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.
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…
The Plan to market transition brought with it the restructuring of the labour market, but also unemployment, new job profiles, and ongoing reform of the education system. Within the catch-up process of joining the EU and harmonizing the legislative framework and developments with the aquis communautaire, the effort to set up and implement effective policies was relatively coherent. But the results achieved so far show that much more efforts are needed, as the participation rate of adults in edu…
Teachers and trainers can only act on what they notice. In line with use-inspired basic research, the question pursued in this book is how teachers’ and trainers’ competence to perceive, analyze, and diagnose situations of learning and instruction can be enhanced resulting in long-term effects. The present state of research with regard to adult education science’s professionalization discourse, teacher education research, competence as well as expertise research is drawn upon in order to gain a…
In the context of lifelong learning, the validation of prior learning has become a contested topic. Views differ about whether procedures should be oriented to (work) requirements – verifying that people match a defined competence profile – or be designed to support people in their personal development. In the latter case, the procedures mainly involve self-evaluation while in the first case they are concerned with external evaluation. In this paper a validation procedure is analysed that inclu…
The partners of the Leonardo project "Training for the Integration of Migrants into the Labour Market and the Local Community (TRIM)” explored the issue of workplace language learning with migrant and ethnic workers. This handbook is a result of the project to support a training programme focused on vocational, linguistic and other cultural aspects, involving both the immigrants and the locals, in order to achieve an effective integration of the immigrant workforce into the labour market and …
This paper provides an outline for a general framework for the assessment of adults’ problem-solving competencies with special attention paid to the requirements of large-scale assessments. The framework can be used as an input to ongoing discussions regarding international comparative studies of adult competencies such as the “Programme for an International Assessment of Adults’ Competencies” (PIAAC) currently being prepared by the OECD, and may also be used in the context of national studies …
The article describes the project „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ which is working as a meta-server to supply users with an information system of relevant data in the field of education, adult and further education. The internet is offering big quantities of information and the chance to build up complex documents. Both make it more difficult to select and evaluate information. The „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ incorporates information critically bringing it into an order making it easier for users to …
Competing for Third-party Funds. Development strategies for adult education providers. Which strategic opportunities are available for adult education providers which would like to successfully attract sponsors on the third-party funds market? This article distinguishes four concepts according to an organisational theoretical perspective which are widely accepted in practice and only partially combined: (a) „flexible specialization“: the purpose is to increase the reaction period of content-bas…
Adult education is also stamped by linear legends, including its implicit models of biography. These are, as shall be shown in the first section of this consideration, concepts of a setting-out-biography. They oversee the aspect of life coming to an end. For that reason adult education often just shows half of the picture of an adult. The adult appears as a timeless entity, being in principle open for development. His “Unteachableness” is not really seen as a result of the structural rigidity o…
The Dynamis review has been designed to provide an overview about applications of the Dynamis approach in cognitive psychology. Since the development of computer-based scenarios Dynamis, based on linear structural equation systems, has become increasingly popular as a tool for analysing decision making and complex problem solving. Beginning with the role of system size, connectivity, and types of relations in a system (e. g, eigendynamics and side effects) it has been discussed how formal syste…
