“Free-choice” learners are people who learn outside of a formal learning environment. The video platform YouTube is a popular place for free-choice learners to educate themselves. The author of this article produced a YouTube channel with fifty-one videos on city planning topics to determine how many free-choice learners could be taught on the platform. Millions of viewers, most with no prior formal educational experience with city planning, watched the videos over a two-and-a-half year pilot study. YouTube can be a powerful tool for education beyond the classroom, but the platform’s recommendation algorithm poses challenges to reaching all demographic groups.
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