Top 4 Experience Categories -

Connected Learning

Duolingo makes it possible to connect your experience to friends via Contacts or Facebook. From this you can follow friend streaks, see updates from others or see your progress metered out against a leaderboard of active friends. Additionally you can share milestones and progress updates with others on social channels as well. The current Open edX mobile experience is a solitary experience with minimal opportunity for shared learning goals or visibility into other learners. Beyond the basics of connected learning you could envision group activities or engagement but starting with connected learning could help toward this direction.

Connected Learning

Learning Path - Simplified Navigation

The Duolingo experience recently has shifted to a simplified navigational path / flow, reminiscent of its earlier iteration, but focused more on personified story and choice as a learner progresses through a visually simplified flow instead of a (boring) list of content objects. The narrative and visual shift introduces a sense of natural progression and exploratory feeling, far from that task and to-do list world of most educational experiences. The existing Open edX mobile navigation would benefit from simplification and exploration of some of the concepts exemplified by the screenshots below.

Learning Path - Simplified Navigation

Progress

Elevated visual progress (connected to other categories around support and motivation) is a key aspect of the Duolingo learning experience. Strong and clear visual supports, easy access to feedback and more reporting, all are designed to help motivate continued incremental progress in a flow state for learners. Here the Open edX mobile experience has some similar elements but progress is not as obvious or visible as you flow through content.

Learning Path - Simplified Navigation

Quantified Learning

A layer on top of Visual Progress that Duolingo adds is a clear focus on quantification of the learning experience, helping turn time spent learning into many numbers of quantified progress, some of which will appeal to different learning focuses and goals. Daily streaks, goal setting, practice metrics (currency + speed + accuracy), plus other numbers and tracking systems, (many associated with Game Mechanics and other categories in Duolingo’s extensive progress + support experiences, all help support continued learner engagement day over day.

Quantified Learning

Second Tier of Experience Categories -

Goals & Commitments

The Duolingo experience goes a long way toward supporting student goals and commitments through the use of many layers of application experiences including its own currency system, goal missions + targets that issue currency and badges, leveled badging to continue supporting deeper engagement, etc.

Goals & Commitments

Support and Motivation

Echoing the description around goals + commitments, there are many moments in the duolingo application where messaging supports continued engagement, a fleeting step away from the learning grind to encourage continued engagement, multi-day streaks, achievement in a ‘league’ for the week, and more. A huge amount of work goes into this and related efforts, which is why our Duolingo summary includes so many categories that could crudely be characterized simply as ‘Game Mechanics and Learner Support.' There’s a reason why Duolingo has received many awards for its experience and its thoughtfulness like these areas that epitomize it (not to take anything away from the content smarts + learning science that goes into the content experience itself of course.)

Support and Motivation

Third Tier of Experience Categories - and

Conversational Tone & Messaging

Throughout the learning journey of the Duolingo experience you are supported with conversational tone and messaging that helps further personify their owl character / persona that follows learners throughout the application. While we wouldn’t propose integrating the full character personification in the base Open edx mobile app, the conversational tone and messaging throughout may help certain pages and flows express a lighter and less academic feel overall.

Conversational Tone & Messaging

In Context Upsells

A number of interactive, high production value mobile animations help surface the value of the offerings Duolingo provides, while ads support the free experience.

Leveling Assessments and Content Pacing

While many of the experiences built around leveling assessments and content pacing might be difficult to replicate in the Open edX mobile experience, some aspects of the mobile experience such as pre-requisites and gated subsections would echo this concept. More broadly, the categorized sections of learning within a given course present an example alternate view of course structure that is much less listing oriented, as each section comes with an illustration or visual.

Interwoven Learning Sequences

A key characteristic of the Open edX learning experience, interwoven content is something that is visually surfaced on Duolingo but this is not as clear in the existing Open edx Mobile experience. Icons are used to represent element type in the outline mode, so there is some representation of this today. Marked as something the application has but there may be opportunities to elevate this visually (minor).

What’s New Messaging

What’s New Messaging exists in the current application, though the Duolingo experience for their application change was much more visually involved, as the screenshots below (and some in the other categories) demonstrate. Marked as complete / existing for Open edX.