Now, teachers will be able to create an account that tracks all of their students to see who's struggling with or excelling at which skills.

'They do these weird things where they have all the students use Duolingo, and at the end, the teacher goes around writing what the students did,' von Ahn says. Whether or not Duolingo’s founders designed the products for schools, teachers slowly but surely began incorporating it into the classroom anyway, albeit with some clunky workarounds.

Companies like CNN and Buzzfeed pay Duolingo for these crowdsourced translations, and now, according to von Ahn, Duolingo’s millions of students churn out several hundred articles a day. When students finish a lesson in Duolingo, they can test their newfound knowledge by translating a piece of text in a news article. So, the co-founders developed a novel business model to pay for the free service. 'It’s like the main reason you want to learn English is to get out of poverty,' says von Ahn, who hails from Guatemala, 'but you need $500 to do it.' That’s why, on Thursday, the Pittsburgh-based startup is launching a new platform called Duolingo for Schools, which will help teachers track student activity on the app and tailor their lectures in the classroom, accordingly.ĭuolingo co-founders Severin Hacker and Luis von Ahn. Von Ahn is the co-founder of Duolingo, a free language learning app that launched two and a half years ago and has since amassed a whopping 60 million users worldwide.Īs big as Duolingo-and indeed, the entire online learning market-has become outside the classroom, von Ahn knows that language education still has a crucial place in schools. And so, the cycle continues.īut Luis von Ahn believes his app could play a key role in breaking that cycle. But one major kink in that plan is the fact that in many cases, the English teachers within these countries don’t speak English either. These are places where, often, English proficiency is seen as a stepping stone to a better job and a one-way ticket out of poverty. In developing countries like Ethiopia, Malaysia, and Mozambique, the market for English language learning is red hot.

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