Today we talked with Herb Cook about the Fort Worden Life Long Learning project in Port Townsend, WA. Goddard College came up as the graduate program provider at Fort Worden. This video not only helps us understand adult learning needs as understood in the 60’s but also fits well in our PSA qwest for video success.
what a trip! ….as people use to day back in the 60s…
The strongest point made in this video is the value of not having to be on campus very often or for very long. Life Long Learning today has a similar appeal in that we generally understand learners need a LOT of flexibility to fit learning activities into their already fairly committed adult lives.
Yet the core elements being provided for LLL vary greatly from one implementation to another. Places like Goddard are “into” liberal studies where the student designs the course content at least partly on their own.
Whereas Phoenix University, the online and no campus entity, has much more conventional learning activities, albeit some parts online. Students take the prescribed content which is mostly a one size fits all proposition, and not student co-created.
Certification is a huge problem with liberal studies and student centered learning designs, because it removes many of the common ways of assessing competence and achievement, and replaces that with very individual results which are hard to compare to others, whether positively or negatively.
In the US we tend to do certification using the one size fits all model, and that isn’t going to work well in an era when LLL are ubiquitous…. and when “doing their own thing” online and elsewhere isn’t just the prerogative of a handful of students.
What would a “scaled up” Goddard type approach look like?
Perhaps new cloud tools will seamlessly create a menu of competencies that learners can select for DIY learning with verification from some authority. Of course, many learners do not have the self directed learning skills for success so support is still key. Does support come from a social learning construct or some other Mentoring option?