What are external barriers to learning?

Or, what happens when you start cooking and you realize you don't have all the ingredients?

Have you ever gone to bake cookies and realized you don't have eggs?

Not having an essential ingredient (because who can afford eggs right now, honestly) is an external barrier to baking. It has nothing to do with your skills or knowledge. I can't say I'm bad at baking cookies simply because I don't have eggs.

On the other hand, not having an essential ingredient when cooking or baking could potentially send your whole project off the rails: it may cause you to spend time searching for an appropriate substitute, or run errands to obtain missing ingredients—all requiring more time than you had initially allotted to complete the project. Or, you might just decide to give it up all together.

So what happens when something like this happens to online learners?

External barriers to learning

When I work with instructors to design courses, I often see them conflating external barriers with the rigor of the course itself.

Here are some quick comparisons of external barriers to learning vs. learning rigor:

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External barrier: A required reading that’s difficult to find because the file name is unclear.

Rigor: A high-level or complex reading meant to challenge learners.

External barrier: Assignment instructions that are vague or confusing. For example, in my class, students were creating a project on Canva and one student asked, “[The instructions] says there should be 2-3 pages, but then it says there should be a canva. Is all the info on canva?” That was due to lack of clarity on my part—I should have more clearly explained that what they were creating in Canva was a document that would be 2-3 pages in length.

Rigor: Expectations of the quality of work created as part of a student’s Canva project (if a student handed in a 2-3 page Word doc in addition to a Canva project, that would’ve been due to my oversight of an external barrier).

Another common example of an external barrier to learning in the formal education space include assignments/content that aren’t labeled as being optional or required.

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You might be surprised to hear how many instructors resist building clearly-structured courses because it makes them "too easy." While we all want courses that challenge students and achieve the intended learning outcomes, increasing external barriers to learning isn't the right approach. What made me think of this? One of my students submitted feedback to a mid-course evaluation survey, answering the question "What do you like about this course?"

They replied: "The organization of the modules. Online classes are often hard to keep up with or understand, but the layout of this canvas makes sure there is nothing to be missed and gives you a perfect layout of when everything should be done."

“Yes, and”: Reducing external barriers and reinforcing student supports

While reducing the number of external barriers to learning should be a key goal in learning design, sometimes avoiding them completely is impossible. You’re designing learning for a whole bunch of different learners, learning on a whole bunch of different devices. Inevitably, someone is going to hit a bump.

So what happens next? Consider designing clear supports in your course so that learners can react to hitting those barriers in a way that does not cause them to give up or walk away from the task.

Is there a help area or discussion board they can consult? Do they know how to reach out to the instructor when needed and when to anticipate a response? Have they been paired with classmates for assistance when needed?

The end goal here is that the learner or student doesn’t have to sink too much time into trying to solve the non-learning problem (wasting precious cognitive energy on non-learning tasks), or worse, giving up in the end.

External barriers to learning in SaaS and product adoption

While most of this post has discussed barriers to learning in formal education settings, this is an issue that plagues many SaaS and software companies trying to educate their customers as well. How can a user get help if they need it, and can they find it easily?

• Have you considered (or even asked) where your customers will go first if they need help with your product?

• Will they check your YouTube page? If you don’t store help videos on your YouTube page (because keeping those videos updated without breaking links is nearly impossible), do you provide some kind of guidance or direction on where they can find help?

• Do you have an easily accessible help center—and if so, are your articles organized and named in a way that makes sense? Have you tried following the steps in those help docs on a regular basis to ensure they’re accurate and up to date?

• What happens if customers can’t find the help they need in a help center or online? Do they know how to reach a person who will get back to them in a timely fashion?

• If they’ve started taking a self-paced academy course in your LMS, do they know how to get back to that course later on and pick up where they left off?

People will only put in so much time (actually very little time) before they give up.

I know regular old Googling seems ancient in our genAI-dominated times, but let’s go back to some pretty recent stats on how people interact with Google:

• Only 9% of Google searchers make it to the bottom of the first page of the search results.

• Only .44% of searchers go to the second page of Google’s search results.

My point here is, people aren’t going to try very hard before they give up. Reducing external barriers to learning and providing clear second-line support should be a high priority in your learning design plan, so that you don’t lose learners for completely avoidable reasons.

Have you come across any frustrating external barriers to learning lately? At what point did you give up? Share your stories in the comments, and have a great weekend 👋🏻