A Brief History

So, research shows that Luis von Ahn (a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University) and Severin Hacker (a student of Professor Luis von Ahn at the time) co-founded Duolingo in 2009.  In 2011, they developed and launched it together.  Their objective was to provide free language-learning education to people across the globe; while using the information gained from their language practice to translate text online.

The platform gained popularity very quickly, mainly because of the features outlined on the next page.

Over the years, Duolingo has expanded the number of languages being offered and revised its curriculum based on user feedback.

By 2021, Duolingo was able to boast of 500 million users worldwide.

Now, good academic software should possess certain key components: usability (be user-friendly, accessibility (be accessible on different platforms), scalability (be able to handle different scales of data or tasks) and reliability (be accurate and consistent), to name a few. 

Let's take a more detailed look at a full evaluation of Duolingo as Academic Software.