Duolingo for School
Empower teachers to deliver personalized, engaging learning at scale
By customizing Duolingo exercises to compliment their teaching and showing detailed learning analytics, we are helping teachers to provide personalized and engaging language education to students.
My Role
This case study was done as a part of the Kleiner Perkins Design Fellowship program application. I conducted research, created user flow and wireframes to ideate solutions, and designed the features.
Project Team
Me, design
Building Context
Deliver the best education, even in classrooms
Duolingo’s aim is to develop the best education in the world. While its primary users are self-learning adults, much of language learning still happens in schools.
Duolingo has perfected its strategy in engaging learners consistently and personalizing materials for them. How might we bring this kind of education into schools as well?
How might we help teachers utilize Duolingo’s personalized, engaging learning in classrooms?
Initial Research
Teachers have little attention for most students
After talking to 5 language teachers, two common challenges emerge:
There is little time to give individual support to all their students; it is difficult to pinpoint where they need help and how to help
Students are not engaged consistently in learning the language
In a class of 30, there are usually a few very high performing and very underperforming students that teachers put most time and energy into. That leaves little individual attention and support to the majority of average students, who still differ in competence and progress.
Teachers often only have time to challenge the good students and help the bad students, leaving the majority who are average unattended.
On top of that, most students lack intrinsic motivation for language learning. But learning a language requires consistent effort. So we see teachers designing activities like games, competitions, immersive activities to keep engaging students inside and outside of class.
Between providing individual support to students of various levels, and keeping students engaged, teachers are spreading themselves too thin. He often has to compromise between prepare engaging activites and tutoring more students individually.
Product Auditing
Teacher’s challenge to adopt Duolingo in classrooms
I see Duolingo as a complement to teacher’s activities and individual tutoring. Its gamified activities engage learners daily. Its dynamic content delivery personalizes everyone’s level and cadence, no matter how many students are in the class.
However, when demonstrating Duolingo and its school platform to the teachers, they express a few concerns that make them hesitant to use Duolingo at school
Duolingo curriculum does not match teacher’s curriculum
Looking at the curriculum of the 5 language teachers interviewed, they all structured their curriculum similarly in themes, each consisting slightly different set of vocabularies and linguistic concepts.
Duolingo often breakdown a theme found in other teachers’ curriculum into a number of “skills” to create bitesize activities. Words and concepts encapsulated in each skill also vary from different teachers’ curriculum. Teachers rarely find a skill to perfectly matches their lesson plan or a module in their curriculum.
Chapters in regular curriculum are broken down into many skills on Duolingo, with words and concepts missing
Cannot differentiate exercises for students of different levels
Duolingo sets all exercises assigned from the School platform at the lowest difficulty. But in the main app, Duolingo uses a few question types and amount of assist to create 5 levels of difficulty.
Teachers should be able to customize the difficulty of their exercises. Duolingo can then dynamically scaffold questions in the exercise to help the students master the difficulty level set by the teacher.
Duolingo For School only offers assignment of the easiest level, but Duolingo has questions of varied difficulties
Cannot see student’s grasp on the material
When interviewing the 5 language teachers, they all mentioned using activities such as quizzes and assignments to diagnose students’ competence to provide individualized support and adjust course plans. But the School portal only tracks exercise completion, experience points, and time spent on Duolingo, without any insight on students’ mastery.
Current report only shows submission, without any insights on student’s grasp on the materials in the exercise
All the teachers agreed that Duolingo can be complimentary to their class activities and assignments. So, based on the challenges on adopting Duolingo into teachers’ classrooms, the design challenge rests on the teacher’s portal to help educators:
Create activities that complement each teacher’s unique curriculum and teaching strategy
See the progress of individual students and the whole class to provide more support and adjust lesson plans
Define the redesign scope
Customizable Duolingo activities and detailed learner insights
This redesign enables teachers to customize Duolingo’s activities to fit their curriculum and create different types of work for different occasions or students of different levels.
The detailed reporting is also added to give much-needed insights for teachers to diagnose patterns and fill student gaps in knowledge.
Revised user flow of teachers assigning exercises on Duolingo for School
Redesign Feature 1
Mix and match skills to fit teacher’s curriculum
To align Duolingo’s exercise with each teacher’s unique lesson plan and curriculum, teachers can now combine similarly themed Duolingo skills in one activity, and then customize the materials covered in the activity, to fit their unique curriculum.
The new exercise creation flow gives teacher more control on what materials to assign to student that aligns with their own curriculum and lesson plans
Teachers can mix-and-match Duolingo’s content to fit their curriculum
For more nuanced control, teachers can remove words or concepts from Duolingo’s content
Redesign Feature 2
Customize exercises for students of different levels
Teachers have to create different works at different moments during the course and based on students’ various progress. Duolingo’s adaptive engine can automate this process by generating questions of different difficulties in various contexts. But teachers don’t know how difficult are the auto-generated exercises.
Explaining difficulty of the exercises
Duolingo uses a few question types and amount of assist to create various levels of difficulty. Explaining what the students will do, in terms of reading, writing, listening and speaking, to answer these questions gives teacher a concrete sense of how hard the activity will be.
Each level of difficult represents a jump in what the students are expected to accomplish after the exercise
Customize exercises of varying difficulty
Teachers can adjust the difficulty of the exercise based on the aim of the exercise and who the exercise is directed to.
Adjusting the difficulty level of the exercise affects the student outcome in the 4 language skills
Assign Exercises to Different Students
Teachers can also assign the exercises to individual students, providing even more differentiation in their use of Duolingo as a complementary tool.
Assign exercises not just to the whole classes, but to individual students
Redesign Feature 3
Learning insights at different levels
When interviewing the 5 language teachers to understand how they track student’s progress and growth, they want to:
Diagnose gaps in students’ grasp of materials to provide individualized support. Some of them pull small groups aside for more personalized instructions
Identify patterns of the class that informs changes to their teaching. They all want to see if they are teaching too fast or too slow, are there certain topics that are particularly challenging, or just quickly scan how the class is doing
Therefore, I created a new reporting feature to highlight both individual mastery and patterns across the class.
From tracking just completion to tracking mastery of each word, the new activity report give teachers more insights
For the analytics to be useful for teachers, it must show the mastery of individual knowledge point for each student, but also show the aggregate mastery of the class.
Teachers can evaluate individual student’s grasp on the material assigned, while getting the gist of how the whole class is doing
Curriculum Report
Holistically, teachers also want to know how individual students or the entire class is grasping all the materials, from the course to the themes and down to each vocabulary.
Teachers can view the progress of the entire class or a single student at the curriculum level
Find patterns of knowledge gaps across the class based on words, concepts and themes
Look at individual student’s progress on the curriculum and assign exercise to target her weak points
What’s Next
School as next frontier for growth
While the growth of adult Duolingo learners is slowing down, the student market remains a huge growth potential. By making Duolingo more versatile for in-classroom applications, teachers will draw in more students into the Duolingo ecosystem.
The School product also serves as a launching pad for other initiatives. Students mature and can use other Duolingo products. The differentiated learning data collected can optimize Duolingo’s adaptive engine and provide ideas for future products.
A better Duolingo For School can catalyze user growth and serve as a starting ground for more usage in other Duolingo products