Duolingo, the popular language learning tool, today announced the launch of Duolingo for Schools, a service that makes it easier for schools to use its platform in a structured learning environment.
Using this new service, teachers can use Duolingo for their classes and track their students’ progress through a centralized dashboard. From there, they can get detailed reports on the lessons their students took.
There are already plenty of teachers who use the service informally and they will surely be happy to get access to these reports. With Duolingo for Schools, it will be easier for teachers to integrate the service into their lessons plans, assign it as homework or give students extra credit for using the service outside of class.
More importantly, though, Duolingo may actually be able to give students a more personalized learning experience than a large classroom because the program can quickly figure out a student’s strengths and weaknesses and then fine-tune its lessons accordingly. The company also argues that its service is especially useful in countries where it’s hard to find teachers with high English proficiency.
“The goal is to provide a personalized learning experience that gives each student and instructor immediate feedback in the classroom. This can free up teachers’ time to concentrate on difficult concepts, answer questions, and assist students falling behind,” said Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn.
Duolingo is making this new service available for free (just like the rest of its language learning platform). It’s available for all the languages the service currently offers (with the exception of Chinese, which should be available in the next two weeks). Already, the governments of Costa Rica and Guatemala are running pilot projects that use Duolingo in a number of public schools.