How To Make Learning Addictive As Social Media.

I'm from Guatemala, then. This is a public service notice, and Guatemala is located there. Also, that is not where they keep the inmates. We call that Guantanamo. (laughing) Not in the same location. Guatemala is therefore just beneath Mexico. Additionally, for the Americans in the audience, you could consider it Mexico's Mexico. Let that sink in; that's true in the majority of cases. Mexico does not want illegal immigration from Guatemala, just as the United States does not want illegal immigration from Mexico. It is a smaller nation. The nation is impoverished. I'll tell you what, the Mexican food there is far superior. The country of Guatemala is extremely impoverished.

Additionally, many people discuss education as a means of promoting equality among various socioeconomic groups. However, I have always viewed it as the contrary, as a source of inequity. The reality is that those with a lot of money can continue to have a lot of money by purchasing a quality education for themselves. On the other hand, those with little money hardly ever learn to read and write, and as a result, they never become wealthy. This is particularly true in underdeveloped nations. Now, even though I didn't have a wealthy upbringing, I was lucky to have an education from a wealthy individual. The reason for this is that I am an only child.

Additionally, as a single mother, my mother devoted all of her resources to my schooling. And this made it possible for me to attend a US college and ultimately earn a PhD in computer science. All of this led me to determine ten years ago that I wanted to take action that would ensure everyone had equal access to education. Oh, and granting everyone equal access to education is what I want to discuss with you today. I chose to collaborate with my PhD student, Severin, on this while I was a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

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, "Okay, now, We decide that teaching foreign languages is the best subject to start with for a number of reasons, including the fact that there is a large audience for it: there are approximately two billion people around the world who are learning a foreign language both in and out of school, and the majority of them—about 80 percent—are learning English. We both love math, and my cofounder and I both love math. However, we didn't decide to teach math first; instead, we thought that perhaps we should teach computer science. 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. With languages, however, you can work as a waiter at a hotel and earn more money if you learn English. Thus, we made the decision to begin teaching languages. We now also 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, it's just too costly to build schools everywhere. However, the majority of people on the planet currently own a smartphone, and this percentage is only expected to rise. At that time, we made the decision to create a mobile phone app that would enable anyone to learn other languages. And then we called it Duolingo. Thank you. In order to make itself fully available to everyone, regardless of wealth, Duolingo now operates on a freemium business model. 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. It turns out that users who pay to enroll in order to disable the advertisements account for the great bulk of Duolingo these individuals that purchase a subscription in order to disable advertisements? They are typically wealthy individuals from wealthy nations like the US and Canada. Who are those who don't have a subscription fee?

Typically, they are from less developed nations like Guatemala, Vietnam, or Brazil. This approach is appealing to me since it essentially makes the wealthy pay for everyone's education, which is a little kind of wealth redistribution. I like that, then We can reach a lot of people with smartphones, and even get the wealthy to pay for it, which is great, but if you try to use them to deliver education, you run into a huge problem because they are loaded with some of the most addictive drugs that humanity has ever created: TikTok, Instagram, and mobile games.

You see, delivering education via a smartphone is like hoping that people will eat their broccoli, but right next to it you put the most delicious dessert ever made. If you truly want to deliver education to everyone, you must not only make it accessible, but also make it so that people want to actually learn. And we've been able to accomplish this with Duolingo. At the most advanced level, we achieved this by turning the broccoli into a dessert. Let me put it this way. What we've done is employ the same psychological strategies that mobile games, Instagram, and TikTok use to keep users interested, but in this instance, we've utilized them to keep users interested while educating them.

Allow me to illustrate these methods with a few instances. The idea of a streak is among the most potent. Simply said, a streak is a counter that counts the number of days you've used the product in a row. For example, streaks have been criticized for making teens addicted to Snapchat, but in the case of an educational app, they encourage people to return to study every day. To give you an idea of the power of streaks, we have over three million daily active users with a streak longer than 365. You just take that number, put it very prominently in your product, and then people come back every day. Well, if they don't come back, that number resets to zero, and people don't want to lose their streak. This indicates that they haven't missed a day in a year or more. Here's a cool streak fact.

