Why the focus on Micro - Credentials?
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The document discusses the evolution of micro-credentials in higher education, highlighting the shift from traditional degree recognition to digital badges and nano-degrees due to the demands of the modern workforce. It addresses the challenges of accrediting online courses and the need for innovative educational reforms to integrate these new credentialing systems within existing frameworks. The MicroHE project aims to propose standardized models for recognizing and documenting sub-degree achievements to enhance the portability and trust of qualifications across Europe.
Why the focus on Micro - Credentials?
- 1. 1DHBW Heilbronn Raimund Hudak MicroHE Heilbronn, 9. - 10. Nov. 2017 DHBW HEILBRONN International Conference “Open Professional Collaboration for Open Classroom”
- 2. Why the focus on Micro-Credentials? As new technologies and traditional education paradigms collide, credentialing paradigms also need to be reviewed. By 2015, global higher education institutions were considering validation of knowledge from online learning coursework in one single common, broad-based credentialing platform, and signed the Groningen Declaration to help forward this agenda.
- 3. The Demands, Trends and Challenges The world of work increasingly demands a quick response from the education system to provide people with the desired qualifications. Still most students, learning the traditional way, depend on recognition of widely understood signals of experience and expertise such as university degrees. Digital Education is increasingly breaking traditional programmes, into smaller, shorter online courses. The discussion in the next few years will centre around whether universities will adapt to offer large-scale micro-credentials, whether VET institutions will take up the mantle, or whether it will increasingly become the domain of start-ups and corporations.
- 4. The Context of MicroHE Credentialing in the form of digital badges, nano-degrees, and micro-credentialing is a new concept in HE advocated for use in the acknowledgement of coursework taken online. Badges provide a method of accrediting content knowledge rather than course credit for specific knowledge (Rath, 2013; Reid, 2011). Digital badges are now being examined and accepted for wider applications in HE. However, the precise form of these badges is still very much up for debate, with one approach proposing fully-open credentials which are transparent, and issuable by anyone, while another model proposes verified credentials which are issued by trusted institutions.
- 5. The Accreditation for Massive Open Online Coursework Accreditation for online learning or Massive Open Online Coursework provides challenges for universities to accept and acknowledge learning as credited coursework Awarding credit for different types of educational coursework disrupts higher education’s traditional, formal educational processes for financial and educational accountability. The challenge for post-secondary institutions is to look at online learning opportunities through a lens of reform and innovation and equally, as an opportunity to increase higher education participation. (Lemoine and Richardson, 2015, ‘Micro-Credentials, Nano Degrees, and Digital Badges’)
- 6. The Accreditation Processes (1) UNESCO defines: a)Recognition as a process of granting official status to learning outcomes and/or competences, which can lead to the acknowledgement of their value in society. b)Validation is the confirmation by an approved body that learning outcomes or competences acquired by an individual have been assessed against reference points or standards through pre-defined assessment methodologies.
- 7. The Accreditation Processes (2) UNESCO defines: c) Accreditation as a process by which an approved body, on the basis of assessment of learning outcomes and/or competences according to different purposes and methods, awards qualifications (certificates, diploma or titles), or grants equivalences, credit units or exemptions, or issues documents such as portfolios of competences. Accreditation also applies to the evaluation of the quality of an institution or a programme as a whole (Unesco Guidelines, p.8).
- 8. Relevance of the Project – MicroHE (1) The ‘State of Digital Education Conference’ concluded that there is scope for a distinctly European solution to the following issues: The educational reforms in Europe arising out of the Bologna Process were designed to enable portability and transfer of qualifications, as well as to create trust between different educational institutions. These same methodologies apply excellently to digital education, with little change…all that remains is for governments to deploy the policies necessary to bring digital education within existing quality and recognition frameworks.
- 9. Relevance of the Project – MicroHE (2) In 2016, the European Council produced a recommendation for a new European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning, identified the following issues with the current implementation of the EQF: • Although the EQF aims to promote flexible learning pathways and focuses on learning outcomes independently of where the qualification has been acquired, no common arrangements exist for credit transfer and accumulation for qualifications related to the EQF. • No common European format exists for describing qualifications and their learning outcomes: this hinders their comparability. Moreover, information on the content of a qualification is often difficult to find as it is in general neither systematically included in qualifications databases and registers nor shared at European level.
- 10. Relevance of the Project – MicroHE (3) • The current Recommendation stipulates that international sectoral organisations should be able to relate their qualifications systems to a common European reference point and thus show the relationship between international sectoral qualifications and national qualifications systems. However, the Recommendation did not create explicit provisions on how this direct relation to the EQF should be achieved. • The lack of comparability of qualifications awarded in the EU with third-country qualifications hinders the trust in foreign qualifications and makes their recognition more difficult.
- 11. The MicroHE Project To this end, the MicroHE project consortium intend to: Propose a standardised ‘credit supplement’ modelled on the European Diploma supplement, which can be used to document learning achievement for sub-degree qualifications. Clarify how the European Qualifications Framework can provide a recognition and translation framework for all types of documented achievements, in particular, including micro-credentials, without the need to create parallel systems of accreditation such as ‘badge’ systems.
- 12. Future Impacts While there is a clear increase in the number of MOOCs and other forms of micro- credentials, the impacts of such radical unbundling in Higher Education are far from clear. Micro-credentials change everything from the structure of qualifications, to pedagogy, modes of provision, types of assessment, economic models and every other aspect of Higher Education.