PSYCHOLOGICAL AND PEDAGOGICAL PROBLEMS OF DISTANCE EDUCATION FOR ADULTS

Our main focus is to highlight the most important challenges in distance education aimed at adults: specific psychological challenges coming from adult development, the problems of quality and evaluation, and the effect particular distance education forms and their content (interactivity, salience, and multimedia additions) have on adult learning. In the opening section, theoretical grounds for how adults learn, treat learning, how they function in informational stress and in the role of a pupil are presented. This is than followed by the discussion of pedagogical aspects (motivation, self esteem etc) of results evaluation and didactical difficulties of planning high quality distance learning. Finally, a review of research results into how different types of material content affects adults' perception and comprehension and how retention and transfer and influenced in effect. In the summary, we move on to discuss how b-learning (blended) and c-learning (complementary) could be employed in order to facilitate adult distance learning and propose research fields to explore in this area.