I stumbled upon this business model while learning Swedish. My girlfriend is fluent in Swedish so I thought it would be nice to start learning the language myself. Since it is a side project I am not willing yet to spend money on it and in such situations your go-to place is Duolingo. After finishing Duolingo’s language tree I will be nowhere near fluency but it is a great place to pick up the basics. Duolingo offers no premium option and it shows no advertisements whatsoever, it’s just free!
As a dedicated BIMmer I started wondering about their business model so I began digging into it. Soon I found a TED talk by one of the founders and frankly I was astonished by the vast scope of possibilities of this business model. The video is over fifteen minutes so let me summarize it for you and set the stage for some brainstorming.
Some of you might be familiar with Captcha, the funny looking words that can distinguish you from computers. A widely used method that everyone has come across at least dozens of times. It takes about ten seconds each time, adding up to millions of hours if you combine all internet users.
Then there is a second, seemingly unrelated problem that occurs in the digitizing of books. Modern books can easily be read by computers, turning them into e-books. But the older books get, the more words are intelligible for computers, resulting in hours of manual labour. The creators of captcha then founded Recaptcha, which kills two birds with one stone.
One sure thing, the words that couldn’t be digitized can’t be read by computers, by definition. Recaptcha uses those words as a means to separate you from computers, while creating your Twitter account. This way over 750 million (10% of earth’s population) contributed to digitizing books. The idea is, when ten people give the same answer then it probably is the correct one.
This idea was used in the creation of Duolingo. Students get to learn a new language while actually conducting labour. The translations that students make are used to translate, for instance, Wikipedia pages. The TED talk was given a few weeks before Duolingo’s pilot phase, so I can’t tell what the results are based on that video, but the idea is brilliant.
I got me wondering what else is possible with the combined knowledge of millions of people. Free education is a whole new market that is just starting to unfold. During the first lecture of DBA we were taught that there is no silver bullet for software development. One of the reasons was that debugging is an arduous, labour-intensive task.
The coding equivalent of Duolingo is arguably Codecademy. Codecademy offers free courses in coding, allowing you to pick up the basics. The site engages with millions of students who would love to get some practical experience in debugging, which would be a great means of practice. Perhaps these students could help software developers with their work, making them much more efficient. I just thought of this idea while writing my blog in the bus home. I think if each BIMmer would spend fifteen minutes thinking about the possibilities, we could make some great impact!
Duolingo is indeed quite an interesting application, I have used it myself in the past. The only problem that CodeAcademy and Duolingo seems to have is an understable, yet hard to tackle problem: user motivation. It’s hard for these programs to effectively re-engage the interest of users if they have stopped using the application. They have a high number of users, only problem is that they only stay for a month or two. It will be interesting to see how they will tackle this going forward.
I completely agree and I think the answer lies in whether you will be able to use the language in your daily life. I tried learning Portuguese a couple of years ago, but I never happen to end up in a situation where I can use my (by now minimal) knowledge.
Currenlty I’m learning Swedish for which I find it much easier to motivate myself because my girlfriend speaks Swedish.
Therefore I suggests that Duolingo adds and promotes a chat function in which you can use you newly acquired knowledge by talking to other learners.