How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media

So I'm from Guatemala. This is a public announcement, it's Guatemala. They don't keep prisoners there either. It's called Guantanamo. Not the same place. So Guatemala is under Mexico. And Americans in the audience and let that sink in because it's really true in most cases, Americans in the audience, you can think of it as Mexico . Just as the United States does not want illegal immigration from Mexico, Mexico does not want illegal immigration from Guatemala. It is a smaller country. It is a poor country. And well, what can I tell you, there is much better Mexican food there. Guatemala is a very poor country.

And many people talk about education as something that brings equality to different parts of society. But I've always seen it the other way around, as something that leads to inequality. Because in practice it happens that people with a lot of money can buy themselves a really good education and thus earn a lot of money. On the contrary, people who do not have much money hardly learn to read and write and therefore never earn much money. And this is especially true in poor countries. Now I was lucky enough to have a rich upbringing, even if I didn't get rich.

And that's because I'm an only child. And my mother, who was a single mother, used all her means for my education. And that allowed me to go to university in the United States and eventually get a doctorate in computer science. Now, because of all this, I decided about 10 years ago that I wanted to do something that would give everyone equal access to education. Moreover, this is what I want to talk to you about today and to give everyone equal opportunities for education. I was then a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and decided to work on it with my PhD student Severin.

How my brain works is an all too common problem in education. So I decided we would start by teaching one thing. And then I started thinking, okay, what should we teach first? Should we teach math? I mean we both love math. My co-founder and I love math. And you know, we didn't decide to do the math. Then we started thinking that maybe we should teach computer science. But in the end, and this may surprise North Americans, we finally decided that the best topic to start with was teaching foreign languages. And let me tell you why. There are several reasons.

One of them is that it has a huge audience. There are about two billion people in the world who learn a foreign language both in school and outside of school. Most of these people are learning English anyway. About 80 percent of them learn English. On this strange map, all the green countries are countries where people mainly learn English. And the reason is that English can really change your life. In most countries around the world, proficiency in English can greatly increase your earning power. This is another reason why we decided to start with foreign languages. And that's because you can directly earn more money by learning another language, especially English.

And see, it is completely different from many other subjects. Take math for example. In math, just knowing math doesn't increase your earning power because you usually need to study math and then study physics to become a civil engineer. This is how you make more money. But in languages, if you are a waiter and learn English, now you can be a waiter in a hotel and earn more. We decided to start teaching languages. Now we have also made sure that the only way to really reach a lot of people is to use a mobile phone or especially a smartphone. Look, building schools anywhere in the world is just too expensive.

On the other hand, the majority of the world's population already has a smartphone, and the trend is that this share will only increase. So, at that time, we decided to create an opportunity to learn foreign languages ​​with a mobile phone, accessible to everyone. And then we called it Duolingo. Now, to be truly accessible to everyone, rich and poor alike, Duolingo uses a freemium model to support itself. This means you can learn as much as you want without ever paying. But if you don't pay, you might see an ad at the end of the lesson.

Now, if you don't like ads, you can also pay for a subscription and turn off ads. And it turns out that most of Duolingo's revenue comes from people paying to turn off ads. Now who are the people paying to turn off the ads? Well, they tend to be rich people in rich countries like the US and Canada. Who are those who do not pay to subscribe? They usually come from poorer countries like Brazil or Vietnam or Guatemala. So what I like about this model is that it's a small form of wealth redistribution because we're basically making the rich pay for everyone's education. So I like it.

With smartphones, we can reach a lot of people and even get the rich to pay for the whole thing, which is great. However, if you're trying to do a workout on your smartphone, you've got a big problem. And smartphones contain the most addictive drugs ever developed by mankind. TikTok, Instagram, mobile games. Look, offering education via smartphone is like hoping people will eat their broccoli, but next to it you put the most delicious dessert ever made. If you really want to provide education for everyone, you have to make it not only accessible, but in a way that people actually want to learn. And with Duolingo, we were able to do that.

At the highest level, we did it by making broccoli taste like dessert. I will say it another way. We used the same psychological techniques that applications like Instagram, TikTok or mobile games use to keep people engaged, but in this case we use them to keep people engaged, but through education. I will give you some examples of these techniques. One of the most powerful is the concept of a tube. What is the tube, is it just a counter that measures how many days you have used the product in a row. You just take that number, put it very prominently on your product, and then people keep coming back every day.

