One of the primary goals of adult basic education programs is to help individuals develop the reading, writing, and math skills necessary to access stable employment opportunities. In the US, this need has been largely overlooked by the burgeoning educational technology sector. To understand how learning technologies might support these learners…

This paper argues for conceptualizing the notion of personal learning environments in higher education from an explicit adult education perspective that emphasizes the realization, re-instrumentation, and integration of learning activity in the wider context of adult life. It discusses and re-interprets an existing proposal for modeling "the…

This study aimed to investigate the differences in learners' emotion, cognitive load, and cognitive performance among various scaffolding DGBLs, and the influences of emotion and cognitive load on cognitive performance when using DGBLs. Participants were 97 adult learners from some community college, randomly divided into the control group with 32…

This article argues for a flexible model of learning for adults which allows them to make choices and contextualise their learning in a manner appropriate to their own professional practice whilst also developing as a member of a learning community. It presents a design based around online "learning activities" which draws on ideas of…

There is evidence to suggest that mature students learn particularly effectively in a problem-solving environment, and that they appear to be especially responsive to analogies and metaphors. Three examples are given of domains where the student has to convert a formulation into an equivalent diagram. Arguably, the process of performing this…