Pearson partners with Duolingo to develop mobile app curriculum for students
Pearson is a big name in the word of publishers and is known for Education publishing giant. Recently it is going to tie a partnership with leading mobile language app Duolingo about development in mobile language learning content specifically for students of higher education.
The partnership intends to launch of new language learning materials which will be designed particularly according to Pearsons’s existing class curricula.
The course outline suggests that it will be available in four languages –Spanish (elementary and intermediate), German, French, and Italian. Though the content will work alongside Pearson textbooks it would clearly follow the mobile style of Duolingo which is bite-sized and gamified due to fine reason.
The future of higher education would be groundbreaking and this MOU with Duolingo is going to set a new standard.
The product is going to be launch in autumn this year with the distribution of 125,000 access codes among students in the US and Canada.
According to Eric Stano, the vice president of portfolio management at Pearson “this partnership will help to enable Pearson to become increasingly present on mobile, and enhance engagement with students”.
“It engages them in the out of class practice that is necessary to efficiently acquire that language and also it helps us make that pivot towards a next generation step.” He added in a video alongside Duolingo’s CEO, Luis von Ahn.
Duolingo is hitting 200 million users currently, but with this partnership, they are expecting to expand its reach, for the most part at the university level.
“There is also a gap in the app’s language teaching that this partnership with Pearson could fill”. Luis von Ahn, co-founder, and CEO of Duolingo said.
“We have a really good way of getting people engaged in practicing the language, but our app does not teach you a lot of the theory for the language,” he added.
With a huge target market of language learners, Duolingo is also used in 300,000 classrooms all across the world and recently it rolled out an English language skill exam which is admired and adopted by a lot of higher education institutions.
