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Duolingo education7/6/2023 ![]() “One of the main ways to deliver education over the next 10 to 20 years is going to be through smartphones,” von Ahn says. ![]() 85% of these users are learning with the mobile app, which Apple named the App of the Year in 2013. In the year and a half since it launched a mobile app for iOS, that number has leapt to 13 million, more than MOOC platforms Udacity, edX and Coursera combined, according to usage figures released by those firms. ![]() Six months into the company’s existence, Duolingo had 300,000 active users, all on its website. The concept of learning a new language through software is hardly revolutionary, but it’s Duolingo’s mobile app that sets it apart. Users can compete with friends who are learning the same languages. The service guides students through a battery of challenges, awarding points and badges for correct answers. Users learn vocabulary words, grammatical structures and even proper pronunciation by speaking into their device’s microphone. Duolingo, which turns two years old this week, offers bite-sized lessons in French, Spanish, English and several other languages for beginners and intermediate-level speakers. Von Ahn believes he has developed a platform that can indeed be better online-and on smartphones. “Typically, the things that succeed the most online are the things that are better online than offline. “You take a lecture that’s not all that great and put it on video, it’s actually going to be worse,” he says. Even he admits that lectures, especially delivered via webcast, can be pretty boring. von Ahn runs what is arguably the hottest educational tool online at the moment, but he’s also a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Luis von Ahn, the co-founder and CEO of language learning service Duolingo, says MOOCs make little sense for the digital world. The co-founder of Udacity, an early pioneer in free online education, admitted that his company initially had a “ lousy product,” while studies showed that hardly any students were actually completing the courses offered by such services at all. It was just 18 months ago that we were living in the “ Year of the MOOC.” Massive open online courses-MOOC for short-were supposed to revolutionize the way people learned and deliver high-quality education to the masses.
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