According to your estimation, which nation has the longest average streaks for educational apps? It's Japan. Naturally. The shortest streaks ever? Baby, Latin America. But, hey, we're entertaining.
Notifications are another crucial tool for encouraging users to return to your product.
Notifications can be incredibly intrusive and spammy, but when it comes to educational products, users genuinely want to be reminded to study. To increase the likelihood that users will return, Duolingo's highly advanced artificial intelligence algorithm essentially decides when to send notifications and what to say in each one. It's interesting to note that, despite all of this complexity, the algorithm used to choose when to notify you is actually rather straightforward. What is the ideal moment to notify individuals, in your opinion? Let me inform you. 24 hours have passed since their last use of the product. The explanation is simple. You are most likely available today at 3 p.m. if you were available yesterday at that time. This is what a highly advanced artificial intelligence system worth millions of dollars discovered. It's amusing. Now that notifications are available, you shouldn't be spamming. And we're not spamming; in fact, with Duolingo, we actually stop sending notifications after seven days of inactivity, so if you don't use it for seven days, we stop sending you notifications.
Eventually, we realized that we should notify people if we're stopping to send them notifications, so we started sending this notification to people saying, "Hey, these reminders don't seem to be working. We'll stop sending them for now." You know what people do when they receive this notification? They return. These passive-aggressive notifications are very effective at encouraging people to return because they believe that our green owl mascot has given up on them. In addition, because our green owl mascot is the source of all of our notifications and is, well, passive-aggressive and rather pushy, there are a lot of memes on the internet that mock the extreme measures he will take to help you learn a language again. One of my favorites is this one. I think this meme is one of my favorites. In essence, it appears that you have forgotten your Spanish lessons. An intruder warning is then sent out; it is likely that the owl broke into your home to force you to learn a language. Now, Duolingo has become popular. There are also SNL skits and millions of memes about it. And the reason for this is that we have successfully inspired individuals to learn a language by employing the same strategies that social media and mobile games employ to engage users. And let me add this: this is a really crucial topic. Actually, I don't think it's possible to build instructional software as captivating as mobile games, Instagram, or TikTok. The good news is that— And, incidentally, I don't think so since you have to teach people something in the end. Additionally, it's challenging to compete with celebrities and pets. The good news is that you don't have to, in my opinion.
Here's the thing, you see. You find meaning in 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. Since people's internal motivation will supply the remaining 10 or 20 percent, I believe it's actually acceptable if your instructional product is just 80 or 90 percent as interesting as something like TikTok—though obviously not much more than that. This is a really important aspect. You may utilize the same strategies used by social networking apps to encourage people to take action if you want to get them to do something worthwhile. You can still get hundreds of millions of people to use your product, even if you're not as interesting as other apps. For instance, the number of Americans learning languages on Duolingo exceeds the total number of language learners in all US high schools at the same time. And in the majority of nations worldwide, this is accurate. I'm confident that we can accomplish this, but I'm hoping that humanity can emulate Duolingo's success in language learning and apply it to all other subjects. where we can encourage millions of people to learn physics, math, or any other subject using their mobile phones. I look forward to a time when screen time is not a terrible thing and when everyone, regardless of wealth, may receive top-notch education via a mobile device. The most crucial thing I can say to wrap up this discussion, though, is to remind you to complete your language classes today. Many thanks. Thank you.
Walters, Helen: Thank you so lot, Luis. Could you elaborate on that last point a bit? How do you believe this kind of thinking can be applied to other subjects? You brought up arithmetic and similar topics. How is that accomplished? Luis von Ahn I believe this is especially true for subjects that are learned by repetition, and it turns out that the majority of things that have any real significance are taught through thousands of repeats.
Repetition helps you learn to read, and it helps you learn math in primary school. The majority of topics that can be learned by repetition may be made more entertaining and engaging by gamifying them, much like Duolingo. Things like explanations are a little more difficult. That probably is going to require some really good videos. Sal Khan is performing admirably in that regard. But for activities that require a lot of repetition, I think we can utilize the same methods.