Lifelong Learning

Learning outcome

Critically appraise and continue to develop personal and professional capabilities.

Student Benefits

Graduates embrace the habit of lifelong learning – a habit that enables them to stay up to date with their chosen profession and continue to develop knowledge and skills beyond the institutional context. The developed attributes of the lifelong learner (curiosity, initiative, independence, transfer and reflection) foster career success and enable both greater options in life and more meaningful contributions to community.

Scaffolding

Lifelong learning encompasses the pedagogies of self-directed and self-determined learning. Lifelong learning habits develop through iterative teaching and learning practice – once is not enough. Lifelong learning teaching and assessment practices are developed throughout coursework: modeled, scaffolded, and culminated with students identifying and meeting their very own learning needs.

Course Requirements

Each course should contain the following elements as assessable items:

  • Identification of current personal, academic and professional learning needs and opportunities.
  • Forecasting of future personal and professional learning needs and opportunities.
  • Assessment of self: personally, academically and professionally.
  • Articulation of the progress and depth of personal, academic and professional learning.

Teaching Practices

  • Encourage and enable students to embrace responsibility for their own learning through inspired and inspirational learning design, assessments and activities.
  • Engage students in the discovery and determination of their own learning processes and needs.
  • Maintain and enhance a student’s exploration of self within the contexts of today.
  • Encourage students to negotiate and design their own learning.
  • Develop a student’s skills to construct assessment criteria, negotiate against external standards and make judgements using those criteria.
  • Enable students to articulate the depth and progress of their own learning.
  • Require students to reflect on capabilities and construct habits for learning beyond the institutional context.
  • Place the student in charge of assessing how they learn.

Assessment

Anticipating and preparing for lifelong learning post-graduation necessitates assessment tasks that are socially constructed/participative/authentic/contextualised. Assessment tasks need to be scaffolded throughout a course of study to increasingly foster self-directed and self-determined learning.

A sample capstone assessment task: Drawing on your previous learning and assessment task outcomes, those aligned to your understanding of your personal, professional and career development needs, you are to anticipate your learning needs post-graduation. You are to do this by reflecting upon and identifying the knowledge, attributes, skills and/or any values “gaps” that are likely to need your attention. As part of this task you are to:

  • review and potentially extend prior self-assessment criteria, tools and processes.
  • decide appropriate actions/set personal learning objectives, associated learning tasks and activities to effectively progress and evaluate the reduction of identified “gaps”.
  • determine prospective learning needs in light of emerging developments in the ‘world of work’ and your profession.