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Tag: Credentials

Micro-credentials in Ontario

The word “micro-credential”, precisely because remains relatively undefined, is absolute catnip to politicians.  It’s tabula rasa: you can tell politicians the word means damn near anything and not only will they believe you, but no one can contradict you because no one can contradict you.  Here is a list of things at least one provincial education minister/ministry appears to believe about micro-credentials. In other words, nearly everything about micro-credentials is down to design details rather than being automatic properties.  But this

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April 28, 2021 1 Comment

Micro-credentials Need to be More than Gimmicks

If you’re one of those unfortunate people who follows the federal lobbying scene, you’ll have noticed that all of the PSE stakeholder groups, one way or another, are currently pitching micro-credentials to the feds either as “a contribution” PSE institutions are making to skills acquisition in the country (CICan) or as something the government should pay for by tacking on some kind of voucher to the CERB (Universities Canada, U15, and Polytechnics Canada).  I have three reactions to this. First,

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September 14, 2020 3 Comments

Credit Hours

It’s hard to tell from the outside what universities are talking about these days, because there is this veil of secrecy up about what planning is happening.  But I’ve heard that, at a couple of schools at least, the focus is very much on the question of credit hours.  As in, “credit hours = contact hours, so if your course isn’t completely synchronous, how do we know students deserve three credits?” Sigh. There are short and long answers to this

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May 6, 2020 4 Comments

The Canada Lifelong Learning Fund

In all the excitement over Christmas I forgot to write about a policy initiative which may or may not find its way into the coming budget.  It’s something called the “Canada Lifelong Learning Fund” (CLLF), and it is among the weakest ideas to float around Ottawa since the Liberals came to power. The idea comes from the Minister of Finance’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, chaired by McKinsey Global Managing Partner Dominic Barton, which issued a paper called Learning Nation: Equipping

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February 5, 2018 1 Comment

Why Education in IT Fields is Different

A couple of years ago, an American academic by the name of James Bessen wrote a fascinating book called Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages and Wealth.  (It’s brilliant.  Read it).  It’s an examination of what happened to wages and productivity over the course of the industrial revolution, particularly in the crucial cotton mill industry.  And the answer, it turns out, is that despite all the investment in capital which permitted vast jumps in labour productivity, in fact

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May 10, 2017 4 Comments

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