The aim of this study is to examine how students at disadvantaged schools in Costa Rica experience and cope with the educational transition between 6th and 7th grade. Furthermore, to analyse which are the major contributing factors and how to aid this passage for students at risk through the term, Lifelong learning. This study will be conducted through an analysis of Costa Rica’s contemporary education policy documents through OECD’s educational report (2017). Thereafter the empirical data will be collected from seven semi-structured, qualitative interviews. Central findings shows that the school should provide more individual attention, equal career counselling in primary schools, start earlier with topics concerning identity and more engaging with parents or persons that are responsible.

Research demonstrates that involvement in musical ensembles provides an environment for individuals to grow personally, musically, socially, and independently (Cavitt, 2005; Coffin, 2005; Coffman, 2002, 2006, 2008; Coffman & Adamek, 2001; Dabback, 2008; Taylor, Kruse, Nickel, Lee, & Bowen, 2011). Typically, research with community bands focuses on older adults who are in the retirement phase of life (see Ernst, 2001; Ernst & Emmons, 1992; Dabback, 2008; Hays, 2004; Hays & Minichiello, 2005; Coffman, 2002, 2006, 2008; Southcott, 2009). However, many community bands are seeing more of an intergenerational aspect to community band membership. The current study explored how individual participation in intergenerational community concert bands influences participants' musical identity with respect to: a) the instrument, the section, and the band as a whole?; b) prolonged membership and multi-band membership?; and c) learning new musical repertoire. Adopting a qualitative multiple case study approach and guided by a Social Identity Theory and musical identity theoretical framework, this study included fourteen participants (N=14) from three community concert bands in Eastern Ontario. Each participant completed a demographic questionnaire, a series of four journal entries, one virtual semi-structured interview, and one virtual focus group session with participants from the same respective band. Data was analyzed using Bloomberg and Volpe’s (2008) "roadmap" to identify the themes both within and across cases (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Seidman, 2006). The main findings of this study relate to how musical identity is influenced by group membership, social comparisons, and perceived musical ability to influence the well-being of intergenerational community band members. Further implications relate to the value of music education and lifelong learning.

My thesis explores older adult lifelong learners’ experiences in transitioning their continued education participation to an online model. This research acknowledges and situates itself in the geragogy contexts of older adult learners, drawing on their experiences of the pandemic and lifelong learning, in addition to their opinions on education for older adults. As such, a case study methodology was employed so that this case could be studied within boundaries created by the pandemic. In my study, 25 older adult learners participated in individual interviews and provided their opinions and perceptions about their experiences with the pandemic and its effect on their learning ambitions. The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted these individuals differently based on their motivations and previous experiences with technology. Four distinct dialogue groups emerged based on the motivations that older adults have to participate in lifelong learning, which are social or instrumental, and also the opinions they have about technology, which are either positive or negative. The four dialogues are distinct in that they each hold alternate opinions about the two issues raised (motivators and opinions on technology) but there were no major identifiers within the groups that could characteristically distinguish one from another. The results indicate that not all discourses of lifelong learners are reducible to identities or recent experiences. My findings suggest that potential refinement in program delivery based on specific user needs could improve the experiences that older adults have in the virtual classroom, and that it is crucial to the administration of lifelong learning that older adults' unique needs are addressed in a collaborative manner. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This study investigated how older adults, who pursue lifelong learning in-person, have interpreted their transition to online learning because of COVID-19 pandemic meeting restrictions. Lifelong learners have had to transition from in-person learning to virtual formats, which has encouraged new older adults to become lifelong learners, and also for some lifelong learners to drop out of the practice entirely. The key goal of the study was to describe the Transitioners, New learners, and Dropout learners' experience with lifelong learning with respect to COVID-19’s impacts on their participation. Interviews were conducted with individuals who fell into these three categories and, through their responses, distinct dialogues emerged to describe their motivation to participate in lifelong learning, and their opinions on using technology as a means to access it. Confirming the motives to participate and how technology is appreciated by lifelong learners enables us to better develop and implement lifelong learning.

Yes / In addressing the EU2020 goals, skills shortage combined with increasing unemployment rates is to be primarily tackled in Western Europe; the common factor here is education. Education and lifelong learning (LL) are the key strands governing employability in the European labour market. Overarching concepts capable of addressing social challenges within education and LL that contribute towards better practices are seen as social innovations (SI). While SI in education is well founded in the developing countries, Europe is still in the process of gaining progressive momentum in this direction. In addressing various societal challenges, this study looks at observable trends in SI for education across Western Europe. About 30 innovations have been recorded across 11 countries that are essentially focussed on: social integration, alternative/new forms of education, digital learning, new learning arrangements, new LL strategies, early career planning, youth employment, quality improvements and new education standards, transition management, and entrepreneurial education. / European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [grant number 612870].

