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As yet more tales of woe appear around failing business models (it’s not just the newspapers that are struggling: it appears Youtube is onto a loser too…), I thought I’d take a coffee break out of course writing to jot down a cynical thought or two about lifelong learning… …because along with the widening participation agenda and blah, blah, blah, blah, lifelong learning is one of those things that we hear about every so often as being key to something or other. Now I’d probably consider myself to be a lifelong learner: it’s been a good few years since I took a formal course, and yet every day I try to learn how to do something I didn’t know how to do when I got up that morning; and I try to be open to new academic ideas too (sometimes…;-) But who, I wonder, is supposed to be delivering this lifelong learning stuff, whatever it is? Because there’s money to be made, surely? If lifelong learning is something that people are going to buy into, then who owns, or is trying to grab that business? Just imagine it: having acquired a punter, you may have them for thirty, forty, fifty years?