Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
Services
Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
Institute
We offer research, transfer and infrastructure for lifelong learning.
Using the crisis-ridden Afghanistan as an example the authors show the importance of adult und continuing education for the positive development of a conflict region. By strengthening the employability of young people in transition from school to university or professional life it helps preventing frustration, aggression and violence – and thus also the emergence of new conflicts.
Experience cannot be synthesised – it needs time. This aspect moves to the centre of attention when educational training time is not examined from the perspective of its exploitation, but rather in terms of its enablement. This article conceives of adults’ educational time as a qualitative factor whose content requires structuring. The structure of educational training time is at the same time viewed as a deceleration factor. Deceleration is not understood here to mean passive non-activity, but…
In adult education, fields of activity have lost their strict boundaries: administrative employees also perform pedagogical work – such as counselling, for instance – and full-time pedagogical employees also have to handle administrative work – e.g. in project management. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, administrative employees play an important role in the pedagogical functioning of institutions of adult education, although this factor is often neglected in both research and measures of…
German universities have been compelled to live on a tight budget for years. Therefore, university financing is on the one hand concerned with more efficiency, on the other hand with the opening up new sources of income. Possible instruments for more efficiency are global budgets and the dividing-up of budgets according to indicators. New sources of income might be funded research and the provision of further education. But German universities are still a long way from being "entrepreneurial un…
This article reports on expert assessments of the opportunities and risks of the current DQR process from the perspective of adult education centres. The seven experts from Germany and Austria who were surveyed in the EU Transfer Project critically analyse above all the focus on formal learning. The change in orientational perspective towards towards learning results can offer an impetus for programme planning, but also requires new skills and abilities on the part of further educational staff.
Based on the assumption that the findings gained during the PIAAC study provide an impetus for the development of demand-driven support opportunities, the author points out the needs for improvement in the field of basic education. At the same time, regarding the content, the author warns of constricting adult education in favour of competence and outcome oriented programmes.
Scientific guidance as empirical research and consultancy Scientific guidance as a self-evident component of adult education stands in area of tension of empirical research and consultancy. This tension ratio can be dissolved when one dissolves scientific guidance in two phases, one survey phase and a consultancy phase, which are then defined as different situations of adult education.
This assumption does not seem plausible at first glance, but rather absurd instead. The regular manifestation of modern age as a knowledge-based society on the one hand as well as the consensual acceptance of the appeal for lifelong learning on the other hand, create the opposite of an image in which the pedagogical aspect of continuing education has been lost. The author argues that learners are increasingly left unsupported, lifelong learning has become more fiction than reality and continui…
Im vergangenen Jahr hat der »Expert*innenkreis Weiterbildung« der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung ein Konzept für eine Governance-Struktur der beruflichen Weiterbildung entwickelt, die eine wirkungsvolle und transparente Steuerung des Weiterbildungsbereichs verspricht. Die Autorin stellt hier die Grundzüge der geforderten Governance-Struktur vor.
The article illustrates a heuristic model that describes the multidimensional interdisciplinary social phenomena of functional illiteracy in a clearly arranged way. To implement professional literacy programmes that match the different target groups, scientific findings about educational deprivation, life circumstances and barriers to equal participation in connection with low literacy skills are to be arranged in a proper order. One result of the research project “HABIL” is the development of …
