The Future of Education

Learning on the spot - a programme in rural areas that seems difficult to implement in times of globalisation and transnationalisation. Inhabitants of rural areas are confronted with the demands for temporal and local mobility and flexibility caused by digitisation and globalisation as well as the requirements associated with an Life-Long-Learning strategy, without having the resources needed to implement them. They are increasingly affected by inequality and disadvantage, with opposing trends in education also playing a central role: For example, homogeneous further education structures and further education offers reduce the social participation opportunities of inhabitants in peripheral regions. Diverse educational offers, however, make an essential contribution to social cohesion, are important for ensuring equal opportunities and are decisive for the development of (further) education in the life course as long as - according to the thesis - they are regionally located and embedded in the structures of biographical learning. In this contribution, the project VHS - Learning on the spot. Building a supporting learning network for people in peripheral regions. For the research, regions were selected which are located away from educational centres, whose inhabitants are affected by the challenging developments and have unequal access to education and further education offers due to their peripheral location. The basic conditions in the regions for learning on the spot, which were collected in this study, are presented. The interim results of the case analysis, in which conditions of learning on the spot in the life course were analysed and success-critical factors were worked out in order to develop new possibilities of the VHS in supporting the processes of learning and teaching on the spot, are presented. Based on the results of the current research project, it will be discussed how innovative educational offers and learning environments in rural regions can be designed and what contribution institutions such as the adult education centre can make in the future.

Keywords: educational governance, adult learning, distance learning, learning on the spot.