The Duolingo English Test has made a bit of a splash over the last year or so. Priced to undercut the likes of TOEFL and IELTS, and claiming to be accurate, secure and ‘scientifically designed’, it has some big-name adopters including Yale, Uber and LinkedIn. In this guest post, Anthony Schmidt puts it through its paces and is left unimpressed. “I went into it very excited and came away with a very bad taste in my mouth.”
Following Tim’s recent post on bots and their potential application in ELT, and after our own foray into the world of bots with our Ame product, we decided it was time to do another ELTjam review, this time of the recently launched Duolingo Language Bots.
Frustration, anger, confusion, boredom and repetition are all hallmarks of bad user experience (UX); unfortunately, they’re often hallmarks of language learning too, especially when it takes place digitally. But bad UX is not the only reason digital language learning products fail – sometimes it’s the content, sometimes it’s the pedagogy, sometimes it’s the lack of human interaction. Bad UX alone fails to address the complexities of language learning. We need to start talking about bad learner experience (LX). Bad LX could be defined in a number of ways, but at its most basic it’s this: not only did you fail to learn something; you had a horrible time trying.
ELTjam blog reader and app-developer-in-training, Damien Herlihy, tells us about how he approached his app as a learning experience rather than a business and his attempts at crowdsourcing input and feedback from teachers.
You’ve got an idea but what is the first step of building an app? Is it sharing a great idea with someone you think has the expertise or resources to make it happen? What’s going to get them on board if it is? Or is it working on the app idea yourself? And if so, how much should you do before approaching someone else? Here are ten steps to start you on the right track.
More than a million people a day connect to Duolingo, an app which causes much derision in ELT circles with attacks on its pedagogical validity. But what happens if you judge it through the prism of research into Second Language Acquisition? Geoff Jordan finds out.
Here’s a snappy infographic based on ELTjam’s talk on what EdTech means for ELT at the IATEFL 2014
It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more
I feel we’re sticking to the same old ways of working, producing similar content for a similar publishing industry, thus confining learners to a similar path.
What is the appeal that has led to Duolingo being awarded the free iPhone app of 2013?
I’d go out on a limb here and suggest that the SR element of the Duolingo approach is more gimmick than gristle.
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