Adult Education

What is the initiative and where is it implemented (city or country, for example)?

Upskilling Pathways Recommendation is an initiative by The European Commission to improve the prospects of adults with low levels of educational qualifications. The Recommendation promotes pathway creation that enables adults to fill in the gaps in their literacy and numeracy skills and enhance their digital skills. Upskilling Pathways are accessible to adults with low qualifications.

The University of Third Age was first introduced in the second half of the twentieth century in France following legislation that assigned the responsibility of promoting lifelong learning to universities. The initiative gained international recognition, and U3As were established across all continents in more than 60 countries. The target audience of the U3As are people in the third age phase of their life, which is usually considered to be above 60 years of age; however, some universities offer the programme to people aged 50 and above.

The University of the Third Age (U3A) is an initiative targeted at individuals over 60 years of age who are eager to engage in different courses for the sake of personal development. It emerged in the second half of the twentiethth century, beginning in France and spreading, first across Europe and, eventually, Asia (Formosa, 2000). Lebanon became a host to the only U3A in the Arab world – the University for Seniors (UfS) at the American University of Beirut (Chahine and Sibai, 2019).

The Institute for Adult Learning (IAL) is an autonomous institute within the Singapore University of Social Sciences. Its mandate is to be the national centre of excellence in learning, practice and research for the Training and Adult Education (TAE) sector in continued support of the national SkillsFuture movement.

CommUniversity, an initiative of the University of Technology (UTech) in Jamaica, is an ‘outreach intervention to create a local community-university network to collaborate learning, exchange of ideas and knowledge for enhancement of life and prosperity, through partnerships with public, private agencies, and individuals’ (Bartley-Bryan, 2013, p. 2). The concept of the CommUniversity is aligned to one of the UTech strategic goals for national impact: assisting local communities in building their capacities for learning, growth and development.