This article is a reflection on a collaborative learning process between a university department and a community-based organisation in creating intergenerational learning platforms. The process ...entailed the coming together of school learners, university students and community elders in a university set up. Participatory Appreciative Action Learning Research was employed. Purposive sampling was used. Data collection methods approach included were semi-structured interviews, one on one individual interview and focus group discussion. Three generations, namely school learners, university students, and community elders, participated in selecting the learning areas. These included Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS), nature conversation topics, peace-building, manners and Ubuntu, social entrepreneurship, and health issues. The purpose of this initiative was to transfer knowledge, skills, norms, wisdom, and values, among generations, through a collaborative effort between an academic institution and a community. It was hoped that this would provide opportunities for lifelong learning and sharing of knowledge and experience among generations. The collaborative intergenerational learning (IGL) process opened with a series of focused discussions about how to bring to mainstream education (both basic and higher education), platforms for learning that should be inclusive of all forms of knowledges, including indigenous knowledge (IK).
The creator zone was a combination of practical meaning and ideas of reform and innovations. It pursued a cultural pattern of sharing, development, innovations, improvement. In the current stage of ...the education reform, the creator zone always supported students' deep learning and lifelong learning concept training. It constantly broadened the new territory in the students' main consciousness, and combined the classroom resources with the network resources, so that students could understand the knowledge from different angles and layers. Compared with the traditional teaching method, the creator zone education had an undeniable advantage. It could show the status of the student as the main body, stimulate the student's interest in learning, and make the student turn from a passive accepting to an active inquiring person. For this reason, based on the experience of the creator zone education, this article talked about the relationship between the creator zone and the deep learning, and provided a new teaching idea for other teachers.
The Age-Friendly University (AFU) principles outline a set of visions that higher education institutions should support to become inclusive to learners of all ages, especially older learners. A ...growing number of higher education institutions across the globe are currently engaged in various work of AFU development. One of the areas of study in AFUs that needs more research is older adults' perceptions about how AFUs should be developed. This article shares a study of older adults' thoughts about the visions reflected in the AFU principles. We conducted interviews with 17 members of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University in 2020. The thematic analysis of qualitative data was conducted to identify the common perspectives and thoughts study participants shared about AFU principles. The discussions of AFU principles with study participants produced three main themes. The first theme described the diversity of older learners' needs and interests. The second theme suggested that older adults possess mixed feelings of both excitement and anxiety about intergenerational learning. The third theme posed multifaceted accessibility issues including informational accessibility, program accessibility, and physical accessibility. We argue that these themes suggest that to develop AFUs, higher education institutions must cultivate ways to accommodate diverse older learners, create robust intergenerational programming, and engage in the work necessary to combat ageism on and off campus.
Purpose: Current approaches to sustainability science and education focus on (assessing and addressing) the external world of ecosystems, wider socio-economic structures, technology and governance ...dynamics. A major shortcoming of such approaches is the neglect of inner dimensions and capacities (which constrains education for sustainability as an end), and a limited capacity to facilitate reflection on the cognitive and socio-emotional processes underpinning people's learning, everyday life choices and decision-taking (which constrains education for sustainability as a means). More integral approaches and pedagogies are urgently needed. The purpose of this paper is to advance related knowledge. Design/methodology/approach: This paper provides a reflexive case study of the development of an innovative course on "Sustainability and Inner Transformation" and associated interventions in the form of a practice lab and weekly councils. Findings: The paper elaborates on the connections between sustainability and inner transformation in education, offers insights into the process of adapting contemplative interventions to sustainability education and concludes with some reflections on challenges, lessons learnt and future work needed to support more integral approaches. The findings show that inner dimensions and transformation can be a vehicle for critical, improved education for sustainability and how this can be achieved in practice. Originality/value: It is only recently that the concept of the inner or personal (sphere of) transformation has received growing attention in sustainability science and education. Despite this interest, such new conceptualizations and heuristics have, to date, not been systematically connected to education for sustainability (neither as an end nor means). The paper presents a critical, reflexive case, which advances related knowledge. It sets a precedent, which other universities/training institutions could follow or learn from.
