Experimenting with Educational Innovation for 50-plus
The Freudenthal Institute at Utrecht University is going to explore the opportunities for innovation in senior adult education. The innovations the institute will test are based on recent developments in the standard university curriculum, such as blended learning and activating learning methods. The experiment is done in cooperation with HOVO Utrecht, an educational institution that offers higher education to people over 50.
Digital learning tools can make a big difference for senior citizens, for example those who aren’t as mobile and have trouble attending lectures in person.
Older generations mostly grew up with classical education, with a lecturer standing at the front of the room providing the students with explanations and instructions. The Freudenthal Institute and HOVO Utrecht want to study whether the rapid pace of development in the field of educational innovation in primary, secondary, and higher education can be used to benefit this group of students as well.
“We’re steadily moving towards a society organised around life-long learning, but we still don’t know much about the best way to teach people over 50”, Pieters explains. “With this real-world experiment, we hope to gain a better understanding of the opportunities available for senior education.”
Digital learning environment
A course has been developed specifically for this study to conduct experiments using a variety of forms of educational innovation. Part of the course will be offered online. The students will be offered the course material via brief videos in advance, and the discussions with the fellow students and the lecturer will take place in a ‘digital learning environment’ as well as the classroom.
In order to gain a deeper understanding of the material, the students will also begin conducting some research on their own on the subject of the course: Big History. In so doing, they will learn how to research the history of an object from the perspectives of different scientific disciplines.
Mobility disability
In addition to contributing to the quality of senior education, the project offers other specific opportunities to the age cohort. Pieters: “There are plenty of people looking for an intellectual challenge later in life, but who aren’t physically capable of coming to a lecture. Digital, interactive learning tools could present new opportunities for them to attend high-quality education remotely.”