Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
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Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
Institute
We offer research, transfer and infrastructure for lifelong learning.
AiKomPass is a web-based tool to make informal and non-formal competences within the electrical and metal industries visible. It is based on an interview study with potential users and a task inventory, which covers tasks of work areas like process planning, production, maintenance and logistics within production processes. The tool itself was developed within a participative design process. It enables employees and people in search of employment to self-assess their ability to fulfil working t…
This article presents the results of a recent online survey of graduates of the Austrian Academy of Continuing Education. Methodically, the survey’s results on benefit items are interpreted and answers to open questions are analyzed by qualitative content analyses. Empirical findings are subject to an interpretation using concepts of professionalization and the political agenda of validation of informal and non-formal learning. An important finding is, that WBA enhances individual professionali…
Lifelong education for seniors is becoming a significant policy focus because of factors relating to the global aging society phenomenon. Yet the modern ‘educational demoralisation’ that can result from informal experiential learning not being sufficiently valued or encouraged, may also apply to later life learning—typically manifest as a ‘fear of ageing’ as well as ageism. This is especially so in contexts where policymakers tend to just mainly focus on the worrying economic, health and other …
This article discusses participation of older people from five different perspectives: the perspective of images of old age, the perspective of individual potentials for change and participation, the perspective of the creation of public space, the perspective of social relationships and the perspective of structures of care. Participation is thus understood as a combination of personal, social, cultural, communal and societal factors. Education is seen as a central mechanism for building struc…
Courses of scientific continuing education are diverse and heterogeneous. This impedes their comparability and their connectivity to existing qualification frameworks. This article provides a proposal for a systemization, which has been implemented in Baden-Württemberg, and shows possible connections to the German qualification framework (DQR).
Why do senior citizens stop taking part in continuing education? The author tries to find and explain reasons, drawing on a survey regarding courses of scientific continuing education of Ulm University. One key finding is that the biggest impediments are a lack of time and other obligations.
Older people often lack the competences for the handling of digital media. This is problematic in a society which is more and more based on digital exchanges. Courses of continuing digital education for older people prove to be successful when they are embedded into their living environments. In this article, the author presents several of these educational formats.
In this article, the dialogue between young and very old people is examined structurally and with regards to contents in the context of education and learning. Topics, interpretations and motivations are the factors which decide how educational and learning processes of different generations can be shaped and understood.