An open-source platform for interactive courses like Duolingo

[ceolinwill]

I love Duolingo. I'm about to reach a 1-year streak and I have almost 300k XP. I proudly pay for Duolingo Super because it's a great investment. I highly recommend it.

Interactive learning is more effective

I love Duolingo so much that I want that kind of experience to learn everything. That's why I'm creating Zoonk, an open-source platform for creating interactive courses like Duolingo.

I often struggle with traditional learning methods. I can't pay attention to a lecture. I forget everything I read just a few minutes after I read it. Even videos have been a struggle. After all, videos are just a virtual lecture.

I need to get my hands dirty. I need interactivity. I need to have a more hands-on experience to really learn something - and I'm not alone on this.

Research shows interactive learning is more effective than traditional methods. We remember much more when we do things compared to passive learning. Take Duolingo as an example: 34 hours of study on Duolingo are equivalent to a full semester in college.

Fixing education

Making learning more interactive and fun is a step in the direction to fix education - and THAT is very important.

83% of students are bored in school due to uninteresting material. Nearly 50% of dropouts say that's one of the reasons they left school. The side effects are really bad. Dropping out of school means lower salaries and, therefore, a decrease in tax revenue and an increase in crimes.

I'm building Zoonk to improve how kids learn in school. We're doing this by giving them more practical and interactive lessons where they can learn by doing and see how things work in real-life. We'll make sure it matches the curriculum standards for each country, state and/or district. This will help teachers because it will allow them to spend less time planning their lessons and more time actually helping their students.

I know this is hard to do. If we don't do this right, we risk giving teachers more work instead of helping them. I don't want that. We're here to help both teachers and students. We'll have a long road ahead but I'm confident Zoonk will be able to give a positive contribution.

Lifelong learning

But school is only a part of the equation. In the past, we'd learn a profession and work on it our whole life. Those days are gone. Our society is moving at a much faster pace. We need to adapt quickly and many times throughout our lives.

We need to learn how to learn.

And we need to keep learning - over and over again. That's where Zoonk Learn and Zoonk School come in.

Those are places where you're going to be able to quickly learn new skills or subjects like AI, Robotics, Programming, Biotechnology, Philosophy, anything you want.

In-job training

We learn at school and college. Then, we're always learning new skills to stay up-to-date. But there's specific knowledge we need to obtain to get our job done.

Every company I worked for had tons of learning materials I had to understand to do a great job. It was never easy. I wish there was a step-by-step guide to help me through.

Zoonk can help provide better learning experiences at your job. Onboarding, compliance, sales training, all those boring things won't be so boring anymore. We will guide you through every step of the process and I can guarantee you'll learn much more than reading dozens of pages on Notion or Google Docs.

This is just the beginning

I'm launching Zoonk now and there's a live demo you can play with. But I know it has to improve a lot to reach the level of fun, practical learning experience I'm envisioning.

I invite you to join me on this journey. Zoonk is a company to build open-source solutions for education. This platform for interactive courses is our first product, but it won't be the last one. Everything we do will be open and transparent. I'm heavily inspired by the great job Cal is doing in the COSS (Commercial Open-Source Software) market.

Right now I'm working alone on this, so follow my progress on Threads: Both on my personal profile and on Zoonk's. I'm going to share every step there. I'm sharing my roadmap here and I'm using GitHub Discussions for discussing this project.

Let's do this. Society is going through a rough path right now but I strongly believe that, if we can fix education, then can fix everything else. ❤️ ✌️