MA in Adult Learning and Global Change

Are you curious about what it is like to study at LiU? Join us for a chat about what it is like to live and study on our campuses in Sweden. We offer free webinars and recordings for both prospective and admitted degree students throughout the year.

• Start:  August 2022
• Place of study : Distance
• Level: Second cycle

Governments all over the world are urging citizens to train and educate themselves in order to stay competitive in a connected world. Critical discourses on globalization require the ability to learn in situations that span vast cultural and geographic divides. Our program is for those who wish to understand adult learning in the framework of global change within a unique digital learning format that has won international acclaim.

Online learning and master thesis

This master’s program enhances students’ ability to work in a globalizing world and to challenge the traditional perspectives on globalization. Our program is an equal collaboration with universities in Canada and South Africa. All course activities will be done within a digital learning platform, where you will learn together with students from the partner universities in a global class, making the program truly international. The courses contain topics such as locating oneself in global learning, adult learning: contexts and perspectives, global/local learning, and understanding research.

Our graduates are able to learn and teach globally, use global connective technologies, understand knowledge-based societies and their implications for learning, understand globalization discourses, develop cultural sensibilities and sensitivities and develop an equality perspective for learning and reframing their own professional practices. They may also continue their academic careers in further projects.

The program won the 2005 Curriculum Innovation Award, awarded by the Commission of Professors of Adult Education of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education, and also The e-Learning Excellence Award(2015) at the 14th European Conference on E-learning, held at Hertfordshire University, UK.

Selection will be based on academic grades and a Letter of Intent. The applicant should submit a Letter of Intent written in English, explaining why they want to study this program (about 1000 words). The letter should include a summary of the bachelor essay/project and a description of academic studies and work experience relevant to adult learning.

Syllabus

This program is designed to enhance practitioners' ability to work in the globalizing world and to challenge the traditional perspectives of globalization. It will do this by developing a critical perspective on globalization and reflective and strategic practice. The characteristic feature of the program will be a dialectic between students' personal experience and the conceptual resources of the program. This means that the bodies of perspectives and theories, including many areas including the field of adult education, with which students will be brought into contact.

There is an emergent field of practice that concerns a global phenomenon; the learning dimension of practitioners and the way practitioners act on and construct their different contexts. This diverse group of practitioners faces new challenges, which accompany the accelerating globalization of the economy, society, and culture. The impact of globalization could be described in terms of economic shifts, in terms of new forms for communications and networking, the use of new technologies, working across differences, etc. These challenges also include demands for greater effectiveness and productivity and the complexities of furthering social justice and equity.

The contexts of learning are changing in response to globalization and practitioners in different areas will face the impact of this. The learning dimension will become an important feature for many practitioners. Instability and change will be characteristic and constitute the incentives to look for new perspectives in order to cope with the unknown. The skills and qualities needed will be networking skills, the ability to work with people from other cultures. Another dimension is also to be able to work from a distance, handle new communication forms, and promote virtual communities.

Adults learn in a diverse field of practice, with many specialisms; human resource development, health care education, community-based adult education, vocational education, basic education, etc. Practitioners also perform a variety of roles, they are teachers, administrators, policymakers, facilitators of organizational learning, and so forth. Other practitioners, e.g. managers, lawyers, and engineers, also have a learning dimension to their work. They learn and teach in their daily practice, often informally and incidentally.

Purpose

The aim is to provide a high-quality Master’s degree in Adult Learning, which in both content and process gives students an insight into globalization and cross-cultural collaboration. The program should also enhance the understanding of different contexts and provide the experience of working in a variety of study modes.

Aim

Knowledge and understanding

• to encourage understanding of commonalities and differences across different contexts for adult learning.
• to understand knowledge-based societies and the implications for learning.
• to develop an understanding of the globalization discourses.
• to appreciate the historical context of present developments and link these to one’s own sites of practice.
• to challenge orthodoxies in adult learning theory and practice.

Skills and abilities

• to learn to use teaching and learning technologies globally.
• to learn how to learn and work globally.

Values and attitudes

• to develop cultural sensibilities and sensitivities.
• to adopt a multifaceted equity perspective on all issues of learning.
• to engage in the reframing of one’s own professional practice.
• to create networks of relationships across countries and help establish a global community of adult learning practitioners.

_Are you curious about what it is like to study at LiU? Join us for a chat about what it is like to live and study on our campuses in Sweden. We offer free webinars and recordings for both prospective and admitted degree students throughout the year. Visit our _ _Meet us online _ _page. _

About Linköping University

Linköping University will never rest on its laurels.

