How to make learning as addictive as social media

Many claim that education creates equality amongst members of various social levels. However, I've always thought of it as the exact opposite—something that creates inequality. Essentially, the way wealth works is that wealthy individuals may maintain their wealth by purchasing an excellent education for themselves. Conversely, the impoverished never become particularly wealthy because they never learn to read and write. And in developing nations, this is particularly true. Now, even though I didn't grow up wealthy, I was lucky to get an education fit for a privileged person. I'm an only child, which is why.

In addition, my mother—a single mother—spent all of her money on my education. And as a result, I was able to attend college in the US and eventually earn a doctorate in computer science. All of this led me to the decision, perhaps ten years ago, that I wanted to take action to ensure that everyone had equal access to education. That brings me to my topic for discussion today: ensuring that everyone has equitable access to education. I chose to collaborate on this with Severin, a PhD candidate, while I was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University at the time. My cognitive style makes education in general too problematic.

I therefore thought, let's begin by imparting one lesson. I then began to consider what we ought to teach initially. Is math instruction necessary? After all, we both enjoy math. Math is a passion shared by my cofounder and me. It's also not like we choose to do arithmetic. At that point, we began to consider teaching computer science. However, in the end—and this may surprise some Americans—we determined that teaching foreign languages was the ideal subject to begin with. And allow me to explain.

There are several causes. One of them is the large audience it has. Approximately two billion individuals worldwide are acquiring a foreign language, whether through formal education or informal means. By the way, the majority of these individuals are studying English. Of them, eighty percent are studying English. All of the green countries on this strange map are ones where English is the primary language of instruction. The reason for this is that learning English has the power to genuinely change your life. Being able to communicate in English will greatly boost your earning potential in the majority of countries.

For this reason, too, we chose to begin with foreign languages. This is due to the fact that learning a second language—English in particular—can immediately increase your income. And you know, this subject differs greatly from a lot of others. Let's use arithmetic as an example. When it comes to arithmetic, having a basic understanding of the subject won't boost your earning potential because being a civil engineer typically requires knowing math in addition to physics.

However, with languages, you can work as a waiter at a hotel and earn more money if you learn English as a server. We so made the decision to begin teaching languages. We also persuaded ourselves that using a mobile phone, specifically a smartphone, was the only practical option to reach a large number of people. You see, it's just too expensive to build schools everywhere. However, the majority of people on the planet currently own smartphones, and it appears that this percentage will only rise. We therefore made the decision at the time to create an approach enabling anyone to learn foreign languages on a mobile device. Next, we gave it the name Duolingo.

Duolingo now uses a freemium business strategy to sustain itself in order to be really available to anyone, wealthy or not. In other words, you are never required to pay for the knowledge you acquire. But you might have to watch an advertisement at the conclusion of a lesson if you don't pay. Ads can now be disabled by paying for a subscription if you prefer not to see them. Surprisingly, the bulk of Duolingo's income is generated by users who pay for a subscription in order to disable the advertisements. By the way, who are these subscribers that pay to disable the ads? The majority of them are wealthy citizens of wealthy nations like the US and Canada.

Which individuals don't pay for their subscriptions? Their origins are typically in developing nations like Guatemala, Vietnam, or Brazil. Since we're essentially forcing the wealthy to foot the bill for everyone's education, what I admire about this concept is that it represents a tiny amount of wealth redistribution. So that's good. (Applause) We can reach a large number of people with smartphones, and it's excellent that we can even persuade the wealthy to cover the entire cost. Still, there's a huge obstacle to overcome when attempting to teach using a smartphone. What's more, some of the most addictive substances ever created by humans are preinstalled on cellphones.Instagram, TikTok, and smartphone games. You see, giving education via a smartphone is like putting your hope in people eating their veggies when you have the most amazing dessert ever placed right next to it. (Laughter) Providing education to everybody requires more than just making it available; you also need to create an environment where learning is desired. And we've been able to accomplish this with Duolingo.

Ultimately, we've achieved this by giving the broccoli a dessert-like flavor. I'll phrase it differently. In order to keep users interested, we employed the same psychological strategies that smartphone games, Instagram, and TikTok use. However, in this instance,They help us to maintain people's interest in education. Allow me to illustrate these strategies with a few instances. The idea of a streak is among the most potent. A streak is simply a counter that indicates how many days you have used the product consistently. Simply take that number and include it in your product very prominently, and customers will come back every day. And the reason why they return each day is because, well, they don't want to lose their streak if they don't return, which resets the number to zero. It functions. Now, streaks have drawn criticism for things like encouraging young Snapchat addiction.