This exploratory study contributes to the understanding of self-confidence as a predictor of self-efficacy, ease of use, and usefulness of eLearning platforms in corporate training. The present ...research explored the relationship among the employees’ beliefs regarding self-confidence, grit, ease of use, self-efficacy, and usefulness of eLearning platforms in their workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, 307 responses from Romanian employees who used eLearning platforms in corporate training (females = 60.3%, males = 39.7%, age range of less than 24 years (12.1%) to over 55 years (6.2%)) were exploited for research. Data were analyzed through a path analysis model. Results indicate that grit (i.e., consistency of interest), self-efficacy, and perceived ease of use of eLearning platforms were considerably directly influenced by the self-confidence variable. Usefulness was directly influenced by the ease of use and was indirectly influenced by self-confidence. Mediation analysis indicated that full mediation occurs only through the ease of use of eLearning platforms variable in the relationship between self-confidence and usefulness. A unit increase in self-confidence will increase the expected value of grit by 0.54 units (t = 8.39, p < 0.001), will indirectly increase the expected value of usefulness through ease of use by 0.15 units (t = 2.39, p = 0.017), and will increase the expected value of self-efficacy by 0.53 units (t = 6.26, p < 0.001). In addition, perceived ease of use of eLearning platforms in corporate training fully mediated the relationship of usefulness regressed on self-confidence (β = 0.20, t = 2.51, p = 0.012). These novel results reveal the contributions of self-confidence, consistency of interest as a grit dimension, and ease of use of eLearning platforms in predicting lifelong learning solutions, which improve business outcomes. The related investigation and consequences were further considered.
The concept of lifelong <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1 , continual <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2 , progressive <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3 , or open-ended <xref ref-type="bibr" ...rid="ref4">4 , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref5">5 , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6 learning by artificial agents or robots is of interest to researchers because it permits robots to adapt to multiple tasks over the course of their life and progressively accumulate knowledge <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1 , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3 , <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7 . This means that the agent or robot is less likely to become obsolete due to environmental changes, and it may be better equipped to respond to new tasks through the accumulated knowledge. This can include motor skills <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8 , high-level behaviors <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9 , vision <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10 , and social skills <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11 , among others. On the other hand, the ability to model and thus "understand" lifelong learning is of potential relevance for robots that interact with children or the elderly, or software agents that interact with people in education or training settings.
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually learn new classes using a few samples while not forgetting the old classes. The scarcity of new training data will seriously destroy ...the model's stability and plasticity. Continually Evolved Classifiers (CEC) (Zhang et al., 2021), a kind of framework, maintains the stability by freezing the encoder and achieves the plasticity by evolving the classifier along with a pseudo incremental learning scheme. However, the performance of CEC is limited due to 1) inequitable information gains between classifier weights and test features, and 2) inefficient learning task construction strategy. To address the first issue, we propose a Knowledge-guided Relation Refinement Module (KRRM) to update both the classifier weights and test features. The main function of KRRM is achieved through cross-attention to propagate the knowledge represented by old encoded data. To address the second issue, we design a Pseudo Incremental relation Refinement Learning (PIRL) that utilizes a novel hard concepts mining strategy to mine hard concept tasks globally and locally. By successfully addressing the two issues, our proposed method, named Improved Continually Evolved Classifiers (CEC+), extends the potential of CEC without introducing any additional parameters. More precisely, extensive experiments on CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011, demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods.
We propose that the design and implementation of effectiveSocial Learning Analytics (SLA)present significant challenges and opportunities for both research and enterprise, in three important ...respects. The first is that the learning landscape is extraordinarily turbulent at present, in no small part due to technological drivers. Online social learning is emerging as a significant phenomenon for a variety of reasons, which we review, in order to motivate the concept of social learning. The second challenge is to identify different types of SLA and their associated technologies and uses. We discuss five categories of analytic in relation to online social learning; these analytics are either inherently social or can be socialised. This sets the scene for a third challenge, that of implementing analytics that have pedagogical and ethical integrity in a context where power and control over data are now of primary importance. We consider some of the concerns that learning analytics provoke, and suggest that Social Learning Analytics may provide ways forward. We conclude by revisiting the drivers and trends, and consider future scenarios that we may see unfold as SLA tools and services mature.
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