When learning circles began in 2015, something we heard a lot of edtech companies say was that “anybody could learn anything, anywhere, for free” and that online learning would “democratize the world”. While these are nice sentiments, they are also very naive, because they don’t account for the very real barriers that many people face to learning.
There are both individual barriers (digital literacy, awareness of opportunities, and academic confidence) as well as structural barriers (racism, financial injustice, monolithic ideals of what constitutes “knowledge”) which prevent many people from being able to take full control over their own learning experiences.
One way to dig into these barriers to to revise this sentiment to make it more realistic.
Here’s how you play:
Here’s what others have come up with: