of such positions increases each year (King, 2001).
In a social environment where formal educational attainment is important and the levels of education required to obtain a good job continue to increase, a large proportion of adults in the United States remain ill educated. This sub-population of American adults does not consist simply of older people for whom higher levels of formal education were not as essential in their younger years as they are in the contemporary period. Rather, a surprisingly high proportion of persons under the age of 30 years old in the United States have seriously substandard levels of formal educational attainment (Boulmetis, 1999).
The existing situation with respect to adult education is one in which those persons who most badly need the education appear to have little interest in pursuing it and those attempting to provide the education appear to have little interest in designing programs that fit the learning styles and needs of prospective students. It is not simply a case of attempting to teach post-16 students as one would teach children. It also is a case of post-16 students who are woefully ill prepared to interact with traditional approaches to education (Donlevy & Donlevy, 2000).
This paper reviews the effects of modern technology on the adult learner. Technological advances offer hope for the development of solutions to the adult education issue than will satisfy both the learners and society.
The educational needs of adult learners are different from the educational needs of children and adolescents. Two fundamental approaches to education are pedagogy ù the teaching of children, and andragogy ù the teaching of adults, which is useful in the education of adults. An individual is defined as an adult within a framework of psychological and social criteria. Within the social context, an individual is considered to be an adult, when one performs social roles typically assigned...