Human beings are not just cognitive. By enabling an emotional, visceral, and cognitive experience, VR lets people retain knowledge at astonishingly higher rates of up to 80% as compared to traditional training mediums of around 20%

Retention and graduation rates increase for community colleges that beef up or get creative with their student advising services.

In today's fast-paced knowledge-intensive economy, work of importanceis increasingly accomplished coUaboratively through informal networks. As aresult, assessing and supporting strategically important informal networks inorganizations can yield substantial performance benefits. In addition, networkrelationships are critical anchoring points for employees, whose loyalty andcommitment may be more to sets of individuals in their network than to a givenorganization. Our research (and that of others) has found that these informalnetworks are increasingly important contributors to employee job satisfactionand performance. Yet despite their importance, these networks are rarely well-supported or even understood by the organizations in which they are embedded.Social network analysis provides a means with which to identify and assess thehealth of strategically important networks within an organization. By makingvisible these otherwise "invisible" patterns of interaction, it becomes possible towork with important groups to facilitate effective collaboration

A number of authors argue that professional development requires adual focus on both knowledge of subject matter content and an understand-ing of how children learn specific content.

Social-based tools are gaining acceptance in the workplace.

Preceptors must create an environment that is friendly to novice nurses and conducive to perioperative nurse education, particularly in light of the current nursing shortage. Effective teachers use principles of adult learning to facilitate the education of new employees. This results in increased satisfaction for preceptors, preceptees, other staff members, and ultimately, patients.

Adult learners face numerous challenges that include changing definitions, overcoming circumstances, relearning, and motivation. Addressing these challenges in a timely and personal way is especially important in distance learning environments. This roundtable will discuss how WGU addresses these challenges and prepares educators in a manner independent of place and time.

The paper argues that the adult learning environment can in some instances be a ‘double-edged sword’, in that it can both enhance and limit student engagement.

Self-directed learning is independent—it provides the learner with the ability to make choices, to take responsibility for their own learning, and “the capacity to articulate the norms and limits of learned society, and personal values and beliefs” (Goddu, 2012).In self-directed learning, the instructor shifts from the leader of the learning experience to the “facilitator of learning,” becoming“a source to be tapped, as required by the learner” (Robotham 1995, as cited in Goddu 2012). Self-directed learning provides students with the “opportunity and freedom to choose the means of acquiring knowledge that is best suited” to them based on their own self-knowledge (Alex et al., 2007). In online or blended environments, self-directed learning canbe offered through the creation of “dynamic learning environments where students may go beyond content presented by the instructor to explore, interact with, comment on, modify, and apply the set content and additional content they discover or create through the learning process” (LeNoue, 2011).

A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the mean-ing of our experience. For some, any uncritically assimilated explanation by anauthority figure will suffice. But in contemporary societies we must learn tomake our own interpretations rather than act on the purposes, beliefs, judg-ments, and feelings of others. Facilitating such understanding is the cardinal goalof adult education. Transformative learning develops autonomous thinking.

Adults have a deep need to be self-directing. The psychological definition of "adult" is one who has achieved a self-concept of being in charge of his or her own life, of being responsible for making his or her own decisionsand living with the consequences. Adults develop a deep need to be seen by others as being capable of taking responsibility for themselves. Too often as trainers we design training situations that place adultsback in their childhood where they are told what where and when and how to learn. Self-directed is not the same as self-paced. Self-paced means that the learner is only in charge of when to experience what the trainer has produced. Self-directed learning puts the learner in charge of much more. Incorporate as much "search and discovery" into the training as possible for experienced learners. Present training with as many options for learning as possible.

Critical and autonomous thinking must take precedence over the uncritical assimilation of knowledge. Transformative learning is a route to the development of critical thinking.