And the reason people come back every day is because if they don't come back, that number resets and people don't want to lose their streak. It works. Now, on the other hand, the tubes have been accused of drawing young people to Snapchat, for example. But for an educational program, yogis make people relearn every day. To give you an idea of ​​the power of pipelines, at Duolingo we have over three million daily active users with pipelines longer than 365. That means they haven't missed a single day in the last year or so. Now for a fun fact about the series. Which country do you think has the longest average educational applications? This is Japan. Of course Shortest pipes ever? Latin America, baby. (Laughter) But we're having fun, hey, we're having fun. (Laughter) Another important mechanism to help people return to your product is advertising.

On the other hand, notifications can be really spammy and annoying, but with a learning product, people actually want a reminder to study. With Duolingo, we have a very advanced AI system that basically chooses when to send an ad and also what to say in each ad so that people are more likely to come back. Interestingly, even after this complexity, it turns out that the algorithm for choosing the time to send a notification is quite simple. Do you know the best time to send a notification to people? I will tell you. 24 hours have passed since the last use of the product. There is a simple explanation. If you were free yesterday at 3:00 PM, you will probably be free at 3:00 PM today. It was discovered by a highly advanced multi-million dollar artificial intelligence.

Now you should not spam with notifications. We also don't spam, but with the help of Duolingo we stop sending messages after seven days of inactivity. So if you don't use Duolingo for seven days, we'll stop sending you notifications. Now it once occurred to us that if we were going to stop letting people know, we should let them know. So we started sending this message to people saying, "Hey, these reminders don't seem to be working. We're going to stop sending them now." Do you know what people do when they get this message? They will be back. Passive aggressive. I work for my mom, I work for Duolingo. These passive aggressive ads help bring people back because they feel our green owl mascot has given up on them, so they come back.

And speaking of our green owl mascot, by the way, since all of our announcements come from our green owl mascot and he's passive aggressive and also pretty rude, it's spawned a lot of internet memes making fun of him. so that you can relearn the language. Here is one of my favorites. This is a meme, it's one of my favorites. Basically, it looks like you forgot Spanish class. And then comes the intruder alarm, probably an owl has entered your house to force you to learn a language. Now Duolingo has been revived. And there are thousands of memes, there are SNL skits about it. And that's because we've managed to get people to learn a language using the same techniques that mobile games and social media use to attract people

. And this is a really important point, let me say this. I really don't think it's possible to make an educational app as engaging as TikTok or Instagram or mobile games. But the good news is that -- and by the way, the reason I don't believe that is because eventually you have to teach people something. And it's hard to compete with cats and celebrities, for example. But the good news is I don't think I have to. See, here's the thing. When you learn something, you get meaning from it. On the other hand, if you spend two hours scrolling through Instagram, many times later you will feel like you just wasted your time. So I think it's fine if your educational product is only 80 or 90 percent as attractive as TikTok, because the other 10 or 20 percent comes from people's intrinsic motivation, but definitely not more.

This is a really important point. If we want to get people to do something meaningful, you can use the same techniques that applications like social media use to get people to do it. And even if you're not as interesting as those apps, you can still get hundreds of millions of people to use your product. In the case of Duolingo, for example, more people in the United States learn languages ​​on Duolingo than students in all high schools in the United States combined. And that is true in most countries of the world. I hope so -- I know we can do it, but you know, I hope that as humans we can do what Duolingo has done for language learning, but for all other subjects. Where we can get people learning math on cell phones like millions of people learn math on cell phones or physics or whatever.

I hope for a future where screen time is not a bad thing, where we can give quality education to everyone, rich or poor, through cell phones. But the most important thing I can end this conversation with is a reminder to please, please do your language lessons today.

Crowd: Eddy, thank you very much. I wonder if you could elaborate a bit on that last point, how you think you might apply that kind of thinking to other topics? So you mentioned math and things like that. How do you do that? Eddy: I think you learn things through repetition, and it turns out that most things that are really meaningful in some way are learned through thousands of repetitions. You learn to read by repetition, you learn elementary school math by repetition.

Most of the things you can learn through repetition, you can actually play and do something like Duolingo where people just do it a lot and have fun with it. It's a little more difficult for things like explanations. It probably requires really good videos. Sal Khan does a very good job with it. But for things that require a lot of repetition, I think we can use the same methods.