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CORVALLIS - Higher education institutions like Oregon State University represent the pinnacle of schooling, the "formal" education process by which people learn an important part of what they know. But 90 percent or more of a person's life is spent outside of school, and "informal" learning comprises a much larger share of what people know.

For the most part, however, informal learning has not received much attention in academia.

At OSU, that's about to change.

The Oregon Sea Grant program at OSU has formed a partnership with the Institute for Learning Innovation of Annapolis, Md., to establish a program in "free-choice learning." Free-choice learning, explains the director of the Institute for Learning Innovation, John Falk, is a more inclusive term for what's often called "informal" learning. Institute associate director Lynn Dierking and Falk suggested the term free-choice learning as "a better way to describe the learning that occurs when the individual chooses what, where, when, how, and with whom to learn," said Falk, who is a nationally recognized expert in this emerging field.

"It is the most common type of learning that people engage in," he said. "We learn from museums, libraries, the Internet, television, film, books, newspapers, radio and other people. Free-choice learning is so common that we have taken it for granted, despite its being as vital as the learning that occurs in school and in the workplace." The institute is partnering with OSU's Sea Grant program because informal education has been an important function of Sea Grant for 37 years, said the program's director, Robert Malouf.

"Sea Grant established free-choice education activities at the OSU Marine Science Center (now Hatfield Marine Science Center) in Newport in 1966," Malouf noted. Today Sea Grant manages and partly staffs the Visitor Center at HMSC.

Sea Grant conceives of this popular venue, which attracts approximately 150,000 visitors annually, as a "laboratory for the study of informal or free-choice learning," Malouf said.

"We are a university, and our role at HMSC therefore should go beyond offering free-choice learning opportunities to the public," he pointed out. "We should also strive to improve the art and science of how the public learns, through research and through the training of educators.

"That is exactly what we intend to do," the Sea Grant director said.

The Institute for Learning Innovation is uniquely qualified for the partnership with OSU, said Malouf. It was established in 1986 as a not-for-profit research and development organization committed to providing leadership in free-choice learning. Despite the focus of its attention on non-school education, the institute's professional staff includes six persons who hold Ph.D.s, including Falk, whose joint doctorate in biology and education is from the University of California, Berkeley.

The goal of their program's collaboration, say Malouf and Falk, is ambitious: to establish an internationally prominent center for the study and facilitation of free-choice learning. They envision the collaboration as being broader than activities at HMSC and involving other OSU colleges and programs as well as external partners.

They expect their collaboration to initially have a strong emphasis on science, particularly marine science.

"But we agree," said Malouf, "that there are opportunities and needs for research and education in many other areas. Nothing in this agreement is meant to imply that the activities of our collaboration will focus solely on science to the exclusion of other disciplines and topics."

Falk and Dierking have been granted courtesy faculty appointments at OSU, with the rank of professor.

Initial projects of the free-choice collaboration are expected to begin soon, and during the next year may include the teaching and training of university students, HMSC volunteers, docents, and Extension staff in the arts and science of free-choice learning. Other key activities are expected to include basic and applied research, evaluation and assessment projects, and the development of educational materials and exhibitions.