The practice of self-study without formal educational guidance. This can be through reading books, watching videos, creating projects and more. An autodidact has freedoms in dictating: - What they learn - How they learn - When they learn These freedoms bring difficulty in that the student is by definition not an expert, which makes it difficult to direct their own learning in productive ways. Though where do the boundaries of autodidacticism lie? What if the textbook provides a structure and recommendation on how to explore the subject? What if the student asks a question on Reddit to better make sense of the topic? What if the learning is in pursuit of a project that should be submitted to a competition? This is to say, **autodidacticism is not binary**. Rather, the topics that are taught, the resources that are provided, and the pedagogical approaches in a complex qualitative spectrum that ranges in provided student-autonomy.