Kseniia Putilova

Everyone has an idea of what education is. Each of us who can read and write, at the very least, received a school education in childhood. However, using only pedagogical principles, creating a full-fledged educational product for teaching adults is impossible. Adults differ from children in the context of perception and understanding new information, and adult learners' needs are different from what we are accustomed to in children’s education.

Adults' general attitude to information and education differs from children’s. For us, as course creators, this has both minuses and pluses. To begin with, consider the difficulties that should be taken into account when creating education for adult students.

According to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, an adult is "a fully grown person who is legally responsible for their actions", and responsibility here is an important point. In addition to undergoing training, every adult learner will have a lot of other responsibilities: work, children, household chores, pets, cooking, and much more.

Keep this in mind when planning the timelines of your course: it is better to break it into fragments that will be easy to assimilate between other duties. Start each segment to help the learner switch to the course topic from other matters.

Imagine you are an adult learner who is simultaneously thinking about how to redo a report at work, when to buy your child winter shoes, and what to cook for dinner, and at that moment, you are asked to think about the course material — you will likely need time to concentrate.

Adults, being self-aware individuals, have the right to decide for themselves what they will engage in.

If the training offered to them is not part of their job, then they can find another way to obtain the same information. The course may seem boring or illogical to learners, or they may not like the format of the material delivery. They may find that the same information is presented more lively and more understandable in YouTube videos, or it’s easier to ask ChatGPT for answers to specific topic-related questions.

This means, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), that creating an adult learning product simply "by authority" will not work. For your course to be used, it needs to be competitive: informative, logical, understandable, and merely interesting.

Unlike children, adult learners filter any material through the prism of their life experience and the knowledge they have already gained. Be prepared that not all students will approve of the material you present.

Theoretical knowledge that is not convincingly presented might not be believed by an adult, and practical skills might not be recognised as valuable. What can we do about this?

Now, let’s discuss the positive characteristics of adult learners and how teaching adults is easier than teaching children.

Even though it is already known that the human brain continuously changes and develops throughout life, some brain abilities decline with age. According to Harvard Medical School, "With age, some brain areas (…) shrink in size. The myelin sheath that surrounds and protects nerve fibers [sic] wears down (…). Some of the receptors on the surface of neurons (…) may not function as well as they once did." These changes can affect an adult learner’s "ability to encode new information into their memory".

However, that’s not all. Although learning new information may become more difficult with age, other abilities, on the contrary, improve. According to the same article, "the branching of dendrites increases, and connections between distant brain areas strengthen", which allows with age to more easily connect different pieces of information, detect analogies, and see global trends and the whole picture instead of separate parts.