Streaks, however, encourage users to return to an instructional app every day. Currently, Duolingo has over three million daily active users who have streaks longer than 365 days, so you can get a feel of the power of streaks here. Hence, for the past year or more, they have not missed a day. Now, interesting streak-related tidbit. In your opinion, which nation's average streak of educational app usage is the longest? It is Japan. Of course. Lowest streak lengths ever? Latin America. We are, nevertheless, enjoyable.

Notifications are another key strategy to encourage customers to return to your product. When it comes to educational products, individuals want to be reminded to study, even if notifications can often be incredibly intrusive and spammy. To increase the likelihood that users will return, Duolingo has an extremely intelligent artificial intelligence system that essentially selects when to send notifications and what to say in each one. It turns out that the method used to choose when to give you a notification is actually rather straightforward, despite all of this sophistication.

Do you know when sending out notifications to folks is the most effective? I will explain. They last used the product 24 hours ago. An easy explanation exists. You're presumably free today at 3pm if you were yesterday at that time. Thus this is the result of highly advanced AI that cost millions of dollars. (Laughing) It is humorous. Nowadays, you shouldn't be bombarding with notifications. Furthermore, Duolingo doesn't send out spam; in fact, after seven days of inactivity, we stop sending notifications. We thus stop sending you notifications if you don't use Duolingo for seven days. Now, we realized at some point that we ought to inform people if we were to discontinue sending them notifications. We then began notifying people through this message that the reminders were not appearing to be working. We'll cease forwarding them at this time. Do you know what happens to folks who receive this notification? They return. aggressively passive. works for Duolingo and for my mother.People respond well to these passive-aggressive notifications because they perceive our green owl mascot to have given up on them, which encourages them to return.

Speaking of our green owl mascot, since he serves as the source of all of our notifications and is both pushy and passive-aggressive, there are a ton of memes on the internet that parody the extreme measures that he takes will undergo in order to help you resume learning a language. One of my favorites is this one. This meme happens to be one of my favorites. It appears that you have forgotten your Spanish lessons. Then there's an alert about an intruder; it's likely that the owl broke into your home to force you to take language classes. Duolingo has now caught on with the public. Additionally, several memes and SNL parodies have been created about it. And the reason for this is that we've been able to inspire individuals to learn a language by utilizing the same engagement-boosting strategies used by social media and mobile games.

Let me add that this is a highly crucial aspect. To be honest, I don't think it's possible to create an instructional software be as captivating as mobile games or platforms like Instagram or TikTok. The good news is that, however, and the reason I don't think that is because, in the end, you have to impart some knowledge to individuals. And it's difficult to compete with celebs and cats, you know? The good news is, though, that I don't believe you need to. Here's the thing, you see. You derive meaning from the things you are learning. On the other hand, after spending two hours looking through Instagram, you frequently feel as though you squandered your time.

So I believe it's actually acceptable if your instructional product is just 80–90% as interesting as something like TikTok, since people's intrinsic desire will supply the remaining 10–20 percent, but not much more than that. This is a really important aspect. You may employ the same strategies that social media applications use to persuade users to take significant action if you want to. Furthermore, you can still attract hundreds of millions of people to use your product even if it's not as interesting as those apps.

For instance, in the case of Duolingo, more Americans are using the platform to learn languages.And the majority of nations on Earth agree with this. My dream is that humanity will be able to apply what Duolingo has done to language learning to all other subjects. Where can we find places where millions of people may learn math, physics, or other subjects using mobile phones? In the future, I envision a world where screen time is beneficial and where everyone, regardless of wealth, can access top-notch education through mobile devices.

I know questions like What other subjects aside arithmetic do you believe one could use this kind of thinking for and how can one be able to accomplish that?

Here is your answer :

It turns out that the majority of things that are kind of truly meaningful are learnt through thousands of repeats, especially when it comes to subjects that are learned by repetition. Repetition is the key to learning math in primary school and reading comprehension. The majority of things that can be learned by repetition may actually be made into games and made into something like Duolingo, where people just enjoy themselves while learning new things.

Thank you!