Parallels of the Nurse-Patient, Facilitator-Learner Trust Relationships as they Affect the National Economy

This chapter addresses the necessity of a clearer understanding of the vital element of trust. Trust is a strong common element in both education and healthcare with the possibility of influencing not only our personal lives but that of our national economy. A concept analysis including step by step construction for the analysis of the nurse-patient trust as it applies to willingness to seek healthcare and implications are presented in this chapter. The parallel of the nurse-patient and facilitator-learner relationship is identified along with implications on the national economy. The purpose in this chapter is to call attention to the elemental phenomenon of trust and encourage individual reflection, continued research, and implementation of trust into these two vital disciplines and in life itself.

Nation Building through Andragogy and Lifelong Learning

This chapter addresses the author’s international experience of and involvement in the very essence of exemplifying my conception of the following in various countries around the globe – nation building through andragogy and lifelong learning: on the cutting edge educationally, economically, and governmentally. Although I have been privileged to engage adult learners in research and learning experiences in a dozen countries through andragogical and lifelong learning processes, the chapter presents only a sketch of the author’s personally unique approach of work and learning in what he calls nation building with people in five countries: Brazil, South Africa, Mali, Thailand, and Austria. The purpose is to clearly articulate some of the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the most successful facilitation activities of helping adults learn in such a way that any adult educator, who may be disposed and committed to do so, could learn these processes and replicate them with others.

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Become a Lifelong Learner

In this chapter, the authors propose examining online learning in higher education as a mechanism for promoting lifelong learning skills, and thus, as a way to provide capital to students. With that in mind, they provide a theoretical foundation to demonstrate the need for workforce development as well as interdisciplinary perspectives on the skills and requisites necessary for successful lifelong learning, and how both are important to the central mission of higher education. This chapter explores the literature and major issues surrounding the importance and use of capital and lifelong learning skills, and how both can be gained through online learning. The authors argue that lifelong learning skills can be generated through transformative leaning experiences and that facilitating these experiences should be a goal of online learning in higher education in order to ensure that students have the skills necessary to gain social, cultural, and economic capital in order to remain relevant through their lives in a 21st century, learning society. In this chapter, the authors discuss several relevant examples of “Tools for Lifelong Learning” including specific examples to demonstrate how online classes can serve as a mechanism to generate capital for students in higher education settings. They provide a model and build upon theory across higher education, sociology, adult learning, and educational psychology to provide a new perspective of the importance of lifelong learning as well as best practices for achieving these goals.

Teaching Digital Natives Using Technology

Students currently entering higher education are faced with a variety of new learning challenges and, over the course of their career in higher education, will develop a variety of skills that enable them to succeed in the workforce. Furthermore, students today use many different forms of technology on a day to day basis. As such, academic institutions are supplementing their curricula with additional information and communication technology (ICT) resources. These resources happen to include but are not limited to multimedia technology, which can be essential to students’ lifelong learning needs. This chapter discusses characteristics of today’s student entering higher education, ICT, multimedia learning, multimedia design elements, and perceived effectiveness of multimedia technology. Moreover, this chapter examines how these topics can help to promote workforce readiness, meaningful learning, and lifelong learning among today’s technology capable students.

A Critical Theory of Adult and Community Education

Critical theory is one of the most influential theoretical frameworks influencing scholarship within the field of adult and community education. This chapter outlines what constitute the chief elements of critical theory using Horkheimer’s (1937/1995) classic essay as a touchstone for this analysis. It argues for a set of adult learning tasks that are embedded in this analysis and that apply both to formal adult education settings and informal learning projects carried out in communities. Future likely trends are the extension of critical theory’s unit of analysis to include race, class, gender, disability and sexual identity, and critical analysis of digital technologies.

Technology Aspects of Information Literacy in the Workplace

Workplaces need information literate employees in order to manage the increasing quantity and complexity of information that impacts their organizations, yet they provide uneven information literacy education. Information and technology literacy are also imperative for the organization as a whole. Decision makers should systematically identify key information and technology literacy processes within the organization, and assess the learning gaps of their employees. Employers should allocate human and material resources to facilitate a variety of formal and informal learning venues, incorporating technology. Such education should also reflect andragogical principles and authentic collaborative learning activities, which can be facilitated by technology-based collaborative tools.

Development and Sustainability of Learning Societies

The chapter reviews the development and sustainability of learning societies, and employs an examination of literature to identify the connections that may assist in the-improvement of the 21st century (21st century) workforce. To increase their learning, it is imperative to create a place that embeds the culture, expectations, and appropriate learning behaviors within the environment. The tools are about the cultivation of connections and communities, not solely based on 21st century technology. This case study explored three key concepts: community connection, policy connection, and netizens’ connection.

Game-Based Virtual-World Environments to Engage Lifelong Learners in Open Courseware for Open Learning

The Open Educational Resource (OER) movement has reached its tipping point in recent years due to advancement of technologies. The OpenCourseWare (OCW) of MIT, for instance, has inspired higher education institutions around the world to deploy OCW systems that provide educational contents free of charge to lifelong learners. In Taiwan, the Opensource Opencourse Prototype System (OOPS; www.myoops.org) plays a significant role in enabling Chinese-speaking learners to benefit from this global movement. Although OOPS has attracted hundreds of thousands of users with open courses translated into Chinese, understanding who these users are and why they chose this particular venue to advance their informal and lifelong learning remains elusive. As a result, the OOPS and other compatible open courseware portals around the world are often challenged by issues related to user engagement that could ultimately determine the sustainability of any open courseware portals. From the perspective of learning system design, it is impossible to develop and deploy effective user engagement strategies without knowing who the users are and what drive them to use the open learning system. To address this issue, this chapter, informed by open courseware users’ feedback, proposes a game-based learning approach situated in virtual worlds to improve and sustain user engagement in open learning environments.

Evolving Online Learning

In the United Kingdom, the increased broadband speeds and the availability of mobile Internet access via 3G mobile phones and tablet computers, along with an ever growing number of free Wi-Fi hotspots located within urban areas becoming available, has meant that there are now more opportunities than ever to access online information. For the adult learner, technology considered innovative a decade ago to pioneering online communities of UK head teachers who collectively made up Talking Heads has now become commonplace, particularly in the guise of virtual learning environments (VLEs). This chapter sets out to show how the knowledge gained from those early communities of practice informed the development of the fully online Ultraversity degree, which in turn has been able to provide pointers to the possible framework for online learning provision in higher education. This is particularly pertinent for this sector of education in the UK, which is faced with raising course fees threefold. By making a greater number of university courses accessible online, available anytime, and from virtually anywhere, particularly via mobile Internet devices, an alternative and more affordable route to higher education in the UK and elsewhere in the world awaits to be developed.

Millennial Adult Learners in the 21st Century

Millennials and their learning needs are in general misunderstood. Little research on how millennials prefer to learn, work, and live has contributed to unproductive, contradictory notions about this generation to the detriment of all. More research is clearly needed to better understand the current and future behaviors of millennials. A wide array of advancing technologies and their direct applications to online and face-to-face learning contexts are explored as means to engaging millennials more in adult learning endeavors. Best practices in employing technologies in the classroom, such as promoting interactivity and social presence through blogs and YouTube, are highlighted in online contexts and through course design. How technology impacts those who have not had exposure to technology is explored as well.