About Learning Equality

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. 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 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.

About GSoD 2021 Kolibri project

After successful participation in the first edition of GSoD in 2019, and two projects during the 2020 edition, this year we are again eager to welcome tech writing contributions through the Google Season of Docs program.

In the previous editions, GSoD writers worked on projects supporting various documentation needs for the end users, external partners and implementers, as well as to support internal guidelines such as style and contributor guides. This year we decided to start an exciting new documentation project to support the Kolibri internalization (i18n) process.

Core to executing LE mission is the ability to support the varied learning needs of the underserved populations in their own local languages, and for that reason we also often rely on translations by volunteers and grassroot crowdsourced contributions, instead of the professional localization services.

We use the Crowdin platform for the localization of several projects in the Kolibri Product Ecosystem. Crowdin offers two important features to aid translators to better understand the meaning and setting where each of the strings is located in the Kolibri user interface (UI), in order to provide the best possible translation for terms and phrases that users see:

String context
UI screenshot

Workflow for adding string context and screenshot on Crowdin platform.

Without context, when translators do not fully understand a word or a phrase that appears in the Kolibri UI, they have the option to raise an issue with the LE’s i18n team, and ask for support to comprehend the string in order to provide the most appropriate translation. The main purpose of providing Context on Crowdin is to enable an optimal translation experience (even by non-professional translators), decrease the number of support questions and issues, and ultimately provide better user experience in localized versions of Kolibri.

The easiest way to envision the writing tasks needed for this project is to think how to describe and explain the function of an UI element (or a message) presented to the user, while adding some complementary information for the translators.

Scope of the project

Currently all the new strings that are introduced in Kolibri go through the i18n audit process during which we write the context for strings, that is later added to the codebase for the new features. However, there are a lot of legacy strings that do not have a complete context included in Crowdin, and that can still create doubts during the translation stage, particularly for the first translation in a new language. The purpose of this GSoD project is to remediate that by adding descriptions (context) for these legacy user interface (UI) strings, to decrease the number of support requests by the translators and ensure better consistency across translations.

Before the GSoD Doc development phase begin, LE i18n team will audit these legacy strings and divide them into P0 (must-have; Priority 0) and P1 (nice-to-have; Priority 1) categories, taking into account these criteria:

user roles (core- and learner-facing strings first, backend strings last)
term complexity (some strings with common words do not necessarily require detailed context descriptions)

To give a sense of scope, the Kolibri Learning Platform version 0.14 has 1,840 user-facing strings, of which around 1,750 are legacy strings that lack proper context.

After the onboarding, GSoD tech writer will start documenting the context for P0 legacy UI strings. Taking into account these criteria, our current estimate is that approximately 75% of the Kolibri Learning Platform UI strings on Crowdin fall into the P0 category.

Timeline and milestones

	Crowdin total	strings	hours	strings	hours
Phase I - Onboarding	24
		P0 (~75%)		P1 (~25%)
Phase II (core user- and learner-facing strings)
kolibri.core.default_frontend-messages.csv	351	281		70
kolibri.plugins.demo_server.main-messages.csv	9	9
kolibri.plugins.user.app-messages.csv	52	52
kolibri.plugins.learn.app-messages.csv	89	89
media viewer plugins (epub, pdf, h5p, html, video, etc.)	66	66
kolibri_exercise_perseus_plugin.main-messages.csv	147	74		74
Subtotal	714	570	95	144	24
Phase III (coach user-facing strings)
kolibri.plugins.coach.app-messages.csv
Subtotal	527	395	64	142	24
Phase IV (admin user-facing strings)
kolibri.plugins.facility.app-messages.csv	199	159		40
kolibri.plugins.setup_wizard.app-messages.csv	60	48		12
kolibri.plugins.device.app-messages.csv	285	228		57
django.po (backend)	55	28		28
Subtotal	599	463	77	136	23
Total Phases I-IV		1418	260

LE members supporting writers during the GSoD project

Radina Matic - Main PoC and Project Coordinator

Carine Diaz - LE Internalization Lead

Jacob Pierce - Full Stack Developer

How would we measure success?

From the perspective of LE, this project will be successful if there is a decreased number of support requests and issues raised by the translators on Crowdin as a result of newly documented context, and ultimately a downstream user feedback on improved translation accuracy.
From the perspective of the completion of the GSoD project, success will be measured by the total number (or overall percentage) of P0 prioritized strings that have the context documented during the GSoD project.

Crowdin platform tracks and stores a very detailed activity data for all the changes in source strings, translations and the string context. We can export that data to obtain metrics for day-to-day progress of the writer as they document the context of the strings.

Project budget

Item	Amount	Notes
Technical writer documents context for legacy UI strings to decrease support requests by translators and ensure consistency across translations	$13,000	This is based on an estimated 260 hours required for technical writing at an estimated rate of $50/hour. This may change slightly depending on the actual number of hours required and the actual rate of the technical writer who LE hires.
LE mentor support	$1,500	$500 each to support the 3 LE team member mentors supporting this project
Project swag	$200	Swag for technical writer and volunteer mentors (may include t-shirts, stickers, water bottles)
TOTAL	$14,700

Additional information

The LE team has already welcomed and supported GSoD writers in contributing to its work, and successfully completed 3 projects in the previous years. The LE Project Coordinator brings more than 15 years of cross-experience in technical documentation, localization and QA across several domains (business, academy, open source) in 4 countries.

As another example of LE's efforts to make projects available to like-minded individuals and providing the needed mentorship and guidance along the way, year 2015 was the first time the organization participated in the Google Summer of Code program, and was recently accepted to welcome GSoC student developer interns again in 2021.