“Learning burnout” is the burnout nobody talks about

The world is changing fast, making it more important than ever to learn continuously, to adapt. However, learning new things is getting harder and less efficient.

We all have tried learning a new skill online and alone, to little or no success. The feeling of defeat from failing to learn a new thing, despite all of the available resources online, leaves us asking ourselves - Is it just me? Am I not good enough? Should I just stop learning completely? 

The good news is, you are not alone! According to Goel and Goyal (2020), Conventional MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have a staggeringly high dropout rate of up to 93%, which signals that learning alone and online is indeed an unproductive and lonely journey, for a variety of reasons. 

First, the plethora of resources available online does not actually help us learn. We think that having all the content in the world available to us would help us learn better, but the truth is, we are just bombarded with content that might not necessarily be valuable to us. We need to first filter what information would help us learn best, which in itself can be a demotivating and time consuming process. 

A growing number of online learners struggle to find useful learning resources that match their level of proficiency. Even when you find a learning resource through searching or recommendation from someone you know, it still takes a significant amount of energy and effort to see whether it is suitable for you. Too often, that leads to learning burnout and fatigue. 

Too many unproductive searching/learning attempts and you will feel completely out of it and you will stop. Turns out, even the most determined learners could fall in this trap and struggle to make it out alright, mainly because learning puts you in the vulnerable position of not knowing, and becoming a beginner again. You can be truly smart and still feel dumb. That’s because a learning experience that starts with too many failures and no small wins is an inherently humiliating experience.

Second, we lived the first 20 years of our lives at school, playing a zero-sum game in which we were either labeled as smart or not. Therefore, while to some people learning is a source of dopamine and joy, to most people, learning is a reminder of incompetence and “not being smart enough”. Most learning and education apps and institutions aren’t built with that mental and emotional state in mind, so they end up unintentionally triggering their users psychologically.

Third, the way learning has been working now is sub-optimal. Come to think about it. When learning something new, chances are, there are millions of other people out there who are learning or have learnt the exact same thing before. But the reality is, you are stuck in this lonely process of having to filter relevant learning resources and repeat the learning process from zero again. There is no mechanism for people to share, and access, learning resources and insights from previous learners to learn more efficiently. 

Why shouldn’t there be a reliable, searchable and universal repository of curriculums for any given hard or soft skill? Why do we still learn in silos and reinvent the wheel thousands of times a day? Why hasn’t the human race created a functioning knowledge transfer mechanism yet?

The good news is, Learning Loop is here to help. Learning Loop is a social network for learning that helps you filter and discover useful knowledge that is relevant to you, right now, without overloading you with too much information. We are on a mission to decentralize high-quality education globally and redesign the learning experience, to help everyone learn anything they’d like to learn and be great at it, regardless of location, language or wealth. 

Why are we committed to doing so? Most people in the world live a lifetime and die without ever discovering what they could be great at, and that makes us deeply sad. 

We believe the solution to that problem isn’t to produce more content and online courses, but to do a great job of matching people to the most helpful people and existing knowledge in the world, in a timely manner, without borders; to help everyone learn anything they’d like to learn, joyfully and productively.

To be among the first users to gain access to Learning Loop, join our waitlist: https://www.learningloop.org/