This thesis presents a novel strategy to address the challenge of "catastrophic forgetting" in deep continual-learning systems. The term refers to severe performance degradation for older tasks, as a system learns new tasks that are presented sequentially. Most previous techniques have emphasized preservation of existing knowledge while learning new tasks, in some cases advocating a memory buffer that grows in proportion to the number of tasks. However, we offer another perspective, which is that mitigating local-task fitness during learning is as important as attempting to preserve existing knowledge. We posit the existence of a consistent, unlabelled world environment that the system uses as an easily-accessible reference to avoid favoring spurious properties over more generalizable ones. Based on this assumption, we have developed a novel method called Learning with Reference (LwR), which delivers substantial performance gains relative to its state-of-the-art counterparts. The approach does not involve a growing memory buffer, and therefore promotes better performance at scale. We present extensive empirical evaluation on real-world datasets. / Master of Science / Rome was not built in a day, and in nature knowledge is acquired and consolidated gradually over time. Evolution has taught biological systems how to address emerging challenges by building on past experience, adapting quickly while retaining known skills. Modern artificial intelligence systems also seek to amortize the learning process over time. Specifically, one large learning task can be divided into many smaller non-overlapping tasks. For example, a classification task of two classes, tiger and horse, is divided into two tasks, where the classifier only sees and learns from tiger data in the first task and horse data in the second task. The systems are expected to sequentially acquire knowledge from these smaller tasks. Such learning strategy is known as continual learning and provides three meaningful benefits: higher resource efficiency, a progressively better knowledge base, and strong adaptability. In this thesis, we investigate the class-incremental learning problem, a subset of continual learning, which refers to learning a classification model from a sequence of tasks. Different from transfer learning, which targets better performance in new domains, continual learning emphasizes the knowledge preservation of both old and new tasks. In deep neural networks, one challenge against the preservation is "catastrophic forgetting", which refers to severe performance degradation for older tasks, as a system learns new ones that are presented sequentially. An intuitive explanation is that old task data is missing in the new tasks under continual learning setting and the model is optimized toward new tasks without concerning the old ones. To overcome this, most previous techniques have emphasized the preservation of existing knowledge while learning new tasks, in some cases advocating old-data replay with a memory buffer, which grows in proportion to the number of tasks. In this thesis, we offer another perspective, which is that mitigating local-task fitness during learning is as important as attempting to preserve existing knowledge. We notice that local task data always has strong biases because of its smaller size. Optimization on it leads the model to local optima, therefore losing a holistic view that is crucial for other tasks. To mitigate this, a reliable reference should be enforced across tasks and the model should consistently learn all new knowledge based on this. With this assumption, we have developed a novel method called Learning with Reference (LwR), which posits the existence of a consistent, unlabelled world environment that the system uses as an easily-accessible reference to avoid favoring spurious properties over more generalizable ones. Our extensive empirical experiments show that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts in real-world datasets.

