If you’ve been near education conferences in the last year or so, the chances are that you’ve heard at least one of the two following propositions.

1)      “Modularization is the Future”.  People don’t need full degrees, they need knowledge in bite-size chunks, and they need it “on-demand”.  That means that learning needs to come in tiny little bits, and certification for learning needs to come in tiny, bite-size pieces, too.  This is partly what’s pushing the enthusiasm behind certain MOOCs and ideas like “Open badges”, but even within mainstream institutions, you’re seeing this as well.  In the US, parts of the Michigan community college system  are giving out “micro-credits” for as little as a two hours worth of classes.

2)      “Learning Outcomes are the Future”.  Part of the general movement for accountability in higher education is going to require institutions to describe expected student outcomes and figure out ways to credibly certify that students who have passed a given course of studies have in fact mastered the competencies and skills linked to those outcomes.

There’s something to both of these propositions.  The problem is, they can’t both be right, because they contradict each other in one very fundamental way.

The whole point of the learning outcomes is to allow institutions to certify with some degree of precision what kind of knowledge and skills a person who has finished a particular program of studies has.  That logic necessarily leads program design away from the  frequently smorgasboard-buffet approach to course selection which is prevalent in arts and sciences in North America, and towards program with larger core curricula.

Basically, the more “core” courses there are, the more curriculum planners can be sure that particular skills and knowledge are being taught (and, presumably, learned as well).  If learning outcomes are difficult to ensure with smorgasboard curriculum, they’re well-nigh impossible with a fully modularized one.  The point of the modularization agenda is very much about making the credentials easier to obtain, and the explicit trade-off made is the coherence of the degree being offered.

To put this another way: the learning outcomes agenda is based on a human capital vision of higher education; the modularization agenda is very much about credentialism.  The public policy rationale is probably stronger for the former, but there’s clearly a strong market rationale for the latter.  Both are important, neither will trump the other.

Anyone who says either “the future is learning outcomes” or “the future is modularization” without offering any qualifications should be ignored.  Different institutions with different missions serving different populations are – quite appropriately – going to favour different strategies.  Grown-up, pluralistic education systems are capable of having trends moving in several directions at once.