Digital Empowerment of Education for Older Adults

This book demonstrates how digital empowerment of education for older adults is a timely and globally significant subject. Achieving inclusive, high-quality, and balanced development of elderly education is particularly urgent in China, a nation currently experiencing an unprecedented "gray tide." The topic is important to the enhancement of well-being of older adults, so that every senior citizen can enjoy the right to education in a community for lifelong learning to achieve educational equity. It will help older adults to cross the digital divide so that no group would be left behind. Therefore, the study of the digital empowerment of education for older adults is of national and international significance.

Based on literature on Empowerment and Instructional Design, this book project proposes a theoretical framework of the digital empowerment of education for older adults for empirical investigation and validation. A sample of elderly learners from Guangdong University for the Elderly were selected to participate in in-depth interviews designed to understand the learning needs of elderly learners as an online learning community. Challenges of the digital empowerment of education for older adults are examined. Based on the research findings, a theoretical model of digital empowerment of education for older adults is constructed. National contexts of the Chinese case studies are illuminated along with international implications for lesson-drawing in related policy making and professional practice.