From French Lessons to Higher Ed Insights: The Duolingo Effect

Adult learners must be able to access education that meets them where they are to meaningfully engage with and gain the skills they need from it.

In higher education, we talk endlessly about engagement, persistence and motivation, yet millions of adults experience those very things daily through a simple app—Duolingo. The platform’s success isn’t just about learning a language; it’s about how it makes learning feel accessible, continuous and even fun. As a higher ed professional devoted to adult learner success, I’ve come to believe Duolingo shows us what’s possible when we design learning that fits real lives. 

In my professional realm, my passion is to support adult learners’ success. I work at a large, fully online institution where working adults are the norm. I think about adult learners day and night. And in reality, I am an adult learner, but I’m not enrolled in a college or university. 

My primary tool? Duolingo. That little green owl is rewriting some of the rules, and its co-founder and CEO, Luis von Ahn, has made bold statements about education. Duolingo’s recent moves, like replacing contract workers with AI, signal that they’re serious about reimagining the scale and precision of learning. 

Thing is, I like it. It really works for me. Recently, I hit a major milestone: I completed the B1-level equivalency in Duolingo’s French program. For context, B1 under the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) signals an intermediate ability. I can now understand main points of conversation, manage simple tasks while traveling and describe experiences and aspirations in French. It’s a major step, and it also feels like redemption. 

French was my minor in college, and I struggled with it…hard. Back then, my only tools were flashcards and, I’ll admit, early Google Translate to get through my composition courses. What I didn’t have was a way to practice without consequence. The traditional classroom model rewarded perfection and punished trial and error. The result? I didn’t learn. I memorized what I could and googled the rest, internalizing it all as a personal failure. 

Now I know why I failed—not because I lacked motivation but because traditional instruction emphasized perfect performance, rote memorization and timed testing, with little room for experimentation or the messiness that deep learning requires.  

Lesson for higher ed: Create space for experimentation and recovery. Progress happens when learners can fail forward without penalty. 

Today, I spend 30 to 90 minutes a day on French. I walk and learn, sneak in lessons before getting out of bed and review vocabulary while waiting to pick up my daughter from dance. My Duolingo streak is over 930 days long. It is hard for me to imagine Undergrad Karen doing anything that many days in a row. The streak is a powerful thing. Back in college, my efforts were minimal because studying felt tedious and discouraging. Now, I play with the language. I speak, I review vocabulary and I listen to Duolingo’s French podcasts.   

Lesson for higher ed: Motivation thrives on small wins and visible progress. Celebrate consistency over perfection. 

I do all of this independently, and I’ve far surpassed the skills I was supposed to develop as an undergrad. This is my French do-over, and I’m grateful for it.  

Lesson for higher ed: Support self-directed learning. Adult learners excel when given agency to control pace, timing and content relevance. 

Reflecting on my own adult learning journey, I believe higher education should critically engage with what platforms like Duolingo are doing—because they’re not just disrupting language learning. As Luis von Ahn put it in a 2025 Fortune interview, “It’s just a lot more scalable to teach with AI than with teachers.” With more than 116 million users and over 16,000 learning experiments, Duolingo has turned this insight into action.  

This doesn’t mean we imitate blindly. The Duolingo model isn’t perfect or universally applicable. Still, higher education can take cues from its structure. Imagine a modular course design that allows students to learn in five-minute bursts or dashboards that show visible progress toward learning goals. These small design choices can make big differences in motivation and persistence. 

It is time to ask ourselves: 

• Are we designing learning experiences that foster experimentation, iteration and autonomy in bite-sized chunks, especially for adult learners? 
  

• Do our models reflect what we now know about cognitive science, memory and engagement? 
  

• How might we build similar mechanisms for feedback, scaffolding and motivation into our learning design? 

Adult learners like me aren’t necessarily looking for structure in the traditional sense. We need flexibility, relevance and tools that let us learn in the margins of our day. If higher education can design learning for those margins, the in-between moments of real life, we can make learning more accessible for working adults. Duolingo, in all its gamified, owl-driven simplicity, shows what’s possible. Let’s not treat it as a novelty. Let’s learn from it.