Opening Higher Education to Adult Learners

Opening higher education for new target groups is regarded as an important political and social goal. Based on central political frameworks the following article analyses, which new target groups are addressed in higher education institutions and which specific demands they have for the organization and structuring of teaching and learning. In the focus of the analysis are studies from higher education research and instructional design. The perspectives of these two in the past almost separated disciplines seem to be coming closer together by focusing more and more on the same questions: how to organize teaching and learning in an environment of heterogeneous students. Both disciplines get impulses from adult education and continuing education research, which traditionally focus more on target groups and their specific needs.

The article deals with the question of organizations' internal control problems, which appear during the implementation of scientific continuing education, and how these problems relate to the implementation process and also to the general opening of universities for higher education to adult learners. Based on qualitative empirical results from a currently ongoing DFG project, three control problems are deployed and appropriate forms of action are demonstrated. The results provide evidence of the challenges in building and expanding offers of scientific training and refer to perspectives of the opening of universities for higher education to adult learners.

The relation between sustainability and widening access to adult learners in higher education is both well comprehensible and highly vague. Accordingly, and following the arguments of Seghezzo (2009) and Foster (2001), the paper aims to complement academic discourse on widening access of higher education by showing the benefit of using the concept of sustainability not merely as an operational measurement index or a learning topic content-wise. Rather, a different understanding of sustainability may serve as a catalyst to revisit the mandate of higher education institutions in providing lifelong learning opportunities and to identify gaps in adult education research. References to the University of Hamburg serve as an example to illustrate the multilayered facets of alternative entry routes to higher education for adults holding VET qualifications and awards.

This article discusses the consequences of increasing access of non-traditional students to higher education (HE) in Sweden for society, individuals, and HE. The findings are based on a recently finished European Research Project called Access and Retention: Experiences of Non-traditional Students in Higher Education (RANLHE) with seven countries involved. First, an introduction about opening access to HE is presented, followed by a review of Swedish HE policy. Next is a presentation of the RANLHE project including the project’s research focus, methodology and a comparison between the partner countries. The Swedish case is highlighted and a typology of non-traditional students introduced which demonstrates a change in students’ identity formation as a result of mass HE. The role of research and teaching institutions in regards to mature/non-traditional students and their impact on students’ identity formation is discussed. The article concludes with the general consequences for HE in Europe

The article deals with cooperation under the perspective of governance from an organisational view. According to the variety forms of cooperation in the field of adult education, cooperation can be seen as a medium that adult educational organisations can use for their reproduction and coordination in different institutional environment. Based on empirical findings from a case study, it can be shown that organisations initiate cooperation for collecting resources and legitimation. So, organisations can continuously reproduce themselves in their institutional environment. In addition, cooperation provides them with the possibility for organisational change-processes.

Departing from the variety of understandings of “region” both in general and in Adult
Education, the author aims at a new definition of the term against the backdrop of
current discussions on space. Based on a geographic approach, the author analyzes
recent literature in the field of Adult Education. He identifies a shift in both politics
and research. He, suggests, with Schöning, to evaluate the concept from a variety of
perspectives – from the point of view of the subject, of the organization and of the state.