What if learners just don't give a hoot?
Duolingo's CEO describes the app as a 'motivation engine'. But gamification will only get you so far.
At the start of this year, I spent ten days on La Gomera with my family, escaping the Scottish winter for some much-needed sunshine.
I’ve been visiting this small Canary Island since the early 2000s, and one of my favorite things about it is the fact that the locals generally don’t speak much English.
That may strike you as a strange quality to appreciate in a holiday destination, but what I like about it is that it forces me to dust off my undergraduate degree and practice my Spanish.
By the end of the trip, I was still a little rusty. But I’d definitely regained some of my confidence, and chatting with Gomerans reminded me of the nerdy thrill that comes with learning new words and phrases.
Of course, what usually happens next is that I stop speaking Spanish the moment I get home, and don’t pick it up again until my next visit to Spain.
This time around, I wanted to maintain some momentum.
So, I downloaded Duolingo.
I set the difficulty level as high as the app would let me, and have spent the last couple of weeks completing exercises, and building my streak.
I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily learned anything new in that time, and the experience is obviously quite far removed from a real conversation. But I’ve ironed out a couple of conjugation errors that had slipped into my speech, and at least feel like I’m getting some kind of practice.
Coincidentally, Duolingo recently came up during a meeting at Mindtools.
We were talking about gamification in learning, and Ross G had a characteristically spicy take:
‘Duolingo is not really designed to teach you a language. It's designed to convert you into a paying Duolingo customer, and it has tonnes of features that make that super fun. We have a slightly different context because, in the B2B space, having people obsess over a management app isn't very useful in and of itself, if they're just getting streaks and playing games. We actually want them to become better managers.’
While that might sound cynical, and Duolingo would undoubtedly dispute the claim that their app isn’t designed to support language-learning, the company’s CEO, Luis von Ahn, recently admitted that the Duolingo philosophy is to prioritize engagement over everything else:
‘From the beginning, this is a central thesis that we believe here at Duolingo: the hardest thing about learning something by yourself is staying motivated. In fact, that is probably the reason for the vast majority of our success is that we realized that early on. From the beginning, we have tried to have a thing that is enjoyable to use and that keeps you coming back. We have probably spent more effort on that than anything else.
Internally, our feeling is that learning a language is a lot like working out. It doesn’t matter all that much whether you’re doing the elliptical or a Peloton or a treadmill. By far, what matters the most is that you’re doing it every day, whatever the hell you’re doing. It’s kind of the same with Duolingo. Maybe some methods are more efficient than others, but what matters is that you’re doing it every day. We got very good at that. Now, once we got very good at that, we started trying to add more sophistication in what we teach, and we’ve been doing that for the last few years. But always, primarily, we are a motivation engine.’
On the one hand, I find this argument generally persuasive, in so far as it recognizes that Duolingo isn’t just competing with other consumer learning platforms. It’s also competing with every other app on your phone, from TikTok to Netflix.
While pursuing engagement for its own sake is a trap, people won’t learn anything from your app, your workshop, or your e-learning module if you can’t persuade them to turn up in the first place.
In an attentional environment of abundant choice and distraction, maybe streaks, badges, points, animations and haptics are just what’s needed to get people through the door?
On the other hand, while I essentially buy von Ahn’s argument that motivation is perhaps the most important factor in self-directed learning, gamification and dancing owls will only get you so far.
One of the common criticisms of Duolingo is that no one has ever achieved fluency through the app. Without getting into what ‘fluency’ means, I think there are two key reasons for this.
Firstly, there’s a difference between being motivated to spend ten minutes a day playing language games on your phone, and being motivated to go out and practice what you’ve learned in the real world.
More than mastering the rules of grammar, or memorizing conjugation tables, the biggest hurdle to learning a language is overcoming the fear of getting things wrong, of looking stupid, of embarrassing yourself in front of strangers.
If you’ve moved to a foreign country, or if you’re dating someone who doesn’t speak English as their first language, you might just be motivated enough to face that fear.
But if you’re learning Spanish out of pure curiosity, or some vaguely defined notion of self-improvement, you’ll probably never break out of Duolingo and into the real world.
Secondly, at a fundamental level, Duolingo is not designed to make you fluent in a foreign language. And neither is a four-year bachelor’s degree.
The reason I’m relatively fluent in French and only mediocre in Spanish - despite holding a degree in both - is that I lived and worked in France for three years.
