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.
The "Blue Series" is the DIE's most traditional series of books. It is aimed at researchers and students of adult education as well as academically interested practitioners. Scientific papers on a theoretical and empirical base provide access to adult education research and enhance the transfer of knowledge between practice and research. Over the past 30 years, it contributed significantly to the discipline of adult education.
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…
Subjects move and act in spatial contexts and through their actions, they create spaces. This also applies to adult learning and to the professional practice of adult education, yet the systematic incorporation of spatial aspects into adult education research to date has remained marginal. This publication takes the category of space as a focal point, with the various chapters defining and honing its meaning for adult education. It brings together the relevant theoretical discourses, summarizes…
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 …
