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.

My support for this concept stems from the fact that it effectively redistributes income by making the wealthy pay for everyone's education. With cellphones, we can connect with a lot of people, and it's amazing that we can even convince the rich to pay for it. However, there is a huge challenge when attempting to use a smartphone to deliver education. The reason for this is because some of the most addictive substances ever created by humans are included in smartphones. Instagram, TikTok, and smartphone games. When you put the tastiest dessert ever produced next to education delivered via a smartphone, it's like hoping people will eat their broccoli. addition to making education accessible, you must also make learning engaging for people if you truly want to provide education to everyone. And we have accomplished this with the help of Duolingo. Making the broccoli taste like dessert is the ultimate method we've accomplished this. I'll put it this way. We have employed the same psychological strategies that are used by applications like Instagram, TikTok, and mobile games to maintain user engagement, but in this instance, we have applied them to education. Allow me to demonstrate these methods for you.

The concept of a streak is one of the most potent ones. The definition of a streak is simply a counter that counts the days that you have used the product in a row. You simply use that figure, prominently display it in your offering, and people return day after day. And the reason people return each day is because they don't want to break their streak, and that number resets to zero if they don't. It's effective. Currently, streaks have been criticized for things like making teenagers addicted to Snapchat. However, streaks in educational software encourage users to return each day to study. To illustrate the impact of streaks, consider Duolingo, which has over three million daily active users with streaks longer than 365. 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? Latin America. But, well, 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 timing 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. Thus, this is what a highly advanced AI system worth millions of dollars discovered.

Therefore, you should refrain from spamming with notifications. With Duolingo, we actually cease sending messages after seven days of inactivity, so we're not bugging you. Therefore, we will stop notifying you if you don't use Duolingo for seven days. At some point, it occurred to us that we ought to notify people if we discontinue sending them notifications. We therefore began notifying people that these reminders were not appearing to be effective. We will no longer be sending them. What do individuals do when they receive this notification, of course? Afterward, they return. Because they believe that our green owl mascot has given up on them, consumers are enticed to return by these passive-aggressive reminders. 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. Additionally, there are dozens of memes and SNL routines 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. However, the most crucial thing I can say to wrap up this discussion is to please, Please complete your language lessons today. Specifically, I believe that most things that are somewhat important are learned over thousands of repetitions. Repetition is the key to learning to read and do math in primary school. Most topics that can be learned by repetition may be made more entertaining and engaging by gamifying them, much like Duolingo. Thanks.