How do continuing education institutions develop their programmes? What factors influence quality and professionalism? How can continuing education reach as many people as possible? These are some of the questions addressed by the Organisation and Programme Planning research department.
The department studies continuing education institutions in all their diversity, regardless of their governing body or subject area. The focus is on organisations and on their programmes and provision and the people who plan and implement them. The department examines management and decision-making processes, collaboration among teaching staff and factors influencing quality and professionalisation. It also investigates how programmes develop and the conditions that facilitate or hinder participation in continuing education.
The department’s work focuses on the following key areas:
Continuing education organisations and programme development
The department examines how continuing education institutions evolve under different conditions and how they design their programmes and courses. This research includes developing various programme segments and studying the impact of societal developments, such as digitalisation, on continuing education programmes and their provision. At the same time, the department investigates how continuing education institutions can ensure and improve quality. The findings support organisations in designing sustainable continuing education programmes.
Educational decisions and access to continuing education
The second focus area examines how people find their way into continuing education and which factors influence their educational decisions. The emphasis is on different target groups and their participation in continuing education, in particular, people with basic learning needs and other vulnerable groups. This work includes research into participant recruitment, successful pathways to financial literacy and continuing education for older people. The findings help in developing educational programmes tailored to specific target groups and improving participation in continuing education.
Programme Research is considered a genuinely adult-education-specific research approach to the empirical analysis of complex planning realities. It examines the programme – that is, the collection of course descriptions regularly published by an adult education institution – as a sediment of programme planning activities and makes it the subject of research. To gradually further develop this methodological approach and provide knowledge in this field, various colleagues from university chairs joined forces in 2010 to form an expert group, partly at the initiative of DIE. Further information on the work of the Expert Group on Programme Research can be found here.