My French improved because I practiced it every day. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have found an apartment, opened a bank account, or built relationships with friends and colleagues.
In other words, I developed proficiency not through my intrinsic motivation to learn, but through the necessities of daily life.
And this, circuitously, brings me to L&D.
In workplace learning, we’re often tasked with helping people learn things they may not find inherently interesting or motivating.
Gamification techniques might help get these learners through the door, but they also need to be motivated to apply what they’ve learned after collecting all those points and badges.
To build that motivation, it’s the job of learning designers to connect learning to real-world problems, and, in turn, improve their working lives.
Circling back to Ross G’s point, we’re not trying to addict people to learning. We’re trying to motivate them to learn, then transfer that learning to the workplace.
Want to share your thoughts on this week’s newsletter? Then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
The National Trust is Europe’s largest conservation charity, established 130 years ago to look after the UK’s nature, beauty and history. Its leaders have diverse areas of focus, from protecting woodland to managing properties – and even running a gold mine!
In last week’s episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Ross G and I found out just how the Trust develops these leaders, with Development Specialist Carole Thelwall-Jones.
We discussed:
how a leader needs to think ‘to be’ lists, rather than ‘to do’ lists;
how leadership development is structured at the National Trust;
how L&D professionals can help new leaders let go of what helped them succeed in the past.
Check out the episode below. 👇
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website. Want to share your thoughts? Get in touch @RossDickieMT, @RossGarnerMT or #MindToolsPodcast
📖 Deep dive
In organizational learning, videos are often used to introduce a complex idea or topic, which learners then explore in more detail through text-based content.
But are these videos effective?
On the one hand, they might increase the viewer’s interest in the material, and scaffold subsequent learning. On the other, they might be detrimental, creating an illusion of understanding.
In a paper published at the end of last year, researchers set out to explore the effects of explainer videos when combined with prompt questions.
Participants in the study were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: video-script with or without prompts, and video with or without prompts.
As the researchers expected, the study participants who watched the explainer video reported more situational interest than those who were merely presented with a transcript of the video.
However, contrary to their assumption that watching a video would create an illusion of understanding, participants in the video group were more likely to underestimate their knowledge of the topic.
Moreover, while prompt-questions supported learning outcomes in the video group, this was not the case in the video-script group.
The authors write:
‘In summary, although we found no evidence that learners in our study developed an illusion of understanding after watching the explainer video, they did benefit from the prompt-questions for their learning outcome. Exploratory analyses indicated that this beneficial effect was mainly driven by the quality of the prompt-answers. Surprisingly, learners in the video-script condition did not benefit from prompt-questions, and actually performed worse in the post-test than those without.’
Krebs, M.-C., Braschoß, K., & Eitel, A. (2024). ‘Does watching an explainer video help learning with subsequent text? – Only when prompt-questions are provided.’ Learning and Instruction, 94, 101988.
👹 Missing links
In this guest post for Dr Alaina Szlachta’s The Weekly Measure newsletter, Kevin M. Yates explores five methods for isolating the impact of training. While he points out that isolating learning impact has several clear benefits, enabling evidence-based decision-making and building stakeholder trust, he cautions that this exercise can be complex and resource-intensive. He also argues that training alone is rarely the sole driver of improved performance, but rather one element in a broader ecosystem of performance influencers.
🎾 On Tour with Tennis’s Golden Generation — and the other 99%
I recently finished Conor Niland’s book The Racket, and would highly recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in elite sport. In the book, Niland - who reached a career-high ranking of 129 in the world - explains what life is like on tour, and the combination of talent, circumstances, resources and luck that have to conspire for players to reach the sport’s upper echelons.
📽️ How David Lynch Invented Me
In response to the recent death of the artist, filmmaker and musician David Lynch, actor and regular Lynch-collaborator Kyle MacLachlan wrote a tribute to his friend in The New York Times. The article reflects on Lynch’s distrust of words, his unique approach to directing (giving notes like ‘more wind’ or ‘think Elvis’), and his love of mystery.
👋 And finally…
The latest instalment of ‘robotaxis do the funniest things’:
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mind Tools! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
Or just hit reply to this email!
Hey here’s a thing! If you’ve reached all the way to the end of this newsletter, then you must really love it!
Why not share that love by hitting the button below, or just forward it to a friend?