Designing for 1.2 Billion People
summary
Duolingo provides a free language app with 300 million users and a dataset showing 1.2 billion people learning languages and ~800 million learning English; the team uses that data to map demand and discovers refugees drive Swedish uptake in Sweden. Field visits to Gaziantep, Turkey and Azraq refugee camp, 37,000 people document learners who use smartphones to teach themselves Turkish or English; examples include a jail survivor turned teacher and a refugee who becomes a certified software engineer. The project becomes a documentary and supports a UN refugee education petition and highlights 6 million Syrian refugees.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Why language learning matters
- 1:52Duolingo’s global learner data
- 3:43Refugees and language access
- 5:31Journey to Turkey and Middle East
- 8:46Rock refugee camp in Jordan
- 11:55Survival through language learning
- 12:59Designing with human impact
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