ABSTRACT
Education and training should socialise learners into a culture of continuous self development, taking personal responsibility for their learning and self development and at the same time being productive. Self direction in learning is particularly important in light of the emerging learning context which suggest that more and more individuals will be working independently and alone, interacting with a rich source of information and occasionally consulting and collaborating with others. In the Adult and Workplace Education degree program at Queensland University of Technology, contract learning was adopted as the instructional strategy in a final year undergraduate subject. It was an ambitious experiment where the entire subject was taught through negotiated contracts. The objective of the experiment was to let students become autonomous and self-directed learners. Inviting students to negotiate their learning process opened up many new possibilities. The involvement of industry experts, working on workplace problems as part of their university assignment and jointly (with industry partners) evaluating students’ work was a major achievement. The contract learning process made students conscious of the need to understand how to balance life’s crisis by reviewing goals and continuing to learn. The students’ ability to draw on unconventional sources for resource and be innovative in their ways of presenting evidence gives a new meaning to university learning.