In close collaboration with the business world and society, Linköping University (LiU) conducts world-leading, boundary-crossing research in fields including materials science, IT and hearing. In the same spirit, the university offers many innovative educational programs, many of them with a clear vocational focus, leading to qualification as, for example, doctors, teachers, economists, and engineers.

The university has 32,000 students and 4,000 employees on four campuses. Together we seek answers to the complex questions facing us today. Our students are among the most desirable in the labor market and international rankings consistently place LiU as a leading global university.

LiU achieved university status in 1975 and innovation is our only tradition.

History of Linköping University

In 1975 Sweden’s sixth university was founded in Linköping. Since then Linköping University (LiU) has grown considerably, expanding to Norrköping and Stockholm.

Linköping has been an important center of learning since medieval times when Linköping Cathedral offered a school with extensive international contacts and its own student hall in Paris. In 1627 the Cathedral School became the third upper secondary school in Sweden and in 1843 a college for elementary school teachers began operations. In Norrköping, the Fröbel Institute – Sweden’s first college for training pre-school teachers – was founded in 1902.

From university college to university

What would later become Linköping University began to take shape in the mid-1960s. Higher education in Sweden was expanding and in 1965 the Swedish Parliament decided to establish a branch of Stockholm University, together with a university college of engineering and medicine, in Linköping.

In the autumn of 1967, the branch of Stockholm University moved into premises in central Linköping. There the first students could take courses in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Two years later the units for engineering and medicine got underway.

In 1970 education and research started moving into the recently built Campus Valla, a short distance from the town center. Buildings A and B were the first to be completed. The same year the various parts were merged to form Linköping University College, including faculties of engineering, medicine and arts, and sciences.

The new university college was the first in Sweden to offer study programs in Industrial Engineering and Management and Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering, both starting in 1969. A few years later, in 1975, Linköping University launched Sweden’s first Computer Science and Engineering program.

1975 was also the year when Linköping University College became Linköping University, the sixth university in Sweden. In line with the 1977 reform of the Swedish higher education system, teacher education was also transferred to Linköping University.

Interdisciplinary research and problem-based learning

Linköping University has always worked with innovation in education and research. In 1980 the newly formed Department of Thematic Studies adopted an approach that was new in Sweden. Research was organized in interdisciplinary themes, such as Technology and Social Change or Water and Environmental Studies. Scientists worked across boundaries to solve complex problems. LiU was also first in Sweden to introduce graduate research schools for different themes. The model later spread to other parts of the university and became a national success.

The new Faculty of Health Sciences (Hälsouniversitetet), formed in 1986, combined governmentally and regionally funded education. It introduced a radically changed methodology, being the first in Sweden to use problem-based learning, PBL. Later, LiU became the first university in the world to allow students from different health sciences programs to treat actual patients on a student-managed training ward.

Expansion to Norrköping – and Stockholm

A significant milestone in the history of the University was the opening of Campus Norrköping in 1997. Some programs had previously operated from Norrköping, but the number of students now grew drastically in line with government efforts to expand higher education. Historical factories in the former industrial district were again filled with life, as they were filled with classrooms, laboratories, cafés, a library and of course students.

Linköping University also expanded to Stockholm when the reputable Carl Malmsten School of Furniture sought a collaborative partner from the academic sector. The Malmsten furniture design and handicraft programs became part of LiU in 2000. After almost 60 years at Södermalm in central Stockholm, Malmstens moved to new premises on the island of Lidingö in the autumn of 2009. LiU got its fourth campus.

Buro Millennial / Pexels

LiU in figures

Some important figures for Linköping University.

Education

• 32,000 students (full-time equivalents 17,907)
• 21,400 on Campus Valla
• 5,500 on Campus Norrköping
• 3,900 on University Hospital Campus (US)
• 2,100 distance students and students in other locations, including Campus Lidingö

(Some students take courses on more than one campus.)

• 120 study programs, of which 27 are international programs in English
• 550 single-subject courses
• Exchange agreements with 400 universities in 50 countries
• 2,400 international students
• 2,200 first cycle degrees
• 2,700 second-cycle degrees

Research and scientific training

• 300 professors
• 1,200 PhD students
• 40 licentiate degrees
• 140 doctoral degrees

Staff

• 4,000 employees (full-time equivalents 3,156)