ONLINE TRANSFORMATIVE LEARNING

The transformative quality of adult education will in several ways shape the future. To the existing critical challenges of climate change, sustainable development, increasing migration, precarity of employment and of food regimes, has been added the abrupt need to face the COVID-19 pandemic and, not least, to discover ways to build a more resilient society in its aftermath.

These challenges cannot be met through marginal change; in order to survive and thrive, broad swathes of the population need to be engaged in the search for viable transnational transformative solutions. Increasingly, this engagement is understood to encompass online learning opportunities. However, the present upsurge of different, uncoordinated initiatives regarding online education seems to be of little relevance to Transformative Learning since the emphasis is on a transfer of existing knowledge. This is indeed the ‘traditional’ sphere of MOOCs and other online educational initiatives. What is lacking, or is just beginning to emerge, is an appreciation of the skills and competences needed to design and deliver an online programme for Transformative Learning..

Online delivery is particularly challenging in a transformative context because so much hinges on personal qualities that have traditionally been conveyed face-to-face.

In the networks represented by the partner organizations of this project, there is innovative experimentation with these questions, based on different models or theories and building on different face-to-face skill sets. This project aimed to synthesize this experimentation in order to further explore the boundaries of the possible. What are the opportunities and limitations for Transformative Learning online?

Both partner networks as well as non-partner networks around the globe were invited to participate as source of input about existing practices, participant in one or more experiments, and recipient, and/or user and potential disseminator of the results.

This project follows the EU Erasmus+ funded project “Building capacity for transformative learning”, which ended in September 2020. Its focus was on enabling adult educators to bring a transformative edge to their offline programs, providing TL to their learners. One of the outcomes is the book A Transformative Edge – Knowledge, Inspiration and Experiences for educators of adults with more than 40 contributing practitioners experienced in Transformative Learning.

Experimenters library
A searchable collection of experimenter’s reference materials is available on this page.