The age-friendly university

It’s no secret that folks in their Second Act flock to the Okanagan Valley, a sunny pocket of British Columbia, to do youth-extending things—such as exploiting the dazzling outdoor recreational options. But an increasingly common complement to these physical pursuits is exploring the educational opportunities.

Older residents come out in droves for pretty much every outreach lecture that UBC’s Okanagan campus hosts, slaking their thirst for lifelong learning. So it’s no surprise that UBCO has seized a leading role in the age-friendly university movement, becoming, in 2022, the eighth university in Canada to join the Age-Friendly University Network.

What makes a university “age-friendly”? Ten principles define the concept. They include things like attracting older people onto campuses—either to study or participate in research—and opening up cultural and wellness resources to the entire community. The principles boil down to supporting area residents writing new chapters for themselves in midlife, either personally or professionally.

“One of the areas we’re strongest in is intergenerational learning,” says Jennifer Jakobi, a professor in the university’s School of Health and Exercise Sciences and co-lead of the Aging in Place research cluster. Many UBCO programs cultivate working relationships between students and older learners. “The one I like best is what I call ‘speed dating,’” she says. “Older adults sit at tables, and students rotate through. Each new pair shares questions and answers. There’s a lot of laughter as each side learns things they didn’t expect.”

One of the richest projects Dr. Jakobi oversees is a cross-generational collaboration in virtual reality design. Undergraduate and graduate students teamed up with older learners to create two virtual-reality games. In both cases, seniors hatched the idea for the game and then students went away and engineered it. The students took the finished games to an independent-living facility, where residents gave them a test spin to provide feedback. They donned VR headsets and were whisked into a simulation of Abu Simbel, Egypt, where they virtually toured the famous temples. In the second game, they became figure skaters, leaving mobility challenges behind to glide and float freely across the ice.

By the end of the project, whatever intergenerational friction there may have been at the start had dissolved. “One student admitted they’d actually been a bit wary of older people,” Dr. Jakobi says. “Now they seek them out in the checkout lines at the grocery store.”

The rewards of such experiments are manifold, and they go both ways. “When I was a PhD student conducting re-search on older adults, they would sometimes ask, ‘What’s in it for me?’” Dr. Jakobi recalls. “And it’s true that the discoveries my generation of scientists makes won’t immediately impact most of the older adults who are participating in our programs; the impact of scientific findings is often on the next generation. But what an age-friendly university does is enable older adults to become part of the learning community, to appreciate the depth and nuance of their contribution to research and learning. And the students, as they move on in their academic careers, bring more empathy to their research and life approach. They see their participants as individuals who are both providing value and receiving it.”