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ABSTRACT
Andragogy is a fundamental principle of online education that has greatly affected nursing educators' perspective on adult education. It is student-centered, experience-based, problemoriented, and requires collaboration between adult learners and nursing educators. Online education has historically been designed for self-directed adult learners. Along with meeting the demand for life-long learning, online continuous education offers nursing students convenient, easy access to high-quality programs. Nursing faculty are challenged to become proficient in new technologies and to develop online education programs that incorporate effective teaching and learning strategies. A plethora of media, such as wikis and blogs, can be employed to engage adult nursing students. The current advances in media technology have also catalyzed the development and ongoing transformation of online nursing education programs. Constructivism, which includes andragogy and problem-based learning, has provided the framework for change. Nurses educated through constructivist frameworks are better prepared to transition to practice settings, and the skills learned and honed provide them with the metacognitive ability essential to active and self-directed learning. Well-constructed online educational programs allow adult nursing students to learn how to learn.
Keywords: Adult Learner ? Andragogy ? Constructivism? Online Education ? Problem-Based Learning
ADULT LEARNERS
Andragogy has greatly affected the way adult education and the characteristics that define this unique group of learners are viewed today. Malcolm Knowles has been credited as the provocative oracle who first introduced this controversial concept into American society in the early 1970s (Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 1998). Since its conception, exactly what constitutes adult education, theory, and learning has been debated. The need to establish a definitive theory has perpetuated detailed critiques and analysis of andragogy (Merriam, 1993). The aim of these deliberations has been to discover a new method of capturing the incentive and imagination of adult learners, whose intellectual appetites are least likely to be aroused by authoritarian, conventional methods of learning.
Andragogy is student-centered, experienced-based, problem-oriented, and requires collaboration between learners and educators (Dunn, 2000). It represents a process of self-mastery in which learners must be highly motivated and engaged. Its major assumptions hold that adults desire and enact a tendency toward self-directedness as they mature; personal experiences are a rich source of learning; adults learn best through experiential learning activities and problem-solving; adults are aware of...