Design and Delivery of Quality Study Programs for Adult Part Time Students in Scandinavian Universities

 The transformation of universities from being educators of primarily young people before their entrance into the job market to modern educational institutions with a multitude of educational offers for diverse target groups must be built on knowledge and leadership in order to succeed (Jarvis 1995). Using Scandinavian universities as examples this paper wants to analyse and discuss what kind of knowledge universities need to design and deliver appropriate study programs for different groups of adult part time students.     

Having analyzed and evaluated existing knowledge in the field a new collection of empirical data on the adult learner in Scandinavian university study programs will be presented, analysed and discussed. This data collection has taken place in 2005-2006 in parallel in Norway, Sweden and Denmark by a research network supported by the Norwegian Netuniversity (Grepperud et el. 2006) .

Themes which will be introduced are how adult students experience combining everyday life, job obligations and academic study programs at university level, and how study programs should be designed and delivered to make such a combination as successful as possible. Different kinds of flexibility (Collis & Moonen 2001) related to structure, contents etc. will be analysed as concepts targeting the challenge of diversity which adult learners represent Lorentsen 2004).