Education for the more mature?
How do you qualify to be a student in the UK? Ideally, you need to be under 25 and looking for a vocational course. Only 1% of the UK education budget is available for older students. This in the face of demographic change which sees 11 million people of pensionable age, many of whom will be looking for something to do post-employment. It is being left to private organisations such as the NCS to provide brain stimulus to our older people, a necessary part of maintaining health into older age.
Ben Bova Credits His Early Training
Science Fiction writer, editor and journalist, Ben Bova credits his early practical training in High School and local newspapers as giving him the solid grounding in writing style and work ethic which shaped his career. Bova was given his first break by his English teacher who put him to work on the school paper. He was later to apply that experience to studying for his journalism degree and working on the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is best known to fans of science fiction as the editor of Analog and author of many books such as Maxwell’s Demons, Mars and Titan. He also co-wrote the story for George Lucas’ film THX 1138.
Education is the key to long life.
Edna Parker
Edna Parker died recently, aged 115 years. The Shelbyville, Indiana, resident attributed her long and healthy life to “more education.” She was a pioneer of women’s education, graduating in 1911 from Franklin College. The message is clear: sign up for a course now and live longer.
More from Associated Press…
Online Learning Goes Deeper
Researchers at Indiana University have discovered an unsuspected benefit for online learners over those working in more traditional ways. It seems that the online approach lends itself to deep learning, a type of learning that goes beyond rote memorising and focuses on reflection, integrative learning, and higher-order thinking such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), which was conducted by the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, collected information from nearly 380,000 randomly selected first-year and senior students at 722 four-year colleges and universities across the United States. NSSE explored the experiences of online learners through a set of additional questions given to more than 22,000 students from 47 institutions. The results were released on 10th November.
“Critics of distance education assume that face-to-face classes have inherent advantages as learning environments,” said Alexander C. McCormick, NSSE director and associate professor of education at Indiana University. “But these results indicate that those who teach classes online may be making special efforts to engage their students.” We know that NCS tutors always make a special effort and it appears that this is a real benefit to students.
You can read more at Top News.
Credit Crunch May Bring Cap On University Places
Universities in England and Wales are warning that a funding shortfall will mean a freeze on extra places. The statement came in response to a letter from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, saying “at this stage” there will be no allocations of extra places until 2011. More from the BBC…
However, there are no plans to limit access to courses offered by the NCS College and more are in the pipeline.
New Courses At NCS College
Two new courses have been introduced to the catalogue of the NCS College of Online Learning. These are “Your Story – Writing A Life” and “The Wonderful World Of Psychology.”
If you have feel you have life experiences that would interest a wider readership, then Joanna Howard’s course could provide you with the tools to create your own memoir or autobiography. Anyone can write down what happened to them, but there are approaches and techniques that make the writing more illuminating for the writer and more interesting for potential readers. This is what “Your Story – Writing A Life” is about.
Have you ever wondered whether you’d make a good psychologist, or just wanted to understand more about why people behave in the ways that they do? Zaynab D’Elia can help you out. “The Wonderful World Of Psychology” is an introduction to this interesting topic. All areas are covered the lesser known with the better known and anyone considering deeper study of Psychology would find this a good place to start.
Is College Necessary? – Tutors Are.
Trent Batson of Campus Technology has raised the question: “Is College Necessary in a Knowledge-Drenched World?” The point being that, when we have so much technology in our homes that libraries, art galleries and other institutional places have difficulty competing, do people need to attend a college to get an education?
Well, it seems that most of the facilities of a college can be replicated at home, apart from one. Face to face contact with a tutor is still at the heart of learning. Only a real human tutor can take a student’s questions in the context of that student’s current state of knowledge and produce a meaningful answer at that moment in the student’s learning. Something that the New Curiosity Shop has always tried to promote, with a real tutor on every course.
Read more at Campus Technology.
NCS Open Space is now… Open
We are proud to announce that our NCS Open Space is now open. Here you can try out a small range of course ‘snippets,’ from Egyptian Archaeology, to astronomy. We are launching this as part of Adult Learners’ Week 2008, but NCS Open Space will remain open from now on.
The course snippets themselves will change, so it is well worth popping back from time to time to find out what has been added recently. Join our mailing list, and we’ll keep you posted of new additions to our course snippets, and our course catalogue.
Have fun
Non-vocational Adult Learning Comes Back, but Without Teachers?
Peter Davies, principal of City Lit, is concerned that the Government’s desire to promote what it terms “informal adult learning” may herald the decline of traditional classes and leave many learners to study alone with little more than the support of the internet.
A consultation paper published in January by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills appears to focus heavily on the use of IT as a study aid and says little about the role of qualified teachers. Davies sees this as a potential erosion of quality. “The risk for us is that people will say there is so much going on through the internet that it’s no longer necessary to fund more expensive adult education classes,” he says.
Is the UK Government endorsing the New Curiosity Shop or is this just another spin on cost-cutting? More in the Independent…
Adult Learners’ Week – launch of NCS Open Space
As part of our contribution to Adult Learners’ Week we are launching our NCS Open Space.
In the NCS Open Space you can try a sample of our courses – course snippets – and try a liitle light learning. Each snippet should take no more than around 15 minutes to complete.
To find out more visit our Adult Learners’ Week page
