Gold mining basic skills to get xp
I am an EAL teacher, my students love duolingo! We use the xp points to monitor involvement and progress. Unfortunately it seems some of our more competitive students are now just repeating the basic levels to max out their xp points and gain levels. I just tested it and i was given the same number of points every time I completed a very easy level.
11 Comments
We have a new feature on the way that will make it easier for you to use Duolingo in the classroom. We don't limit how many times someone can practice a lesson. You might consider your challenge being based on how far you get down the tree. You can't see their tree (unless you have their login info), but they could share a screenshot with you (just an idea!).
Hi Kristine, I thought you might like to know that there is a way to grind xp in duolingo. Since the levels and the leader boards are all generated from xp, having a way to generate it without acquiring new knowledge undermines them.
I will now reward students only when they have achieved a skill, although as you say there is no way for us to centrally monitor this. This means checking each individual student's progress manually.
The classroom feature sounds great btw, but I do hope you can incorporate some way to monitor knowledge attainment centrally.
Perhaps it would be better we didn't receive xp for skills that are already gold?
Tim, I understand your issue but have to disagree. While some people can do a lesson once and have it down pat, some of us more densely-headed folks take repeated exposures of the same material for it to infiltrate and be retained. During my early studies, if I had to wait for a skill to drop below gold before redoing the lesson, I would have forgotten most of it. Fortunately, now I'm far enough down the tree that I usually use "Practice Weak Skills" on the app rather than repeating individual lessons, so it picks my weakest words based on length of time since most recent exposure, which seems to be working well. By doing that, my tree stays bright gold, and I continue to advance.
Therefore, based on my limited experience, I recommend requiring students to add a new lesson or skill every so often and encouraging them to start using "Practice Weak Skills" or the equivalents on the website once they get past the first few lessons so they can gain broader exposure and continue learning.
Best wishes to you and your students.
Hi Tim, I understand what you mean:-) You could monitor the progress of your students by seeing the number of words they got instead of their XP. For Example, it needs 1397 words to finish the whole English tree and 1710 for German Tree. So, by seeing how many words they have, you could know their progress in learning:-)
Hi Hitrizie, monitoring progress by words is a good idea and would give a far more accurate indication of progress. Unfortunately at the moment the only information shared on the leaderboard is xp and level. So the only way to check the number of words would be to see their screens, as many of our students are in different locations it is difficult to do so (some are in different countries!)
Previously, we are able to view other's trees , so we can know about other user's progress. Unfortunately, this feature is no more viewable now . Perhaps you could ask Duolingo to display everybody's tree again like before to monitor your students' progress:-) Best wishes:-)
Actually there are a number of people asking for the skill trees of friends to become visible again.
