Sustainable development has become an increasingly important topic in recent years as the world has become more aware of the need to protect the present and the future. Sustainable development is concerned with the improvement of life quality for all. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without denying the…

The present publication is one of the outcomes of the OBSERVAL-NET project (followup of the OBSERVAL project). The main aim of OBSERVAL-NET was to set up a stakeholder centric network of organisations supporting the validation of non-formal and informal learning in Europe based on the formation of national working groups in the 8 participating…

Innovation is crucial to the competitiveness of the economies of Europe, and learning is crucial to innovation. The most important trend shift is not that knowledge is becoming more important but that it is becoming obsolete more rapidly than before, so that firms and employees constantly have to learn and acquire new competencies. This involves…

Because a growing proportion of the world's working population is in the informal sector (in work areas generally outside the sphere of state protection), planners of vocational training for adults must pay closer attention to those concepts of teaching and learning that have relevance for the informal sector, and they must develop strategies for…

We are delighted to welcome you to the International Conference on Education and New Developments 2015-END 2015, taking place in Porto, Portugal, from 27 to 29 of June. Education, in our contemporary world, is a right since we are born. Every experience has a formative effect on the constitution of the human being, in the way one thinks, feels and…

This document contains six papers about and from a roundtable discussion of poverty alleviation, work, and adult learning. The "Introduction" (Madhu Singh) presents an overview of the roundtable. "Work-Related Adult Education: Challenges and Possibilities in Poverty Areas" (Enrique Pieck) describes work-related adult education…

WORKTOW was a multidisciplinary action research project carried out in 27 small and medium-sized enterprises in the United Kingdom, Finland, and Norway. The main focus was on the learning of workers aged 45 and older. In-depth case studies were conducted in all three countries involving a range of learning interventions. Results showed age was not…

This book contains 15 papers: "Introduction" (Madhu Singh); "Adult Learning and the Transformation of Work" (Paul Belanger); "Future of Work and Adult Learning" (Ettore Gelpi); "The Obligation of Education in the Face of Globalisation" (Nicole Arnaud); "Lifelong Learning and Vocational Education and…

Research on changes and issues in workplace learning in Australia over the past 6 years was reviewed. Special attention was paid to four topics: importance of learning in the workplace; nature of workplace learning; factors affecting the quality of workplace learning; and recognition of workplace learning. Selected findings were as follows: (1)…

This book examines the rhetoric surrounding the notion of informal learning in order to expand debate about the uses of informal learning in workplaces and about attempts to "recognize" it through competency-based standards. The following topics are among those discussed in the book's eight chapters: (1) the nature of informal learning…

The French worker certification system is focusing on efforts to design a scheme for the accreditation of work-based learning. If implemented, the scheme would be directed by a business-government-worker partnership, recognized and accepted by different occupations, and accessible to all employees regardless of the way their qualifications were…

Policies and practices in the areas of identification, assessment, and recognition of nonformal learning in the European Union (EU) were reviewed. The review focused on national and EU-level experiences regarding the following areas and issues: recognition of the contextual nature of learning; identification of methodological requirements for…