Universities play a much greater role in further education today than they did ten years ago. Continuing education expert Anke Hanft and educational scientist Karsten Speck talk about the changes in the higher education system and look ahead to future challenges.

Around 250 million euros in funding, 101 participating universities, over 370 academic continuing education programmes in regular operation: the figures alone show that the federal-state competition "Advancement through Education: Open University" has left a clear mark on the German higher education landscape. The programme, which was launched in 2011, came to an end in the spring of this year.

The aim of the programme was to link vocational and academic education more closely, and continuing education expert Prof. Dr Anke Hanft provided academic support from the outset. "We had provided the main impetus for planning the programme with an international comparative study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Education," reports Hanft.

The study at the time found that the German vocational education and training system had too little exchange between vocational education and training and the higher education system in international comparison. This was a major disadvantage that needed to be rectified. After all, close links between further vocational education and academic education not only enable more flexible career paths, lifelong learning and more opportunities for advancement for individuals. "Advanced scientific training also promotes knowledge transfer between universities, companies and society," emphasises Hanft.

"The C3L has set standards."

A good ten years after the start of the federal-state competition, the situation has changed fundamentally: "We have reached important milestones in recent years," says Prof Dr Karsten Speck. Like Hanft and Dr Annika Maschwitz, now Professor of Lifelong Learning at Bremen University of Applied Sciences, the educational scientist was involved in the scientific monitoring of the competition. As part of a nationwide network of universities and the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHE), the experts examined the implementation of the competition, supported the projects in their implementation and helped to ensure that the results, such as new study programmes, are better anchored at the universities.

Hanft and Speck also consider the programme a success from this perspective: in addition to the new continuing education courses, for example, teaching staff have been trained and new digital teaching and learning formats have been set up. The latter have long since become part of undergraduate teaching. New forms of cooperation between companies and universities have been created and new target groups have been tapped into. "This is something we can capitalise on, including at the end of projects in Oldenburg," says Speck.

University access without A-levels

And that's not all: permanent centres for further education have been established at universities all over Germany. The University of Oldenburg was a nationwide pioneer in this area with the C3L - Centre for Lifelong Learning, which was founded in 2006 from predecessor institutes. "The C3L has set standards," says Speck, pointing out another concern of the federal-state programme: Opening up universities to non-traditional target groups - through advanced scientific training, but also through offerings such as the KinderUni, the Gasthörstudium or the so-called Z-Prüfung, which gives working people without A-levels access to higher education.

Hanft and Speck summarise that all of this has led to further education at universities becoming more professional and more politically aware. Nevertheless, both also see shortcomings: for example, access to higher education remains difficult for working people with families, the unemployed and certain professional groups, such as those in the health and care sector. "Most further education programmes are subject to a fee and therefore don't appeal to these target groups at all," explains Hanft.

One reason for this is the precarious status of further education and further education centres, as Speck and colleagues from the Open University in Hagen, TU Dortmund University and the CHE point out in a brochure on the results of the accompanying research. Although the higher education laws of the federal states recognise further education as a core task of universities alongside research and teaching, there is a lack of systematic financing. Politicians and universities need to solve this challenge if they really take this task seriously, says Hanft.

Flexible study programmes important

In her view, however, public universities should be allowed to earn money through fee-based study programmes: "This enables innovations that spill over into undergraduate teaching and research," she emphasises. Hanft and Speck advocate a mixed model in which fee-financed degree programmes alongside free programmes open up the path to higher education for different target groups - from nurses to managers. One way to achieve this is to make undergraduate degree programmes more flexible than before, making it easier for those interested to study part-time and in structures and formats that suit them, says Speck.

Both researchers are aware that this remains a challenge: up to now, many programmes have been too inflexible. In order to make undergraduate degree programmes attractive to working people, their modular structure would have to be strengthened, for example. "And we need to move away from sticking to relatively rigid standard periods of study," says Hanft. The corona period in particular shows how important it is to organise studies flexibly. "In this way, we can support lifelong learning at universities in the long term," says the expert. However, to ensure that previous achievements are not lost even after the major funding programmes have come to an end, advanced scientific training must move to where it belongs in the opinion of Hanft and Speck: To the centre of universities and thus to the centre of university culture.

In the federal-state programme "Advancement through Education", the University of Oldenburg coordinated the joint projects PuG (development of part-time study programmes in nursing and health sciences) and mint.online (establishment of part-time study programmes in STEM subjects) in addition to providing scientific support for the overall programme and was involved in three other projects. This has resulted in a number of continuing education programmes at various universities.

To the original: https://uol.de/aktuelles/artikel/lebenslanges-lernen-als-kultur-5037