Op donderdagavond 20 november 2014 om 20.00 uur gaf Louis von Ahn, een van de oprichters van Duolingo, een open interview op Reddit, de populaire Amerikaanse publieke discussie website. Dit type interviews door het publiek heet “Ask Me Anything” op Reddit.
Zelf heb ik onderstaande vraag in de discussie geplaatst:
Question: Would you be interested in creating “Teacher accounts”, where teachers can get reports with useful data about their students learning activity and progress? Presuming that students voluntarily appoint someone with such a teacher account as actually their teacher with whom they want to share their progress data. Such a functionality is lacking now. Teacher accounts could be paid by schools. This would provide Duolingo with new funding without violating the promise that learning languages on Duolingo is free and will remain free forever.
Gelukkig gaf Louis von Ahn tijdens het interview een antwoord op mijn vraag:
“Yes. We are working on this.
So far we have stayed away from developing specifically for schools, because we think that companies that develop primarily for institutions have really crappy products — it’s almost an unstoppable effect: the institutions pay, and since they are not the end users they don’t care tooo much about the user experience, so it makes more sense to hire really good sales people to sell them a shitty product. This explains Blackboard.
We will always develop for the student.
That said, we’ll have some notion of a teacher account soon :)”
Bekijk alle overige reacties op mijn vraag naar Teacher accounts en de reacties op het antwoord van Louis von Ahn.
Wat opvalt is dat de oprichter van Duolingo heel kritisch is over de kwaliteit van bestaande scholen, met name die in ontwikkelingslanden. Hij is van mening dat deze slechts de bestaande ongelijkheid in de samenleving in stand houden. “It’s really quite a broken system. It’s inefficient, unfair, and ineffective.” [Link]