A Collaboration-Based Spiral Model for Curriculum Development of Older Adult Education

Abstract

Older Adult Education (OAE), which is considered as an effective way of dealing with social problems caused by aging society, has been widely adopted in many countries. One of the most challenging problem in OAE is curriculum development due to the unique features of OAE, such as the variety of requirements and background of older learners and multiplicity of the objectives of education providers. Fewer studies have been conducted on curriculum development for OAE, compared with those for regular school education. In this paper, we propose a collaboration-based curriculum development model, inspired by value co-creation model in service science. In the proposed model, the role of older learner is emphasized in that education providers collaborate with older learners in curriculum development, as business service providers collaborate with customers for value creation from service science perspective. We study the curriculum development in two representative OAE universities in China to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.