Despite the ubiquity of staff soft skills programmes, few studies have examined why and how academic and corporate services staff utilise these programmes for self-care/governance. This study reports on findings from an ethnography of soft skills learning and development programmes (LDPs) in a UK university, focusing on interviews with programme…

Active citizenship is increasingly being framed in the context of lifelong and life-wide learning. However, research on young people's participation in and experience of different forms of civic practice, particularly in informal settings in different sociocultural contexts, is scarce. Consequently, little is known about how these experiences…

This paper explores three themes, emerging from the Inter-Life project, an Art and Design education and social skills project set in a virtual world. We argue that they connect with the concerns raised by critical Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) researchers at the Alpine Rendezvous workshop entitled "TEL: the Crisis and the Response."…

There is great interest in the potential of smartphones to enable language learning during daily activities. However, this overlooks the paradox faced by migrant learners that while they have the educational goal of seeking to improve their language skills, they also have the cultural goal of fitting into the host society. Inappropriate use of…

By recognising the limitations of formal sex education, young people are able to seek out alternative material, gaining informal sexual knowledge through their own means and through a wide variety of sources. This paper derives from part of a larger study centred on feminism and heterosexuality in practice which features 17 feminist-identified…

This article is written by young people who attend an open-access youth project in the city centre of Hull. Although they describe themselves as "educational failures" (the "black holes"), they argue that they have a significant contribution to make to discussions about how to develop socially just education in schools. In the…

This article provides an example of how the World Café method can be used as a platform to encourage reflection on internationalisation in higher education. The World Café is a community engagement method that encourages participants to engage in reflection and dialogue in a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere. It promotes the use of multiple…

Using the badged open course, "Taking your first steps into Higher Education", this case study examines how assessment on online open courses draws on concepts of assessment used within formal and informal learning. Our experience was that assessment used within open courses, such as massive open online courses, is primarily determined…

The changing nature of teaching and learning in an age of accessible technologies provides challenges and opportunities for the design of learning events. Working with a sample of undergraduate students of education in one UK higher education institution we use an exploratory, qualitative approach to investigate students' spontaneous uses of their…

In 2013, the Open University (OU) in the UK launched a large-scale survey of users of its OpenLearn platform for open educational resources. The survey results revealed that OpenLearn is functioning as a showcase and a taster for the OU, thereby offering informal learners a bridge to formal education. In 2014 and 2015, the OpenLearn survey was…

Sandwich placements and other integrated work and study schemes are increasingly advocated as a key means by which universities can promote students' employability. However, there is little understanding of how successful placements work in terms of facilitating learning and development. Drawing on three longitudinal case studies of students who…

The Open University (OU) makes a proportion of all its taught modules available to the public via OpenLearn each year. This process involves the modification, of module excerpts, showcasing subject matter and teaching approach. This activity serves both the University's social and business missions through the delivery of free courses to the…

This article explores, from within the social constructivist paradigm and drawing on data from twenty-one semi-structured interviews with international postgraduate university students approaching the end of a one-year full-time taught Masters degree in the UK, the range of language development brokers that have had an impact on these students'…

This chapter describes a collection of selected papers from the 2017 Innovative Language Teaching and Learning at University conference (InnoConf), which took place in June 2017 at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. The theme of the conference was "Integrating Informal Learning into Formal Language Education." The aim of the…

This investigation focuses on participation and related investment patterns in job related non-formal education (NFE) in selected European countries. Broadening previous research formats of NFE are distinguished by investment including financial and time investments by employers, employees and public authorities. By this, company-sponsored and…