Learning to learn - challenges

Lifelong learning is viewed as involving all strategies that are put in place to created opportunities for people to learn throughout life. It is about learning of what, how, when and where one wants to learn. Various challenges are to be found to many spheres of life including: financial, demographic, technological, social, environmental and democratic challenges (Marjan Laal, 2014).

The pressures and demands of everyday life in an increasingly more complex world make learning more challenging. According to Smith (2014), To be successful in life as well as in college, learners must produce strong learning performances even while meeting non-academic but top-priority challenges, such as being exhausted from hours of work, nursing a sick child, or caring for an aging grandparent. On top of this, when tragedies occur (a divorce, a layoff, an accident, or the death of a family member or friend) the recovery must be quick and effective. Thus, improving emotional skills of persisting, coping, responding to failures, and adapting to change is critical to building the resilience that is needed to overcome the difficulties that arise from personal factors. As facility with other learning to-learn components grows (e.g., higher levels of learning, improved learning skills, and identity as a learner), so does the proactive problem-solving capacity for addressing these personal factors.