How Duolingo changed the way of learning a language
Over the past decade, smartphone technology has allowed many benefits for people and it has transcended traditional functionalities about how people gather information. The growth of mobile technologies makes the role of smartphones in the field of education important. This essay discusses how a smartphone app named “Duolingo” has impacted and transformed educational life.
Duolingo is a digital platform that includes a language-learning website and mobile app (Duolingo, 2020) With over 150 million users registered around the world, Duolingo is well-known language learning apps on the market today. The inspiration behind Duolingo was to create a language learning app that was free for people. The logic of the founder, Luis von Ahn, was creating a platform that gives equal access to education to everyone. The question comes “How Duolingo triggers users to learn and change their learning behaviour”. It is important to see that what lies under it. The reason why the number of users increasing is not only because of its content and functionality but also, it has convenience and usability. It is designed for being accessible to everyone. It is also free of charge and learning a foreign language social trend topic. It also triggers emotions of the users by its rewards which connects to Skinners Box emotions reward system. It makes its users engaged with itself by making them success driven. Exercises are unpredictable and call them for action that is why user continue to stay.
As Nir Eyal claims about how to build a habit-forming product, it is crucial to understand which user emotions may be tied to internal triggers and know how to leverage external triggers to drive the user to action. (Eyal, 2014) The success behind Duolingo can be also the gamification approach it uses in education such as tricks like points for continuous use. Besides, Duolingo uses a data-driven approach. Its system measures when and which questions users struggle with and make mistakes. The more Duolingo get information, the more it retains its users for now and future. The data driven feedback loop can be seen here as there is a direct effect when the more users contribute to the platform, the bigger its database becomes, and the greater commercial value the appears (Meikle, 2018). Consequently, it helps Duolingo for shaping the other users’ expectations which this digital history loop can be seen in other digital educational platforms too such as Grammarly.
When it comes to measurement of success, it is clear that looking at clicks, reviewing time, referrals, the number of new accounts, the frequency of their studies and also feedbacks of the users are the most significant measurements. According to the statistics, the number of active Duolingo users has increased from 0.125 million users in 2012 to 30 million in 2019. According to a survey which was done in 2016 with quantitative and qualitative research method showed that the results of the study suggest that Duolingo fosters vocabulary and grammar development. However, it fails to develop language development in a broader sense because of its lack of interaction and language production. This shows that it has limitations when it comes to teach a language in a deep way.
I support underlying mechanisms in Duolingo because it triggers to change people’s perception of memorizing and learning a language by putting a game on the platform. Besides, according to Chris Callison-Burch, an associate research professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, Duolingo is beyond helping people learn and providing translations of online content, the data Duolingo produces could be used to help improve machine translation. This also shows how powerful Duolingo is in future language development.
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