Did you know that some of Duolingo’s language courses exist because volunteers from around the globe teamed up to create them? Inspired by Duolingo’s mission to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available, a community of over 1000 volunteer Contributors came together over the last decade to help bring dozens of new language courses to Duolingo.
Now that Duolingo has evolved into a larger and more financially sustainable company, we believe it’s time to update the way content in these courses is created, as well as show our gratitude to our community of volunteer Contributors who helped us get here.
Moving forward, we will pay for the creation of all course content, and our volunteers will have the opportunity to join us in a paid capacity. While this does mark the end of our volunteer program, we are proud to announce that Contributors who paved the way will be recognized with the Duolingo Language Impact award – a $4 million dollar fund that will be shared among this community, along with additional honors.
We are committed to offering a wide spectrum of free and diverse language courses, and we want to be proactive in doing what we think is right and fair. It was not easy to make the decision to end our volunteer Contributor program, but we firmly believe this is the right direction to both scale Duolingo and do right by our Contributor community.
How did the Contributor program start?
When Duolingo launched in 2012, we developed an internal tool called the Incubator to build and improve our courses. It wasn’t long before we started hearing from language communities eager to leverage Duolingo to teach their own languages, and we decided to test an idea around community crowdsourcing — opening our Incubator to qualified teams of volunteers who wanted to join our mission and help us bring more languages to the world. In 2013, our Contributor program was officially launched, and many language courses like Navajo, Hawaiian, Welsh, and Irish wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for these trailblazing Contributor teams.
How is the Contributor program changing and why?
The growth of the Contributor community has been incredible to witness, but it has become clear that volunteer-supported course creation is not sustainable long-term. There are two key reasons for this:
First, Duolingo now makes money from our courses. This was not the case when the Incubator was opened to volunteers. Contributors share that they participate for intrinsic reward and out of passion for the language and mission, but it does not feel fair and equitable to continue this gracious relationship.
Second, as Duolingo has grown, we have standardized our approach to creating and updating our courses. There are now strict timelines and specific templates around delivering course content, which cannot and should not be applied to volunteer Contributors who do this as a passion project, not as a job.
In light of these developments, we have decided to end volunteer course creation and take full internal responsibility for Duolingo’s courses by moving to paid content creation.
What will happen to the volunteer Contributors?
Volunteer Contributors played a key role in helping Duolingo scale and propel our mission forward. In this spirit, the entire Contributor community will be presented with the Duolingo Language Impact Award, a $4M dollar fund that will be shared among this community. There will also be an award celebration where additional honors and benefits, such as recognition and VIP access to special events, will be announced. Our volunteer Contributors will also have an opportunity to join us in a more formal capacity as part-time Course Specialists.
Contributors have helped make the dream of free language learning a reality for millions of people who want to improve their lives through education. On behalf of Duolingo and the global community of Duolingo learners, thank you, Contributors! Your efforts have made — and continue to make — education more equitable for everyone.
What’s next for current and new courses?
We do not expect major changes to Duolingo. We will continue to develop new language courses as well as add to our current courses. We remain committed to using Duolingo’s platform to preserve indigenous and endangered languages. Most importantly, Duolingo’s mission remains unchanged and all of our courses will remain free.