educating through adversity
Software Speak
Online language-learning companies thrive in wake of COVID-19
54 BACK TO SCHOOL | 2020
the weeks after it dropped student subscription fees. “In light of the current COVID-19 situation leaving millions of kids across the U.S. doing their schoolwork from home, the global language and literacy company, Rosetta Stone, is stepping up to help provide those workfrom-home parents some relief,” the company announced in press materials after dropping the student fees on March 30. In this unusual time, marketing materials position the products as the home-schooling solution for the coronavirus epidemic. A BOON FOR BUSINESS Before the pandemic, Rosetta Stone was serving 17,000 schools and 4 million students with English literacy and foreign-language services, says Maya Goodall, a company director. That number is now much higher. Babbel, based in Berlin, also has offered free access to students during the pandemic and has added more than 50,000 new young users, including around 10,000 new students in the U.S., a spokesperson says. As of March 19, shortly after the pandemic caused the closure of nearly all schools in America, Duolingo for Schools signups were increasing 425 percent week-over-week, driven largely by teachers assigning remote
work and parents looking for resources to home-school their children, says spokeswoman Michaela Kron. BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Some teachers will continue to incorporate what they see as the best of both worlds: robust, face-toface instruction as well as games and online tools to keep students engaged — even if it’s a struggle in the new world of remote learning. In a normal year, Richard de Meij, a world language teacher at Hartford Public High School in Connecticut, uses a variety of in-class and virtual tools. Now that everyone is at home, de Meij, who speaks eight languages, is teaching by video and encouraging students to stay connected to their studies via online software. “I think face-to-face learning in a classroom will never go away,” he says. “But it’s a golden moment for these language tools and learning platforms.” — Erin Richards
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As children nationwide settled into weeks and months of remote learning, educational technology companies were having a heyday, marketing their products as musthave solutions to keep students connected and engaged. Few were poised to do so as well as language-learning software companies, which have spent years honing the digitized, personalized, gamified experience of self-paced education. Programs like Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, Babbel and Kahoot! have been used in schools for years, with a catch: They’re usually paired with a teacher. The tools could supplement foreign-language and English language instruction, but a few schools used them to fully replace a certified educator who was too difficult to find or too expensive to hire. CEOs of the companies have long stressed their software isn’t meant to supplant educators. But with hundreds of thousands of new users logging in from home, a global test is underway: How much will this digitized education experiment change learning once children eventually return to traditional classes? “I do think that this is one of those watershed moments,” says Matt Hulett, CEO of Rosetta Stone. The company said it added 10,000 to 20,000 new users each day in