Duolingo: Learning Languages

Duolingo is a free online service to help people around the learn languages for free. The way the organisation makes money is through having professional documents translated by the community. This means that the user isn’t given a limited service, or distracted with adverts, and even the money making side of the site benifits it’s users by giving them practicing translating text. This site is the best site for learning languages for free, and it has been developed to be used in schools, much like my service.

Teachers require special tools to keep track of their students, I have studied the tools available to teachers on Duolingo as part of my research. Below is what I have discovered.

To begin with teachers need to get the student to join their classroom

They provide multiple wayts to get the students setup. They even include this downloadable printout for the students

On this page the teacher has the ability to track the students in their class and the lessons completed;

The teacher has the ability to create assignments for their students

and how the assignments are to be acheived, should it be by collecting points in their own chosen topic, or should it be something specified by the teacher?

If the points are selected then the point to be acheived are selected.

Due dates for the tasks, and start dates if the teacher wants to plan out a semester.and if the teacher prefers to set a specific task, 

Suggestions for classes the students can be given by their teacher;

and even classroom tasks;

Tracking the students is possible by allowing the teacher to see what assignments they’ve completed

and then the specifics of that assignment

It is worth noting that the teacher holds the privacy options of the students when setting up the accounts. (I believe the user/student has the right to change these themselves if they want at a later stage);

THINGS I HAVE LEARNT:

My project should allow teachers to;

– view all students progress

– track what they’ve learnt

– Identify interests of the students

– Identify interest in common of certain students

– specify homework via;

– Points collected (If selected gives user lots of freedom to explore)

– Specific tasks

– Lock accounts to specific tasks by teachers until they are completed

 – Use Premade lessons that;

– Are split up into subjects

– After learning tests (Automatic marking – saves on teachers work)

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Platforms and Experiences

It important to note that experiences should differ from device to device in the sense that computers have a larger screen estate available with more power in comparison to the smaller devices. This means that there are things that are important for each device, and about how they should help their user, this is what this post aims to identify.

AirBnb

Airbnb a service allowing users to book holidays etc online. It is a site allowing users to browse a store like experience viewing properties to rent in the cities they want to visit.

When landing on the desktop homepage, the user is greeted with the following page. It is a page that has an infinitite scroll of content available to the user, consisting of the different experiences available to the user.

What you notice on the mobile version is very different. You see there are less options in experiences available and menu has been condensed into a drop down.

Once the user selects a place to visit (in this case Paris) they are greeted with list of places of to visit. This is the desktop version;

and the mobile version;

Again the differences are obvious. the mobile has a lot les information instantly visable, the user has to search or scroll on the mobile to discover content. It is also important to note that desktop content just doesnt have the same issues with space so it is capable of filling the screen with even more information for the user.