No undergraduate or postgraduate programmes currently exist for the professional education of informal educators. The authors outline the development of previous programmes and consider the emergence of informal education as a discrete concept. The article then highlights some key failings in the professional education of informal educators and…

Purpose: This study aims to reflect on "good practices" in doctoral research supervision and transfer the author's experience to other academics. The author explains the sources of his approach to doctoral research supervision drawing on traditional practice in adult learning and some reference to phenomenology as a "meeting of…

As graduate and professional programs internationalize to provide students with global competencies and skills, more graduate students are participating in education abroad programs. Graduate students represent a growing portion of the total population participating in education abroad, with short-term, faculty-directed (STFD) programs expanding…

Being a subject matter expert does not make someone a good ins­tru­ctor. Most institutions do little to prepare first-time instructors. The Marine Corps puts new instructors of graduate-level programs through a rigorous 4-week program to prepare them as first-time instructors. They are exposed to adult learning theory, assessment processes, and…

This chapter is a case story of the evolution of the Master of Education in Health Professions Education (MEHPE), a collaborative graduate program developed by the Adult Learning and Development program at Cleveland State University and the Cleveland Clinic.

Opsimaths are a unique group of late learners among adult learners who qualify as Knowles' 'neglected species'. Opsimaths usually face more daunting challenges in their academic journey than other adult learners. In this study, we employ the [exploratory] phenomenological design to present the experiences of 15 opsimaths in Ghana who entered the…

Higher education has undergone a radical transformation through the use of technology, including the offering of online courses and degrees. However, programs with fieldwork-based components that require students to demonstrate application of adult learning principles by performing specific skills in clinical settings face unique challenges. This…

In the past few years online learning has grown to a point where it was estimated that by 2020, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, five million people would have completed their education online. Going to school outside of a traditional classroom could be more convenient for many learners but may present a barrier to concepts of socialization and…

The disruptive effects of the COVID pandemic on vulnerable and/or minority demographic groups among 1) student populations and 2) persons employed in low wage sectors are well-established. This study examined whether disparity in the disruptive effects of the pandemic extend to adult learners employed in "bright prospect" sectors (e.g.,…

This qualitative case study examined the cultural learning insights of four educators during and after an immersion experience in Kenya. During this experience the participants delivered professional development sessions to teachers in two rural Kenyan schools, and stayed with Kenyan families. Mezirow's transformational learning theory,…

Advocates of rubrics have claimed that the inclusion of employers in the shaping of management education rubrics can help students demonstrate to employers that they have relevant managerial skills. There is an inevitable logic to this argument. Let employers determine what they want from graduates, and academics can then design programs to…

Many students return to graduate programs as experts in their prior fields. "Returners," as they are commonly termed, have undergraduate degrees and have worked five or more years before returning for a graduate degree. While there is a significant body of literature on graduate students in general, there is less research on students…

This case study both shines a light on the flipped classroom paradigm and exemplifies successful faculty-librarian collaboration. The co-authors leveraged an existing collegial relationship into a productive partnership to create a multi-faceted flipped classroom module. The module, developed over the course of three and a half years, was designed…

Online group work can be complicated because of its asynchronous characteristics and lack of physical presence, and its requirements for skills in handling technology, human relationships, and content-related tasks. This study focuses on the administrative, logistical and relationship-related challenges in online group work. Challenges in areas…

The difficult times in which we live require innovative, creative, and hopeful pedagogies of adult education. This article describes a nontraditional experiential, "empathy-invoking" approach to the teaching of a graduate course on the theory and research of adult learning. The approach begins with the building of a safe learning…