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In developing countries like Ethiopia, Malaysia, and Mozambique, the market for English language learning is red hot. These are places where, often, English proficiency is seen as a stepping stone to a better job and a one-way ticket out of poverty. But one major kink in that plan is the fact that in many cases, the English teachers within these countries don’t speak English either. And so, the cycle continues.
But Luis von Ahn believes his app could play a key role in breaking that cycle. Von Ahn is the co-founder of Duolingo, a free language learning app that launched two and a half years ago and has since amassed a whopping 60 million users worldwide.
As big as Duolingo—and indeed, the entire online learning market—has become outside the classroom, von Ahn knows that language education still has a crucial place in schools. That’s why, on Thursday, the Pittsburgh-based startup is launching a new platform called Duolingo for Schools, which will help teachers track student activity on the app and tailor their lectures in the classroom, accordingly.
“It’s hard to know how many, but we think right now we have a few thousand teachers using Duolingo without this feature,” von Ahn says. “I think this will multiply that by a factor of ten, easily.”
Duolingo’s success is part of a groundswell of activity in the online learning space. In recent years, thanks to the explosive growth of platforms like Coursera and edX, the idea that you can get a quality education for free online has gone mainstream.
The New Model
That’s one reason why, in the early days, von Ahn and his co-founders Brendan Meeder and Severin Hacker intentionally designed Duolingo not for large school systems, but for a mass audience of international language learners. They objected to the fact that most mainstream products for learning a new language, like Rosetta Stone, are still prohibitively expensive, despite the huge and growing demand for English language education in poverty-stricken places.
Duolingo co-founders Severin Hacker and Luis von Ahn. Duolingo
“It’s like the main reason you want to learn English is to get out of poverty,” says von Ahn, who hails from Guatemala, “but you need $500 to do it.”
So, the co-founders developed a novel business model to pay for the free service. When students finish a lesson in Duolingo, they can test their newfound knowledge by translating a piece of text in a news article. Companies like CNN and Buzzfeed pay Duolingo for these crowdsourced translations, and now, according to von Ahn, Duolingo’s millions of students churn out several hundred articles a day.
Whether or not Duolingo’s founders designed the products for schools, teachers slowly but surely began incorporating it into the classroom anyway, albeit with some clunky workarounds. “They do these weird things where they have all the students use Duolingo, and at the end, the teacher goes around writing what the students did,” von Ahn says. “It’s pretty cumbersome.”
Now, teachers will be able to create an account that tracks all of their students to see who’s struggling with or excelling at which skills. What’s more, the system learns from student performance to help teachers understand the best ways to teach a given subject.
“If we want to figure out if we should teach plurals before adjectives, we run a test,” von Ahn explains. “It could take you years to figure that out, otherwise. This year you’d have to teach it one way, and next year you teach it another way, and maybe after ten years you figure out plurals are better than adjectives first. Yes, teachers have been doing it way longer, but we can iterate way faster.”
The Teacher Caveat
Despite these advantages, some academics caution that an app like Duolingo can never replace the teacher—or the textbook—particularly at the university level. “You can review vocabulary and practice verb forms, but it’s not giving you any cultural context,” says Elise Mueller, an academic technology consultant, specializing in language teaching and technology at Duke University.
“It’s great that it’s free and available to people, and it does support language learning, but the main pushback is: it can’t be the primary way you’re learning a language.”
Still, Mueller concedes that for younger learners, Duolingo may become a worthwhile addition to the classroom. “It’s great, because it’s addictive,” she says. “Instead of having to do your homework and learn vocabulary the hard way, you’re pulled into it.”
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