How Do You Do It Yourself?

Defining Do-It-Yourself Education

A movie scene that likely sticks in the average millennial's developmental memory comes from The Matrix (1999).

In one of the action scenes the heroes happen upon a helicopter, clearly a great way to escape. Neo looks at Trinity and says, "can you fly that thing?" she replies "not yet".

What follows is an excellent metaphor for Do It Yourself (DIY) Learning which we are going to define here as a process where students harness a huge online repository of free and open resources to enhance, or enable their learning in a specific space. This process can be facilitated by the formal educational process and institutions, or can be non-formal in being resources pulled into our educational institutions due to their usefulness, or informal in that it is people solving their own problems with the openness of the internet.

This is facilitated by the proliferation of easy access to high speed internet, a shift to open courses and resources, as well as the crowdsourcing of knowledge on the internet as a whole.

DIY Learning can take a variety of forms ranging for the notoriously informal culture of the Maker Movement and their ethos of learning by creating physical objects, all the way to the almost-formal nature of EdX type courses offered as an alternative to the traditional academic pathway. It also includes resources that help K-12 students like Khan Academy, as well as resources for teaching adults life-skills.