We Can Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media
The Future of Education is Free, Accessible, and Engineered to Be Highly Engaging.
Introduction
I grew up in Guatemala, a poor country just south of Mexico. Many people believe education helps make things equal between rich and poor. I saw the opposite. When I was young, I noticed education often created more inequality. People with money buy a good education and keep their wealth. People without money struggle to learn and stay poor. This is especially true in developing nations.
My mother was a single parent. She used all her savings to pay for my schooling. This allowed me to go to college in the United States. I later earned a PhD in computer science. Because of my experience, I decided I wanted to build something that gave everyone equal access to high-quality education. My goal was to make learning possible for everyone, whether they were rich or poor.
The High Cost of Unequal Access
When my co-founder and I started this project, we had to choose what to teach first. We thought about math or computer science. Eventually, we decided that foreign languages were the best place to start. There are several reasons why. First, the audience is huge. About two billion people worldwide are learning a new language.
Most of these learners, about 80% of them, are learning English. In almost every country, knowing English can dramatically improve a person’s ability to earn money. It directly increases your income potential. If you are a waiter, learning English allows you to work at a nicer hotel for better pay. You do not have to study physics and engineering first to get a benefit. This immediate financial gain makes language learning one of the most powerful tools for lifting people out of poverty.
This focus on direct income improvement was key to our first educational goal.
Why Mobile Is the Only Answer
We realized that the only way to reach two billion people was through the smartphone. Building physical schools all over the world is simply too costly and slow. In contrast, most of the world’s population already owns a smartphone. This number is only going to grow larger in the years to come. Therefore, we decided to make a way to learn foreign languages directly on a mobile device.
This approach became Duolingo. We created a freemium model to pay for the work and to stay truly accessible. The word “freemium” means you can learn as much as you want without ever having to pay any money. If you use the free version, you may have to watch an advertisement after a lesson. If you do not like ads, you can pay a monthly fee to subscribe and turn them off.
It is interesting to look at who pays the fee and who does not. Most of our revenue comes from well-off people in rich countries like the US and Canada who pay to remove the ads. Most of the people who use the free version come from poorer nations like Brazil, Vietnam, and Guatemala. This means our model acts as a small form of wealth redistribution. We get rich people to pay for the education of everyone else.
We had the tool to reach people and a way to pay for it, but another huge problem remained.
Making Broccoli Taste Like Dessert
Using a smartphone for education runs into a giant challenge. Smartphones come with some of the most engaging apps ever created. Think of apps like TikTok, Instagram, and other mobile games. These apps are designed to be extremely addictive. Trying to deliver education on a smartphone is like putting a bowl of healthy broccoli next to the most delicious dessert ever made. Most people will choose the dessert.
If we want to deliver education to everyone, we must do more than just make it free. We have to make people want to learn. We needed to solve the problem of engagement. We found a way to make the educational “broccoli” taste just as good as the “dessert.”
We achieved this by using the same psychological techniques that social media and mobile games use. We used these powerful methods to keep people engaged with their education instead of scrolling endlessly. These methods turn learning into a daily habit that people feel motivated to keep.
By adding these small, motivating techniques, we could get millions of people to make a habit out of learning.
Psychology of Learning: Streaks and Owls
One of the most powerful techniques we use is the concept of a Streak. A streak is simply a counter that tracks the number of days you have used the product without missing one. We put this number right on the screen where it is easy to see. People come back every day because they do not want to lose their streak. They do not want to see their hard-earned progress reset to zero.
Streaks have been criticized for making people addicted to things like Snapchat. However, in an educational app, streaks make people study every day. The results show how effective this is. More than three million of our daily users have a streak longer than 365 days. That means they have not missed a day of studying in over a year.
Another mechanism for re-engagement is the use of notifications. While notifications can be annoying, people actually want to be reminded to learn. We use a smart system to decide the best time to send a reminder. After a lot of study, the simple rule turned out to be the best. The best time to send a notification is 24 hours after a person last used the app. If you were free yesterday at 3 PM, you are likely free today at 3 PM.
We also found a way to use passive-aggressive notifications to bring people back. If a user has been inactive for seven days, we stop sending them reminders. We then send them one last note saying, “Hey, these reminders don’t seem to be working. We’ll stop sending them for now.” This one message gets people to come back right away. They feel like our green owl mascot has given up on them, and they rush back to study. The mascot has become famous online for the great lengths it will go to in order to get people to learn.
These techniques prove that you can borrow tools from addictive entertainment to promote positive habits.
Conclusion
I do not believe any educational app can ever be as engaging as a platform filled with cat videos and celebrities. We have to teach people real things, and that is harder than pure entertainment. The good news is that educational apps do not have to be 100% as engaging. They only need to be 80% or 90% as engaging.
The other 10% to 20% of motivation comes from the person themselves. When you finish a language lesson, you feel meaning and satisfaction from having learned something. When you scroll on social media for two hours, you often feel like you have wasted your time. The internal reward of learning helps close the gap.
More people are learning languages on Duolingo in the US than are learning them across all US high schools combined. I hope that we, as a society, can do what we have done for language learning for all other subjects. We can get millions of people to learn math or physics through their mobile phones. I look forward to a future where screen time is not a negative phrase but a positive one. It can be a phrase that means high-quality, accessible education for everyone.
Discover the simple psychological tricks behind the world’s most popular language app. Learn how ‘streaks’ and ‘passive-aggressive owls’ are changing the future of free global education.
Key Takeaways
Education and Inequality: Education often makes social inequality worse in poor countries if access is not free and equal.
The Power of English: Learning a foreign language, especially English, directly increases a person’s income and job potential globally.
The Mobile Solution: Smartphones are the most cost-effective way to deliver high-quality, free education to billions of people around the globe.
Wealth Redistribution: The freemium model allows wealthier users who pay to remove ads to financially support the education of all non-paying users.
Motivation Blend: Educational apps must use the engaging tricks of social media, but their success is sealed by the user’s natural, internal motivation to learn.
Source
TED
How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media | Duolingo’s Luis Von Ahn
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