Diese Studie konzentriert sich auf eine vergleichende Erforschung über lebenslange Lernmotivation und deren Einflussfaktoren in China und Deutschland. Da das lebenslange Lernen ein weithin anerkanntes System ist, welches internationale Bedeutung, reichliche Konnotation, Multiplex-Programmen und komplexe Verzweigungen enthält, scheinen die Erforschung und Analyse über das lebenslange Lernen und konkretes Lernverhalten, Strategien, Theorien, Performanz und Einflussfaktoren immer extrem schwierig zu sein. Zum Analysieren der konkreten Lernerfahrungen sowie Einstellungen und Gedanken von normalen Personen über das lebenslange Lernen werden biographische Erzählung Interview als Instrument der Datenerhebung und die Erforschung Schritte vom Grounded Theory als Forschungsmethode verwendet. Insofern ist eine empirische Theorie auf unseren Forschungsgegenstand zu entwickeln. Die interviewten Personen für dieser Studie besteht aus 20 ausgewählten chinesischen und 20 ausgewählten Deutschen mit unterschiedlichem Hintergrund und Konventionen. Untersucht werden die ganzen Lernerfahrungen und Ansichten von ihnen über die Motivationen und Einflussfaktoren auf ihr eigenes lebenslanges Lernen. Basiert auf einen Analyseprozess von offenen, axialen und selektiven Codierung kann man feststellen, dass die Lernmotivationen und Einflussfaktoren auf lebenslanges Lernen vor allem aus vier Hauptgruppen, nämlich Familie, Gesellschaft, Individuum, sowie Schulen bzw. Mitschüler und Lehrer kommen. Zum Beschreiben der Zusammenhänge zwischen diesen Faktoren und den typischen Kategorien von Einflussfaktoren in den einzelnen Ländern zu beschreiben, werden sie in „Postmoderne“, „Scandinavian“, „Transformation“ und „Traditionelle Asiatische“ Typen mit dem „Ideal-Typ“ als Leitgedanke eingeteilt . In der konkreten Analyse der Arten der Motivation und Einflussfaktoren auf lebenslanges Lernen von Deutschen und Chinesen, werden die „Autonome“ und „Autoritären“ Features auf der y-Koordinate, und die „Individuell“ und „Sozial“ Faktoren auf die x-Koordinate beschriftet, damit die Cluster-Formen der Faktoren in den einzelnen Ländern auf die Diagramme zeichnet werden können. Die konkrete Analyse der Einflussfaktoren und Motivationen beruht auf dem allgemeinen Hintergrund der nationalen Bedingungen und der Realität der Bildungsentwicklung in jedem Land. Jede Hauptkategorie der Einflussfaktoren und Motivationen hat seinen tiefen Grund von der konkreten Makro-, Meso- und Mikrorealität, wie die nationalen Geschichte, Gesetzessystem, Bildungseinrichtungen, Lehr- und Lernpraktiken, wirtschaftliche Situationen, Gesamt Figuration und Bildungskulturen, sowie das Bildungssystem. Durch Analysieren und Vergleichen kann festgestellt werden, dass jedes Land oder Region ihre eigenen Eigenschaften, Implementierungsmethode oder Merkmale des lebenslangen Lernens sowie ihrer Bildungspolitik, Bildungserfahrungen, Lernmethoden, Prinzipien, Lern- und Lehrerfahrungen hat. Zur Verbesserung der Bildungsreformation und deren Fortschritt könnte man erfolgreiche Erfahrungen und Geschichte als Referenz verwenden, damit eigenes erfolgversprechendes Bildungssystem bzw. erfolgversprechende Bildungspolitik gründet werden könnte. Auf der Grundlage von Schlussfolgerungen und Ergebnisse dieser Erforschung sind Vorschläge und Anleitung für die Förderungen des lebenslangen Lernens zu erschließen, die sich in der Zukunft nicht nur in China und Deutschland, aber auch in anderen Industrie- und Entwicklungsländern für verbesserte Leistungen in diesem Bereich anbieten.

CyborGlogs are lifelong log files of personal experiences that are captured without conscious thought or effort. By creating cyborglogs on a continuous basis, we can enable various novel applications where the lifelong records are used as memory aids or for personal safety. This thesis presents the development of a mobile application that provides the tools to instantly capture, archive, recall, and share our personal experiences on widely available cameraphones. To achieve this goal, a client-server computational framework is designed and implemented to support real-time interaction among the users. Three fully functional prototypes supporting three major mobile platforms (J2ME, Symbian, and iPhone) are presented to show the feasibility and flexibility of this framework. Finally, this thesis shows an early prototype which demonstrates the idea of mediated reality on cameraphones using various integrated sensors. This prototype explores the possibilities of developing truly intelligent wearable applications on mobile devices in the future.

CyborGlogs are lifelong log files of personal experiences that are captured without conscious thought or effort. By creating cyborglogs on a continuous basis, we can enable various novel applications where the lifelong records are used as memory aids or for personal safety. This thesis presents the development of a mobile application that provides the tools to instantly capture, archive, recall, and share our personal experiences on widely available cameraphones. To achieve this goal, a client-server computational framework is designed and implemented to support real-time interaction among the users. Three fully functional prototypes supporting three major mobile platforms (J2ME, Symbian, and iPhone) are presented to show the feasibility and flexibility of this framework. Finally, this thesis shows an early prototype which demonstrates the idea of mediated reality on cameraphones using various integrated sensors. This prototype explores the possibilities of developing truly intelligent wearable applications on mobile devices in the future.

The thesis deals with the lifelong education of teachers. For the purposes of work the thesis defines the conceptual apparatus, compares the possibilities of further education of teachers in the Czech Republic with the possibilities of education in other EU countries. It suggests ways which can lead to improve further education of teachers and presents own proposal for lifelong education using Christian self-reflection.

This study describes and implements a necessary preliminary strategic planning procedure, the Internal Environmental Scanning (IES), and discusses its relevance to strategic planning and university-sponsored lifelong learning program model selection. Employing a qualitative research methodology, a proposed lifelong learning-centric IES process based on Bryson's (2004) strategic planning model was tested at a large public university in the American Southwest with the intention of both refining the IES process for general use in the field as well as providing a set of useable reference documents for strategic planners at that university. The prototype lifelong learning IES process as tested proved to be highly effective in identifying and categorizing previously unrecognized lifelong learning programming and organizational structures and, was reasonably efficient in process execution. Lessons learned from the application of the prototype lifelong learning IES procedure led to the development of a revised scanning procedure. This revised procedure is considered more reliable and can be accomplished by a single investigator in as little as 35 production hours, providing a detailed snapshot of the total university lifelong learning system and a point of departure for the larger strategic planning effort.