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.
Current Aspects of Professional Qualification Consultancy for Companies Professional counselling has to pick up the thread of the real-life in-house training in order to provide companies with efficient counselling services. A first step would be to make companies sensitive to the identification of a call for action to help them to renovate their learning culture. Thus, they need a repertoire of innovations which is based on a cooperative approach and the application of company expertise to …
Over the past 15 years, a variety of approaches have been developed in (adult) education contexts to validate formal, non-formal and informal competences and thus harness them for lifelong learning purposes. Despite the development, testing and evaluation of appropriate procedures as well as process-accompanying research and procedural clarification processes, a nationwide implementation can not be observed. It can be deduced from these findings that the low degree of implementation of correspo…
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…
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…
Participation in continuing higher education has various perspectives particularly with regard to lifelong learning. By arrangements in the field of continuing higher education, universities need to react to changing learning and educational biographies as well as to enable prospects in the context of lifelong learning. An important aspect belonging to this is the transfer of knowledge. Based on the definition of influencing factors on transfer of knowledge by von Krogh and Köhne, the system of…
Foreign languages à la mode. Trends in adult language acquisition based on the example of the VHS programme Learning foreign languages is a high-status activity in organised adult learning. Based on VHS (adult education centre) statistics, the author shows that foreign languages are an indispensable element of the VHS programme range; hardly any other area is in such constantly high demand, a demand which can also be seen in relation to income status. Now making up 30 percent of all courses,…
Exploring the inner aspect of learning. Methodological considerations for investigating life-long learning This article sets out research methods required for qualitative research aimed at understanding the inner aspect of learning. The aim is to make qualitative single case studies more relevant with regard to issues of education policy and social analysis. For this purpose, the following measures are proposed. (1) Close reading and reflexivity: Precisely studying the source texts sheds lig…
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 …
There is currently a strong demand for more evidence-based pedagogical practice. This paper, therefore, examines how pedagogical practitioners deal with scientific evidence on a voluntary basis. Previous research has hinted at various ´fractions of implementation´. In particular, it is still uncertain how evidence-based training offers for implementation are perceived by pedagogical practitioners and on which grounds these offers are received and judged by practitioners as they seeks to impleme…
