning experience of the future users of Kolibri who are viewing them. This objective is going to require substantial investment in time and resources, and we must improve our internal production processes to reduce that investment.
The video tutorial production experience from previous years has led us to the conclusion that recording the voice narration and the screencast separately (but following closely the same steps from the script), and combining the video and audio tracks afterwards, requires less editing, and yields better video flow in the final result compared to recording the narration and screencast at the same time. Following the same steps in localized versions will also provide consistency in the content across videos in all languages. Even though in a couple of past releases of Kolibri we managed to obtain localized video tutorials narrated by a native speaker of Arabic, French and Spanish, the bandwidth required to produce them consistently through subsequent releases was out of our reach. Recording a video and audio is also technically more complex for our volunteer and grassroots contributors, compared to just translating the captions in text format. Given the background above, we decided to experiment and evaluate the use of the TTS tools to produce the voice narration. For the latest v0.15 release of Kolibri, as a proof of concept we produced 2 videos using the narration track recorded with the TTS from the English script.
- Implementation models using learner data syncing
- Configure a Kolibri learn-only device for data syncing
GSoD contributor could start with these draft steps for each video deliverable per language, which may be subject to change as the work progresses:
| Step | Time estimate |
|---|---|
| Script and storyboard steps preparation | 20% |
| Voiceover audio recording with TTS | 10% |
| Screencast video recording | 30% |
| Combining and editing audio and video tracks | 40% |
The objective of this GSoD project is two-fold:
- Produce a set of 17 fully localized video tutorials for Kolibri in 2 languages (either French, Spanish, or Brazilian Portuguese).
- Establish a workflow and document the best practices for the production of localized video tutorials for Kolibri in the rest of languages.
- Full success would assume having all the 17 current video tutorials for v0.15 produced with voice-over and screencast in additional 2 languages (French, Spanish, or Brazilian Portuguese).
- From the point of view of efficiency of our video tutorial production processes, the measure of success for this project would also be having an established and documented workflow with guidelines and best practices enabling us to start from the video script in English and ultimately result in a fully localized video tutorial.
| Phase | Month | approx. hours |
|---|---|---|
| I - Onboarding | May | 20h |
| II - Videos in language 1 | June-July-August | 100h |
| III - Videos in language 2 | September-October | 90h |
| IV - Documenting best practices | November | 30h |
| Total | 240 hours |
- Fluent written and verbal communication skills in English.
- Experience with video tutorials recording and editing.
- Availability to learn how to use text-to-speech tools (LE to provide training).
- Ideally reading and listening comprehension of Spanish, or French, or Brazilian Portuguese.
- Familiarity with best practices for production of captions for videos.
- Radina Matic - Main PoC and Project Coordinator
- Carine Diaz - LE Internalization Lead
- Laura Danfort - Global Community lead
If you are interested to know more about this project idea, Kolibri or Learning Equality, send an email to radina@learningequality.org, and we'll reply with the invite to the #season-of-docs channel we set up in our team Slack workspace!