Discussion: The DIY (Do It Yourself) and Maker movements are being supported by the wealth of practical knowledge and sharing spaces blooming everywhere on the web, inspiring a Renaissance 2.0 of creativity. DIY Learning is a distinctively crowd-sourced and mobile phenomenon that encourages everyone to believe they can learn to do anything at a competent level if they just connect with the right communities and get to work. AI is beginning to provide unprecedented support in guiding individuals from absolute beginners to mastery.
523 Inspiration: Mobility is essential because it brings to hand inspirational global ideas, the guild-like support of craft communities, and just-in-time know-how. Mobile devices are the toolkit, manuals, training school and brainstorming hub for DIY Learning.
Many of the DIY videos on how to use certain software really helped in the early days of my instructional design career. YouTube videos basically taught me how to use many of the tools I am using today. I continue to resort to using DIY videos from how to clean a burnt pot to trouble shooting an Articulate course. Just-in-time mobility and AI put the learning resources I need immediately at my fingertips. The convenience and ease makes it so addictive to keep going back for more.
While AI tools and DIY videos can provide quick solutions, they can also come with algorithmic bias and misinformation. This can lead to learning skills without proper guidance. The learner could also be led to possible unsafe techniques and have a lack of deep foundational mastery of a skill. Ultimately, the DIY videos’ true value may depend on the learner’s ability to balance convenience with deep foundational mastery of a skill.
I love a DIY video, and rely on them frequently. I even host monthly skill-sharing workshops at my house for my friends where we’ve covered clothing repair, cocktail mixology, and felted ornament making. All this to say, I am a big proponent of the DIY mentality, and I think mobile toolkits, apps and manuals that learners can use to onboard a new skillset are overall very positive and encouraging.
However, I do want to trouble the word “yourself” in “do it yourself.” In the context of learning, DIY to me means learning without paying directly for someone’s assistance or receiving formal training from an institution. However, this does not necessarily mean we are learning independently. When I use an instructional video, access an online community, or find another resource to teach myself something new, I am still relying on someone else’s knowledge, experience, and expertise. I think we need a new name for this type of learning that doesn’t center the individual learner and still celebrates the community aspect, and values the expertise required at the heart of this shared experience.
Behind an instructional video or online resource is often a skilled practitioner who developed that knowledge through years of experience and participation within a community of practice. Mobile technologies and AI have made an incredible amount of knowledge accessible, allowing people to learn skills at the moment and in the context where they actually need them. But as this expertise and content is aggregated in LLMs and shared out in AI-voiceover tutorial videos, I think we risk missing out on a huge part of what makes the skillsharing worthwhile in the first place, which is interacting with the human experts and the craft communities we want to partake in.
At this point in time, I would say almost everyone has had to use a DIY video. It could be anything from how to change a light fixture to watching a step-by-step tutorial on something in Excel, and sometimes that is just a single day.
Many teachers, especially those who work in a computer lab, create their own DIY videos already to help students progress through projects and various other tasks. There are numerous benefits to them. Students may be absent but can keep up to date at home without falling behind. Or maybe your student with anxiety would rather get a 0 on an assignment than raise their hand to ask for help. These DIY videos as supports can do wonders.
Before, the issues were that they took a while to make, or at least make well. Although I haven’t used AI to help build one yet, the potential for them is incredible, with the growth and abilities of AI meaning that, so long as you’re exact with your prompt, it can build you exactly what you want in no time at all; or at least without you needing to be hands-on for the entire process.
I believe the DIY and Maker movements represent a genuine Renaissance 2.0 of creativity, and I saw this firsthand when I was an Instructional Designer in the university, where I watched absolute beginners—students and staff with no design background—teach themselves to build polished e-learning modules using nothing but crowd-sourced YouTube tutorials, peer-shared Articulate 360 files, and community forums. What struck me was that they didn’t need formal courses; they needed the right community and the willingness to get to work. My role became designing the scaffolding that connected that informal energy to structured outcomes—curating pathways, embedding AI-guided checkpoints that diagnosed where each learner was stuck, and progressively handing them off to more complex, peer-driven practice once they had the fundamentals. AI handled the personalized, moment-to-moment guidance that beginners once had to piece together themselves, while the community provided inspiration, accountability, and real-world context. That experience convinced me this is a Renaissance where everyone holds a brush, the studio is everywhere, and AI plus community can carry a complete novice to genuine competence.
DIY Learning is something I connect with because I use it regularly in my own life. I’ve used YouTube and AI to learn about cooking, weight loss, and different hands-on projects, with one of my biggest DIY projects being installing laminate flooring. I like that I can learn something exactly when I need it, rather than having to take a course or wait for someone else to teach me. However, my experiences have also shown me that DIY learning comes with some risks. I once followed online advice to fix a scratch on my car, but the information was incorrect and actually made the problem much worse. With AI now becoming part of DIY learning, I think it will be important to balance the convenience and accessibility of just-in-time learning with the ability to verify that the information we are getting is accurate.
I feel like we have all delved into DIY learning at some point. Personally speaking, learning independently about my interests (like skin-care, meal prepping, as well as investing) has helped me not only develop practical skills but also introduced me to new communities full of like-minded people. What’s great about this is one area of curiosity often leads to another and it exposes you to people, ideas/philosophies that inspire you to keep exploring. We are naturally curious creatures and when we have the resources to let that curiosity blossom, learning can become self-directed and continuous.
Over the last 5 years, I have made it a habit to listen to DIY tutorials while exercising at the gym. Currently, I am learning about videography for cooking video content creation. It is not a field of expertise that I would have imagined myself to be exploring. However, YouTube makes this learning easily accessible and also enables me to preview multiple professionals in the field and learn different perspectives on a topic such as the best gear for lighting. Time and place, ‘just-in-time,’ are central concepts for me regarding the importance that mobile DIY learning affords to the inquiring individual.
DIY learning has taken off with the rise of AI, making it possible to learn almost anything independently (eg. investing, fixing a car, learning a new language) all from the convenience of a mobile device. I am particularly interested in whether AI can support DIY learning among students, and whether they can help children genuinely master academic concepts without a teacher. This is especially relevant since alpha schools are already experimenting with AI tutors. I am also curious about the equity implications – will AI tutors become a marker of wealth by giving the elite access to increasingly personalized learning, or will they become widely accessible tools used to cut costs in under-resourced schools?