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There is a great need to use technology in adult education. In this blog post, we’ll examine digital inclusion challenges that impeded using technology in adult education, and how some of the field’s foremost researchers and practitioners are addressing these issues. About 43 million U.S. adults struggle with low literacy (Mamedova & Pawlawski, 2019). This is an equity issue because strong foundational skills help adults gain secondary education credentials. These credentials open up post-secondary education options and career growth, leading to higher…

The CREATE Adult Skills Network is starting its fourth year of operation in Fall 2024. The Network’s job is to help expand the adult skills research base and resources for using, and then facilitate the translation and use of that research in everyday practice. We could not do this without the contributions from each of our six research teams and our Network Partners. Network Partners volunteer their time and share ideas during Network meetings and workgroup discussions, providing perspectives from directly teaching adult learners, informing and…

Dr. Christine Miller and Dr. Daphne Greenberg   Researchers put a lot of effort into ensuring that the content of a curriculum aligns with theory and previous scholarship. However, content issues should not be the only consideration. Diversity, inclusion, equity, and access (DEIA) issues need to also be addressed. The best intended curriculum will be unsuccessful if it fails to address the heterogeneity of adult learners, instructors, and settings. The goal of the W-AE (Writing in Adult Education) project is to develop and try out a technology-based…

by Aydin Durgunoglu and Erin CaryAccording to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), 108.4 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced as of late 2022 (https://www.unhcr.org/us/). Although these statistics help illustrate the incredible scale of this problem, it is also important to understand how it is affecting individuals and their families. Recently, we have completed a small-scale implementation of our CILIA-T curriculum with approximately 50 adult English learners in four classrooms. The students came from various…

CILIA-T, or “Content-Integrated Language Instruction for Adults with Technology Support”, is a full intermediate/advanced adult ELL curriculum that integrates U.S. history, civics and government content as well as digital skill-building. The curriculum, which is part of the CREATE Network, is completing its third year of development under a team including adult ELL and technology educators, literacy experts and content scholars. A draft of the CILIA-T curriculum is currently being piloted in four adult education classrooms by experienced teachers in Minnesota.…

Adult Learning and Education in Digital Environments: Learning From Global Efforts to Promote Digital Literacy and Basic Skills of Vulnerable PopulationsAuthor: Judy A. Alamprese, MAJournal: Adult Learning, Volume 35, Issue 2AbstractThe pervasive role of digital technologies in adult learning and education (ALE) was a prominent theme throughout the deliberations of the Seventh International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VII) held June 15-17, 2022 in Morocco. CONFINTEA VII embodied the worldwide interest in digital technologies through the use of a…

Recently, SkillBlox was updated to include over 1,000 new activities in four new subject areas, along with a number of new features designed to ease the process of sharing and adapting SkillBlox created by other users. But what led to these updates over others? In Designing in the Open: Building Free Software, Blox by Blox, the TSTM-SkillBlox team describes the invention and building of the free, open education resource (OER) platform. The team shares early insights gleaned as they’ve worked to build a sustainable, equitable open education ecosystem…

The TSTM-SkillBlox Instructional Support Pilot is exploring how the TSTM instructional framework, delivered through the SkillBlox online platform, can improve technology-enabled adult skills instruction. We launched the first component of the pilot, an implementation study of TSTM, in Fall of 2021 to explore the needs and experiences of teachers who are aligning their instructional practices with TSTM. We found promising practices and identified obstacles to inform development of SkillBlox that supports TSTM…

The digital technology landscape is constantly evolving. To sustain provision of innovative and quality instruction that prepares adult learners to use digital technologies in schooling and work, adult education program leaders and teachers must continuously evolve in the way they make use of digital technologies in their programming. This can be a dizzying challenge as practitioners and program leaders may feel they have insufficient experience and confidence to make choices about what technology to use, when to use it, and for what purpose. Quality technical…

The National Center for Education Research (NCER), a center within the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), is seeking insight to guide its efforts to fund quick-turnaround high-reward, scalable solutions intended to improve education outcomes for all students.  This RFI is focused on a proposed new program called “From Seedlings to Scale” (S2S). IES is considering a three-phase investment strategy for S2S to support transformative ideas as they grow from seedlings to scalable solutions. As proposed, S2S would focus on high quality research, robust…