Teachers make nearly 1,500 decisions a day but are often left out when it comes to the choices that impact their students the most. At Duolingo, we take a different approach—one that includes teachers by seeking feedback, listening to their expertise, and adjusting our product to better serve students all over the world!

Recently, Duolingo introduced a new learning path to replace the previous home screen design. This update ensures that each step users take in Duolingo is the best step to help them achieve their language goals.

We knew this change could be a challenging adjustment for our teachers, who had already been trained on the previous design. But we saw this as an opportunity, and asked ourselves…

How can we use this change as a chance to improve the experience teachers have with our product?

To answer that question, we formed a coalition of teachers who agreed to test out the updates before they went live. We met with these teachers weekly to learn what was working for them, and what wasn’t.

Teachers wanted increased visibility into learning objectives and lesson content along with deeper insights into student learning.

We agreed that these were important features! So we implemented a variety of changes to our product that will be available soon, including:

  • Unit summaries, complete with learning objectives, grammar descriptors, and Guidebooks with explicit tips to enrich student learning
  • Student progress views that allow teachers to see overall course progress, as well as more individualized insights like time spent on task and assignment scores
  • Classroom Leaderboards that give students a fun way to motivate one another through classroom competitions

We are confident that these changes will allow for greater depth of learning in language classrooms, and we’re so grateful for the continued partnership of teachers. We are excited to continue improving with their help!

Want to see the new features we built alongside teachers? Create a Duolingo for Schools classroom today!