Posts Tagged ‘adult learning’

4year schools and adult learners

Report: It’s Time for 4-Year Schools to Welcome Adult Learners

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2021/01/25/report-its-time-for-4-year-schools-to-welcome-adult-learners.aspx

New Horizons: American Universities and the Case for Lifelong Learning” was produced by the Longevity Project, whose lead content collaborator is the Stanford Center on Longevity, among other nonprofits, think tanks and media organizations.

The big challenges schools will have to tackle in pursuit of this goal are twofold:

  • Faculty “intransigence” for adopting new methods of teaching and learning; and
  • The need to sort out how to make various credentials “portable and ‘stackable.'”

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more on microcredentials in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential

adult learners support

How Universities Can Rethink Support For Growing Number Of Adult Learners

https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/51089/how-universities-can-rethink-support-for-growing-number-of-adult-learners

Anya Kamenetz, April 18, 2018

You’ll hear a reasonable amount of discussion about “new traditional” students today. But the common assumption — in Washington at least — seems to be that they require more vocational education to fill a “skills gap,” particularly in STEM or technical fields. Or that they need quicker, cheaper paths to a degree.

if you ask incoming adult community college students about their educational aspirations, more than 70 percent want to get a bachelor’s or beyond.

The problem finding good hires is actually a jumble of different realities. In some sectors (for instance, advanced, digitally driven manufacturing), innovation has outpaced training, and there is truly a shortage of technically skilled workers. Higher ed needs to work with employers and government in these targeted sectors to fill a real “skills gap.”

In other sectors, employers complain they can’t find workers with communications, problem-solving and other soft skills. The solution to that is more liberal learning, not more technical workforce training.

For most nontraditional students, this dimension of “self-authoring” (in the words of psychologist Marcia Baxter Magolda) is not less crucial, but even more. They often feel that they have failed in some way the customary narrative of high-school-to-college that defines successful adulthood.

The obstacles they face are as diverse as their lives. But here’s one key way of understanding what they share: Adult, nontraditional students have to fit their studies into complex lives with multiple roles and stressors, rather than being able to organize their work and social life around a central role as a college student.

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more on higher ed in this IMS blog:
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/04/28/disruption-in-higher-education/