Adult Education
Office of Vocational and Adult Education
(OVAE) - Home page
The
Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) supports
programs that help young people and adults obtain the
knowledge and skills for successful ...
The Cambridge Center for Adult
Education
An
Adult Education resource located in Harvard Square, with
hundreds of courses; site offers online registration.
NIACE Homepage
NIACE
(The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education) is
the leading non-governmental organisation for adult
learning in England and Wales.
AAACE Home
The
American Association for Adult and Continuing Education The
nation's premiere adult education organization dedicated to
being the leading ...
Centre for Adult Education
(CAE)
Responsible
for the provision of a range of basic and general
education programs
to adults.
Penn State | Online: Online Degrees, Online
Courses, and Online ...
Penn
State Online offers degrees, certificates, and courses
online or through
... Master of Education in Adult
Education. a lab technician turned teacher ...
Online College Degrees at Westwood
College!
Westwood
College Online offers 16 Associate and Bachelor degree
programs in ... one of the few online schools that offers
this full Bachelor’s degree! ...
Adult
education is the practice of
teaching and educating adults. This is often done in the
workplace, or through 'extension' or 'continuing education'
courses at secondary
schools, or at a
College
or
University.
The practice is also often referred to as 'Training and
Development'. It has also been referred to as
andragogy
(to
distinguish it from pedagogy).
Educating adults differs from educating children in several
ways. One of the most important differences is that adults
have accumulated knowledge and experience which can either
add value to a learning experience or hinder it.
Another important difference is that adults frequently must
apply their knowledge in some practical fashion in order to
learn effectively; there must be a goal and a reasonable
expectation that the new knowledge will help them further
that goal. One example, common in the 1990s, was the proliferation of
computer training courses in which adults (not children or
adolescents), most of whom were office workers, could
enroll. These courses would teach basic use of the
operating system or specific application software. Because
the abstractions governing the user's interactions with
a PC were so new, many people
who had been working white-collar jobs for ten years or
more eventually took such training courses, either at their
own whim (to gain computer skills and thus earn higher pay)
or at the behest of their managers.
In the United States, a more general example is that of the
high-school dropout who returns to school to complete
general education requirements. Most upwardly-mobile
positions require at the very least a high school
diploma or
equivalent. A working adult is unlikely to have the freedom
to simply quit their job and go "back to school" on a
full-time basis. Community colleges and correspondence
schools usually offer evening or weekend classes for this
reason. In the USA, the equivalent of the high school
diploma earned by an adult through these programs is to
pass the General Education Development (GED) test.
Another fast growing sector of adult education is English
for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL), also refered to as
English as a Second Language (ESL). These courses are key
in asissting immigrants with not only thre acquisition of
the English language, but the acclimation process to the
culture of the United States.
Source: Wikipedia