Knowledge
Co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, Luis Von Ahn, in conversation with ScooNews
Duolingo CEO questions the fact that education brings equality. He believes otherwise, and for that reason, the formation of Duolingo. Luis Von Ahn finds India to be a huge market for education and urges the use of smartphone technology for the same.
Luis Von Ahn, the co-founder and CEO of Duolingo, popular free language learning platform, was in India for the prestigious Web Summit’s first event in India, SURGE 2016 Bengaluru, and team ScooNews got a chance to meet and interview the mastermind.
Luis, in his interview with ScooNews, talked about his take on India, future plans, and various other aspects. Here’s an excerpt:
ScooNews (SN): What was the original source of inspiration for you to start Duolingo?
Luis: I wanted to work on something related to education, which has always been my true passion, thus Duolingo really is the project of my passion. Now, my views on education are much related to the fact that I am from poverty-ridden Guatemala, which at many places is similar to India.
And I always saw that a lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes but according to me it is just the opposite, it rather brings inequality to social classes. People who have money can buy the best education in the world, go to best schools, and continue having money, whereas people who don’t have enough money barely have the proper education and therefore continue not having money. So, I wanted to do something that would bring equal access to education to everybody regardless of the fact that they have money or not and that’s where Duolingo came from.
SN: How is the earlier version of Duolingo different from the current one?
Luis: We’ve made it significantly more intelligent this time… the first Duolingo was static. Today, it is very personalized to you, customized as per the user’s previous lessons and other requirements.
SN: What are Duolingo’s plans for the language market that India offers?
Luis: India is a huge market… the total number of people learning language is huge, particularly learning English, as it can double or triple your income potential. So, it can fix in with our vision and mission of free language education to everybody.
India is the first country that we have made a specific team for. So, we have an engineering team dedicated entirely to India. The team started making changes to the app, the latest version of the app that we have released over the weekend is significantly better for India. Size of the app is very small bringing it down to 7mb because we know in India most of the smartphones being used are without high memory power.
The goal for the next few months is to have a fully offline version so that people can do it entirely offline. It’s also localized to Hindi so you can learn English from Hindi.
Also, we calculate that there are as many as 1 billion adults the world over, 200 million being in India. Now that’s definitely a huge market.
SN: Since you’ve offered solutions for schools, how would you approach Indian schools?
Luis: We aren’t yet talking about schools in India, but yes, we are open to doing that in the future. We have contacts with many governments in the world… 5% of all US schools use Duolingo to learn languages.
Our immediate goal here in India is to grow in terms of user base.
SN: Any message or insight for school administrators for using edutech?
Luis: There are lot of EdTech companies but there are few who actually care about teaching better… so, I would ask educators to demand actual proof that they teach better, for example, at Duolingo we have spent efforts measuring how well we teach. There are many tools that sound great but in reality you don’t know if they work well, I think that is something educators should demand.
SN: Any message for our readers, school administrators, teachers, etc?
Luis: I think the message should be that there is lot of good educational opportunities right with your smartphones, making taking and giving of education rather easy. If you carry a smartphone, you should make full use of it.