Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

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Xenops
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Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Xenops » Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:15 am

From their forum, particularly regarding the Irish course:

This year, Duolingo started contacting all the community coursebuilders and in the end it turned out we (the volunteers) won't be responsible for building the courses anymore. Seems Duo are doing a fair bit of restructuring in general (they're on the stock market now). We handed over the material we had created, had a brief meeting with some staff about our plans and the direction of the course, submitted a report we decided to write but I'm not sure how useful it was to them, and got a nice token sum of money for the efforts. The guy we spoke to on their staff was American but had excellent Irish and seemed passionate, if anything he was slightly too keen on being traditional, but he definitely has a great knowledge of the language. I'm not sure of Duo's plans or how it's all structured, so no idea how much authority he'll have. They told us full-time, pro staff would be hired to manage all the courses.


https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/51565059

I also saw that the Norwegian course was due for an "update", which makes me nervous--it's the best Duolingo course i've used.

Anyone know more about this? Will this practice go for all courses?
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Stefan » Sun Aug 29, 2021 7:12 am

Duolingo published an update regarding it back in March:

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.

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.
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Gordafarin2 » Sun Aug 29, 2021 11:14 am

From what I've heard, the Esperanto course is orphaned at the moment. They've kicked all the volunteers out, but not hired anyone new yet, and no one knows who will be maintaining it from here on out. I don't know if the same is true for the other small courses - I'm sure Esperanto is low down on their priority list.

I can see the reasons for Duo not wanting their content to rely on volunteer labour, but it's a bit sad when these people have put so much work into the courses and they lose all control over their former projects. I'm in the Facebook group for Duolingo Esperanto users, and the former Duo volunteers are very engaged in that group. It used to be the case that any time someone spotted a bug or problem, a volunteer would immediately hop in to discuss and fix it. Now, if someone posts about it, all they can say is "Report it, and hope that Duo hires someone to look after the course soon".
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Aug 30, 2021 3:32 pm

I am very pleased to hear this, but I still think it's a bit disingenuous to say that they can only do it now that they're earning money from the public. Duolingo was built using millions upon millions of venture capital dollars and some of that money could have been spent on the people making the content.

However, for them to give money after the fact to the volunteers is a decent move -- they were under no contractual obligation to do so, so kudos to them for that.

Von Ahn seems like a genuine guy, I just feel that historically he's placed a bit too much emphasis on the magic algorithm (which isn't spectacular) over the content (which is the result of a huge collective effort).
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Cainntear » Mon Aug 30, 2021 4:12 pm

Also worth adding that I just saw an email in my junk folder saying an alternative translation I'd suggested for a French task has been accepted, and while I can't remember the last time I looked at the French course (it was purely out of curiosity anyway -- I learned French long before DL came along) it was definitely in the BC* era. (* Before COVID, of course. :D )

Isn't it funny how things suddenly get done when you start paying people to do a job...?
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Cavesa » Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:32 am

While there are some great aspects of this (because sure, it is not cool to gain so much on someone else's volunteer work), I am a bit worried this will just mean another wave of lowering the quality and dumbing stuff down. Some of the volunteer courses (such as Norwegian) have a great reputation for being solid and thorough. The old volunteer courses for the major languages used to be at least not too slow and to fulfill the expected function not too slowly.

But ever since they hired "professionals" to make the major language courses, the quality dropped.

-The main courses (such as Spanish) were redesigned very badly. They are now much slower paced, which combined with the exercise and algorythm changes (many more dumbwit exercises, significantly lower % of the valuable exercises even at the higher crown levels) leads to Duo being even less efficient. The lessons were chopped into smaller ones, so the not true beginners (or people using Duo alongside a coursebook) cannot progress much faster even by testing out.

I know that this fits with what the CEO even admitted in an interview. They are primarily targetting the huge crowd of americans interested in playing, not really learning the language. That would be ok, if only Duo's marketing didn't also mislead real learners into falling for it. Let's never forget that all the Duo's "research" on "successful learners" is focused on people staying on Duo forever, not on real success.

-The pace is even more uneven in the offical courses. The equivalent of the first few units of a normal coursebook is spread over half the course, then a lot of stuff gets introduced fast. Therefore you will be useless for very long, and struggle to use Duo alongside a coursebook, but later you will "learn" a lot of stuff just as memorised sentences, due to lack of varied practice.

Btw B1 content was promised ages ago, but I highly doubt it will arrive. And even if it does, Duo will suck at teaching it, due to the preference of easy exercises (to keep people coming back and seeing ads. Learning is not a priority).

-The CEFR labeling (or rather the way the cefr has been applied here) has done more damage than good in this case. Why? One of the few huge advantages of Duolingo over many of the nowadays common coursebooks used to be the grammar based organisation. It was a nice supplementary workbook. You could just go and review this or that grammar feature.

Now it is all about vocab and stupid conversation situations. This approach is actually rather discouraging to some kinds of learners. (Instead of an approach "hey, this is a versatile feature to be used in so many situations, you've learnt a huge chunk of the language today!", it's like "hey, you've learnt to handle one situation, just a million to go").

-The "professionals" (using the "" to suggest that they are professionals in the sense of being paid. But imho, they are just some not too bright college students hired for cheap) are paid just to make a course, but there are probably no or very few people paid to maintain it and add alternative answers. That's actually a huge problem and a huge advantage of the volunteer courses. If the team of volunteers sticks around (but sure, some languages are orphaned), they take care of this rather efficiently. But when you report something to the "professionals", there is no reaction. You'd better memorise the official correct version, even if yours is totally valid or even better (for example, the Spanish course really overuses the personal pronouns very unnaturally), because there might be a reaction in half a year.

Duo deserved better. It does have problems, it hasn't become what I had hoped it to be. But it is just sad to see that they are gonna dumb it down even further by paying some morons to replace people, who may have less time for the project, but genuinely care.
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Cavesa » Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:33 am

Cainntear wrote:Also worth adding that I just saw an email in my junk folder saying an alternative translation I'd suggested for a French task has been accepted, and while I can't remember the last time I looked at the French course (it was purely out of curiosity anyway -- I learned French long before DL came along) it was definitely in the BC* era. (* Before COVID, of course. :D )

Isn't it funny how things suddenly get done when you start paying people to do a job...?


Just before leaving, my experience was the opposite. The alternatives were not being added, the same issues had been reported and discussed months before my report.

The paid people were probably paid to just design a course, not to maintain it.
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Re: Duolingo Hiring Language Professionals?

Postby Cainntear » Tue Aug 31, 2021 9:25 am

Cavesa wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Also worth adding that I just saw an email in my junk folder saying an alternative translation I'd suggested for a French task has been accepted, and while I can't remember the last time I looked at the French course (it was purely out of curiosity anyway -- I learned French long before DL came along) it was definitely in the BC* era. (* Before COVID, of course. :D )

Isn't it funny how things suddenly get done when you start paying people to do a job...?


Just before leaving, my experience was the opposite. The alternatives were not being added, the same issues had been reported and discussed months before my report.

The paid people were probably paid to just design a course, not to maintain it.

Historically, I think you're right. They commissioned freelancers to write the courses and had basically no linguists on the full-time payroll.

But what they're talking about here seems to be actual permanent salaried language specialists, and not before time, either.
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