MILLICENT MAAME ESI BAIDEN

How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media.

All of education is simply too general a problem for the way my brain functions. So I thought, let's teach one thing first. After that, I began to consider what we should teach initially. Should math be taught? We both love math, after all. Both my co-founder and I have a passion for mathematics. We didn't choose to do math, you know. After that, we began to consider teaching computer science. However, we ultimately determined that teaching other languages was the best course of action to begin with, which may surprise some in North America. And I'll explain why. There are several explanations. One of them is that it has a sizable readership. Approximately two billion individuals worldwide are enrolled in or pursuing extracurricular foreign language education. By the way, the majority of these individuals are learning English. Approximately 80% of them are acquiring English. All of the green countries on this strange map are those where English is the primary language of the majority of the population. And the reason for that is that learning English has the power to change your life. Speaking English can greatly boost your earning potential in the majority of nations. Thus, this is still another justification for our decision to begin with foreign languages. The reason for this is because learning a second language, namely English, can directly increase your income. And you see, compared to many other subjects, this is quite different. Take math, for instance. Since you typically need to learn arithmetic before learning physics in order to become a civil engineer, which is how you make more money, simply knowing math does not boost your earning potential. However, with languages, you may work as a waiter at a hotel and earn more money if you learn English.Thus, we concluded that we should begin teaching languages. We now persuaded ourselves that using a mobile phone—more specifically, a smartphone—was the only effective way to reach a large number of people. You see, the cost of constructing schools worldwide is just too high. The majority of people on the planet, however, already have access to smartphones, and this percentage is only expected to rise. Therefore, we made the decision at the moment to create a mobile phone learning app that was available to everyone. After that, we gave it the name Duolingo. Nowadays, Duolingo makes use of a freemium business model to make itself fully available to all users, regardless of wealth. This implies that you will never have to pay to learn as much as you like. However, you might have to watch an advertisement at the conclusion of a class if you don't pay. Ads can now be disabled by paying to subscribe if you dislike them. And it turns out that users who pay to enroll in order to disable the advertisements account for the great bulk of Duolingo's revenue. These people who pay to subscribe in order to disable the advertisements are now who? In wealthy nations like the US and Canada, there are typically wealthy individuals. Who are the individuals who do not pay for a subscription? Most of them are from poorer nations like Guatemala, Vietnam, or Brazil.