Continuing Adult Education

By: Ianny Lau

As Peter Drucker puts it, "We live in an economy where knowledge, not buildings and machinery, is the chief resource and where knowledge-workers make up the biggest part of the work force."

The Internet has triggered an explosion of knowledge and information. The phenomenon is a double edged sword - easy access to tons of information makes the conventional wisdom that "learning is a life-long process" even more relevant today than it was for past generations.

It doesn’t matter who the person is, or how successful he has been so far. In fact, relatively speaking, the better qualified person has more to lose even as his peers soak in, digest and apply the latest developments in his field. High achievers increasingly perceive that they are lagging!

So the need for continuing adult education is a foregone conclusion. Except, of course, that there are many barriers to making it a way of life.

For one, depending on where a person lives, good seminars may hardly come by, especially those conducted by worthy speakers. And if they do come, he must be available on the scheduled dates to attend. That is assuming he can afford it.

Major city dwellers have it better, since the busy experts are more likely to swing by.

Seminars are excellent learning grounds. The speakers, being successful in their own rights, have mindsets that set them apart from regular folks. They offer perspectives that are thought provoking. They share key information and research data that are not commonly available to the public. Sometimes, they disclose their strategies to success. It is not uncommon for something a speaker shared to simply spark off new initiatives by any given participant.

The good news is that seminars are not necessarily expensive. There are several online offerings that are very reasonably priced. For a small investment of perhaps no more than US$300 a year, the subscriber gets access to an entire archive of recent seminars by an army of experts.

For online learning channels like these, it doesn’t matter where the participant resides as long as he has Internet access. And since these are seminars-on-demand, the participant can choose the topics of his choice, at slots that are convenient.

Unlike in live settings, the participant can pause at will for breaks, or to think about and understand points of special interest.

Very often in live seminars, the organizers squeeze in many speakers and topics so that the participants get the most of their dollars. The problem with that is that every human has his limited span of attention. When mentally saturated, information overload renders the rest of the seminar ineffective.

With online seminars-on-demand, the participant reaps maximum benefit from each session simply by being able to focus on the discussion.

In addition to that, he can revisit the topics from time to time to reinforce learning points. Subconsciously, the repeated messages rub into him. In the long run, those messages and knowledge become second nature to him.

To benefit a wider audience, some online seminars come translated into major languages.

Practising professionals like doctors, pharmacists and engineers are more interested in keeping abreast with technical developments. There is no shortage of online establishments offering technical seminars. For completeness, however, these professionals and everyone else should cultivate ‘soft’ areas like marketing, money management and relationship.