Decisions, Provisions and Disillusionment for Non-vocational Adult Learning (NVAL) Staff in South-Eastern Europe: a comparative appraisal of some policy developments with diminishing returns

Since 2000, the European Union has given greater attention to lifelong learning, as expressed in the Lisbon presidency conclusions and the general objectives of the Education and Training 2010 work programme. In September 2007, these policy proposals were further strengthened with the announcement of the ‘Action Plan on Adult Learning’ that sets out how Member States and other stakeholders could be supported to improve, implement and develop adult education and monitor its results. Because of the multitude of policy expectations, training and professional development for adult learning staff are still relatively uncommon in some parts of Europe, despite a societal demand, which also should be interpreted in the context of changing societal conditions and needs besides raising the quality of lifelong learning. This is largely echoed in South-East Europe where the situation of the training of adult learning staff is more on the downside than most policy-makers would have expected. In most South-East European countries, adult learning is expected to provide individual, cultural, and social improvement, to address illiteracy or earlier unsatisfactory access to initial education, and mostly to respond to labour market access problems. At the same time, adult learning staff have to face obstacles such as dependency on government or EU funding, changing political perspectives on and interest in adult education, policies prescribing an enclosed employment-oriented adult education market and occasionally a lack of national legislation or frameworks and structures covering their field. Along with these general findings, this article focuses on the comparison of current policies on training and professional development of adult learning staff in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, according to three vital topics:

• • Selection procedure and working conditions of adult learning staff (focusing on recruitment, professional expectations and employment situation).
• • Opportunities and obstacles for their professional development and evaluation (focusing on career paths and monitoring, assessing and evaluating issues).
• • Societal situation for the profession (focusing on attractiveness and social impact).

     

An Information Scanning Approach for Learning to Work on the Internet

Access to global information fundamentally alters the information scanning function of decision-makers. The flattening of the management pyramid means information scanning of external sources is being performed by personnel in middle and lower levels of management, not only in the traditional senior management level. Both graduate and undergraduate classes in information systems can effectively address the use of external information scanning through the teaching of Internet skills. This paper presents the course outline for a class in Global Communication Networks where a project-oriented approach was used to teach web-based skills. The importance of global information systems in decision-making and the use of the Internet as an information resource were emphasized in this class. A survey of students in the class found that this approach was successful in improving the perceived value of Internet-related tools for information scanning and professional decision-making.