Model of free online learning - experience Duolingo
A Life / / December 19, 2019
How to make sure that people can get something for free, but the creators of this free service can make it profitable, or at least paid back? Answer: If users access the service for free, so for it to pay someone else.
In this video, Luis von Ahn, the founder of Duolingo and reCAPTCHA, tells the story of how they came up with a model of financing its project Duolingo, which allows learn English for free just to the people who really need it, but they do not have the ability to pay big bucks for a standard language courses.
The main problem in the modern world - is 1.2 billion people who are learning a foreign language. And almost all of these people are scattered all over the world. If we dig a little deeper, it turns out that of the 1.2 billion about 800 million fall under three basic definitions. First - they are learning English. Second - they do it to get a better paying job. And the third - the majority of these people belongs to the affluent people. Therefore, the bulk of people learning English - it is poor or very rich people who want to earn a little more money or even earn at least something.
The basic irony of language learning is what it is worth a certain amount, and usually this amount is not so little. For example, there is Rosetta Stone, and this course is $ 500-1 000 in the United States. In Latin America, there are Open English program, which costs $ 1000. That is, it turns out that many people are learning English in order to be able to earn money, but to study it just needed the money, which they do not. That is why the goal of the project Duolingo - the creation of a completely free language course. That's the whole backstory Duolingo. When we started, we thought we should find a way to learn the language, which would be 100% free.
The project started by me and another co-founder - Steven Hacker. When we started, we knew that we wanted to find a free way to learn the language. It is easy to say that it's free, the problem is to find a way to finance that for free, and make it viable. That is, the question is how we can learn a language for free, but at the same time to finance this whole process? The decision came out of my previous projects, the idea of which was close to the idea of Duolingo. This idea originates from one of my children's ideas. In fact, it was a terrible idea, but then I thought that it was amazing. I wanted to open a free gym. Visits are free of charge, but all the equipment that was in the room, it would be connected to the mains, and all the people, which would be engaged on simulators, to generate electricity, which was subsequently sold to electricity company. And that is why he would have been free. We could not charge people money, but it would get the money for the electricity from the power company.
But it turned out that this is not a good idea, because people, it turns out, is not so well generate electricity. But at the time I thought it was a good idea. Also, there is another reason why this idea is not very successful. It turns out in the gym the economy most of the money, developed human beings, we can not see, while the people we need in order to generate electricity. This is not a good idea, but the idea is very similar to the one we used in Duolingo, and in my other projects: whether we can offer free services, but, as we offer it for free if we can get from this little arrived? In the case of the gym it was getting electricity. The question is what value we can get from people who are learning English? And it turns out that you can ask the people who are learning the language, help with translations. What we do in Duolingo to finance the project? We offer students after studying a particular lesson (for example, we helped them to study the subject food) to help us with the translation of a specific text on this subject, and so little practice. Here is a document that was never translated, not just in the language you are learning. Could you help us to translate it into your native language? And then we sell this translation. For example, CNN is our partner. The CNN write all in English, they send us these texts, and then the people who are learning English in Duolingo, translate them into their language. Then there is a vote for the best translation, and as a result we sell this option.
The main idea of the project is that people learn the language, help us to do translations and thus practiced. This is completely optional. You can learn all that there is on Duolingo, and thus do not practice in the translation of such texts. But about half of the people who are offered the opportunity to transfer, they say that they would love to do the translation. That is, it turns out that this method works.
The project is very grown since its launch. We now have about 42 million users (from 0 to 42 million over two years). Duolingo - one of the most popular ways to learn languages in the world. In the United States, more people studying languages in Duolingo, than in the public school system of the United States.
So, we have a lot of people who learn the language and at the same time do not pay anything. In the developing world there are millions of people who simply did not have the opportunity to learn languages, they simply did not have access to the right information. Now, with Duolingo, they have the opportunity. That is, we have changed the industry. If you just look at the stock prices Rosetta Stone, you will see not a very good picture. But I think this is just the beginning. We're just getting closer to what I consider a good result. I think we need to teach the language in three to four times more efficient, and we will work on this.