Pilot Course

3AC courses will be organized at each institution with a group of 10 to 20 senior learners who will test approximately 20 hours of teaching in accordance with the local parameters and preferences highlighted by the initial survey. A biopsychosocial approach is expected, but this should not exclude a disciplinary limited focus in some context. The partners will use different complementary gerontagogic approaches, depending on the scientific and practical strengths at each institution.

  • Pathological ageing will not be taught. The entire programme will be the subject of prior mutual consultation but it is not expected to be the same at each university. Such a strategy seems to be most fruitful for all, to perform comparative exchanges and to enrich perspectives.
  • The learners will not only follow the teaching, but they will also take active part in this research conducted thanks to this programme. The underlying idea and driver are that 3AC is to be developed with the senior learners and not simply for them. This experimentation will be followed up qualitatively by involving young volunteers, e.g. qualifying individuals in educational sciences at Bachelor's, Master's or Doctorate level. Different methods may be relevant for this: analysis of lessons with an observation grid, semi-structured interviews of focus groups. At least one focus group involving the learners in the different universities will be implemented during a video session with simultaneous interpretation (Virtual exchange).
  • Knowledge of the learners' profile will be deepened in each university in order to get a better understanding of their educational needs and to improve the approach of such specific learners in the framework of gerontagogy.
  • In the Activity 2, a general project bibliography may be supplemented by bibliographical exchanges related to the content of the courses. Based on this literature and on the data analyses, conclusions will be drawn individually by each HEI and conjointly.

How is it going to help to reach the project obectives

The implementation of a pilot course in the four partner institutions will provide concrete results on the teaching from the point of view of the academic staff (lecturers and researchers) and from the point of view of the learners. The implementation of a course, even with a small number of hours, will help to improve the gerontagogic approach, since previous experience of the academic staff in adult education is related to middle-aged adult learners, and rarely with learners over this age. The senior learners, though active and healthy, may learn in a different way than younger adults do. Their intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to undertake training are likely to be different, as are their expectations as regards the teachers. They also constitute a highly diversified audience. Even though publications about gerontagogy may be found in the field of educational sciences, as far as we know, most of them present an elaborate theoretical analysis with a step back from the studies that nourished it or based on the own experience of the authors. However, the 3AC team also needs to acquire very practical skills (including improving the teaching-learning process through digital technologies, increasingly used by baby boomers), hence the interest of activity 2. Ultimately, the questionning is even more complex since it is about optimizing a gerontagogical practice dedicated to gerontological teaching. The learners are expected to benefit from increasing their knowledge of the ageing processes, while they are already intimately faced with them. There is therefore a double challenfe, theoretical and practical, in the implementation of the pilot course and in its follow-up.

Expected results of the activity

The implementation of a pilot course in the four partner institutions will provide results that are not limited to a unique context, but may be influences by macro (e.g. national parameters) to micro (e.g. lessons, teachers, relationships within the group) factors. Obviously, effects described in the four contexts will gave a more general value.

Lecturers will provide feedback from their own experience, both in terms of content and socio-organizational aspects. They will thus analyze their feelings in terms of reinforcement and disappointment, as well as the social interactions with the group of senior learners and within the group. They will compare this experience to their practice with younger learners in comparable numbers. 

Focus groups will be implemented close to the end of the training session in each university. The goal is to assess attitudes, feelings and beliefs of the senior learners about their experience during the training. Although some dependent variables may also be assessed by questionnaires and, with maximum quality via in-person interviews (as planned by ULille and UWr), some of them are more likely to be revealed via the social gathering and the interaction that being in a focus groups entails. Pre-post questionnaires will also be used to quantify the effects of the training on how they perceive their own ageing process with a specific semantic differential questionnaire.

Lesson observations are also planned at UWr and possibly at ULille. If participants agree with this, video recording will help to overcome the fleeting nature of observation and will facilitate the coding with retrospective refining of the observation grid which will be subject of simultaneous interpretation from national tuition language to English. This will be an optimal strategy in this exploratory context whose evolution will depend on the actions and the words of one another.

Co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This website reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained here in.