Adult education and its connection with the ongoing iPath2UpSkilling project
Adult education is concerned not with preparing people for life, but rather with helping people to live more successfully. Thus, if there is to be an overarching function of the adult education enterprise, it is to assist adults to increase competence, or negotiate transitions, in their social roles (worker, parent, retiree etc.), to help them gain greater fulfilment in their personal lives, and to assist them in solving personal and community problems. (Darkenwald and Merriam 1982: 9)
Adult Education is the passport to living a healthy and productive life. The iPath2UpSkilling Project seeks to reflect these core beliefs through the congruence between Partners’ experiences in their adult education programs and knowledge, skills, beliefs, and actions considered by the partnership’s members to be important for adult education sector.
The project is aiming to empower the adult educators with an integrated and innovative iPath2UpSkilling Platform and Programme together with the specific skills for using it in order to assure high quality upskilling pathways for adult learners. Within the Project, the new iPath2UpSkilling Programme under development, together with the e-Platform and tools, combines three basic steps in one strong tailored upskilling pathway for adult learners from different countries:
An e-Professional Counseling Module, as guidance services provided to adult learners, to empower the adult educators to help their beneficiaries in order to come to terms with the problems they face and to guide them along the upskilling pathways;
A Certified e-Training Module to empower the professionals to teach the adult learners to do something they don’t know and to certify adult learners’ newly acquired skills. The project brings three main training solutions:
e-training materials for transversal key competencies and other competencies not taught in schools, as ready to be used by the adult educators from different countries;
assistance through an extensive training network, introduced to adult learners through an interactive e-map with the closest key adult learning providers, in order to cover other tailored training fields not covered by the Platform; a Library with Open Educational Resources to be used by the trainers and the trainees.
An e-Coaching Module to empower the adult educators to assist their worldwide adult learners in identifying and making the most of their personal talents and capabilities, helping to change their perspectives and to discover solutions to achieve their personal and career goals by developing their potential, to increase their performance.
In line with the EU’s strategical objectives of improving the quality and efficiency of education and training and in addition to the iPath2UpSkilling Platform’s e-tools, the adult educators will have at their disposal other useful resources such as: one Handbook for using iPath2UpSkilling Platform for each of both categories (trainers and trainees), a Handbook for adult educators explaining how to use the Platform’s e-tools in order to develop new online trainings or other Open Educational Resources and a Mentorship Manual for adult educators to explain the iPath2UpSkilling Programme’ approach and how it works in the benefit of adult learners.
The project partners strongly believe that the project will make a sound impact on adult learner’s engagement in systematic and sustained self- educating activities in order to gain new forms of knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values, in order to live more successfully, by increasing the quality and efficiency of education and training.
