Community Contribution #6- Personalization

A year ago I started trying to learn Italian on Duolingo. Me and all of my cousins decided to start our streaks together learning different languages and see who could keep the longest streak. During my time on the app I would say that Duolingo is not particularly personalized. While it has some personalization features it is mainly the same for all of its users. When thinking of the self-determination theory Duolingo can be looked at regarding the three points: Competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Kerins, 2021). Duolingo makes users feel incredibly competent in the skills despite not being a pro. When you get 100% on the quiz at the end you feel like you’re suddenly fluent but in reality you only learned 5 words 10 minutes ago so of course you remember them. Duolingo is also incredibly autonomous. You choose exactly when and where you want to continue using it. By creating this autonomy it gives users control over how much or how little they would like to learn. This can make users experience less cognitive overload leading to more successful learning over. Finally Duolingo doesn’t necessarily have relatedness. Yes you can have friends and maintain streaks with them but this doesn’t always lead to a real human connection. This can make it hard to continue to use the app when it gets boring because you don’t have someone along with you that you can connect with about it. I think one area of concern that I really noticed over the years of using the app was that over time I wasn’t focused on learning but rather on maintaining the streak. At the start I was really focused on the actual language learning portion of the app but now I log in 10 minutes before midnight and rush through a lesson as fast and sloppily as possible to maintain that streak. 

Kerins, T. (2021, August 30). Self-Determination Theory. The Decision Lab. https://thedecisionlab.com/es-ES/reference-guide/psychology/self-determination-theory