It has been about a year since I last took a look at micro-credentials and I want discuss how I see things evolving in this space.

The most important thing to note is that there remains a massive disconnect between those people who think micro-credentials are building blocks towards credentials – that is, that they should be courses or groups of courses which are both independently coherent and can build towards larger “macro-credentials” like a Bachelor’s or Master’s Degree, and those people who believe that they should be unconnected to system of degrees and credentials and should instead denote some kind of skill relating to the job market.  Broadly speaking, the first position is the one taken by most of the world’s governments and universities, and the second one is taken by digital badge enthusiasts and most Canadian provincial governments.

There are, of course, nuances to both positions.  With respect to those who view microcredentials as building blocks to larger credentials, the Government of New Zealand – which has a simply wonderful process for approving new micro-credentials – has a strong emphasis on the transparency, particularly with respect to both the level of the course and the credit value of the course.  This is important because if you don’t specify either of these things, it is very difficult to subsequently claim that a particular group of courses taken from a variety of providers is actually equivalent to a degree.  Take a look at the New Zealand Micro-Credential Framework if you don’t believe me.  This approach is necessary if you think micro-credentials need to be both stackable and portable.  If you don’t care so much about the portability piece, and think it’s fine for every institution to have non-interoperable standards, then you can go the route that many institutions in the US are going, most notably SUNY in the public sector and Northeastern in the private. There, microcredentials are either single, snazzily designed credit-courses, or bundles of pre-existing courses with fewer credits than a typical certificate but nevertheless coherent enough that passing all of them theoretically amounts to mastery of some kind of discernable skill that conceivably ladders into something else at the same institution (in Canada, only the University of Manitoba seems to be going down this road in any serious way). 

On the other side – let’s call it the “non-credit” side of the debate, there are also nuances.  It’s not so much experiments in “badging’ that are going on, where providers of for-credit courses hand out what amount to certifications in certain types of soft skills (e.g. Jacqueline has demonstrated good teamwork skills, Ahmed has exhibited solid project management capacity, etc). Rather, it’s about the more hard skill/industry-related microcredentials which are meant to lead to industry positions.  In Ontario in particular, this is precisely what the term “micro-credential” has come to mean, though you can see similar examples elsewhere, at universities like Lethbridge and Laval (a recent University Affairs article gives a good round up of these kind of initiatives).  At a certain level, there is nothing wrong with this – arguably it is just a new version of bespoke industry training programs that colleges (less so universities) have been doing for decades.  But there are two catches here, reasons why the Ontario approach is really not very useful for the long term.

The first has to do with whether or not the skills taught through these kinds of microcredentials are industry-specific or firm-specific.  If it is the latter, the match to initial jobs might be pretty tight, but at the same time this does not necessarily do a lot for individuals who want to choose between multiple firms in an industry.  There are alternatives of course.  In Singapore, the Skills Future skills framework program has done a truly ludicrous amount of work to try to standardize skills by job level, occupation and industry in order to make it possible for single courses offered by public or private providers to serve multiple firms (note: Singapore doesn’t label the courses that lead to various skills levels as “micro-credentials” but they absolutely fit the definition).  But in Canada we have very little tradition of companies co-ordinating like this and even less tradition of governments acting as convenors of such discussions, and even if we did, I bet we’d be incapable of exercising it during this moment of national uselessness through which we seem to be passing. 

This has serious implications: if you decide that microcredentials are meant to be hyper-focused on firm-level skill shortages, your ability as an educational provider to achieve scale is practically zero.  And to put it bluntly, no scale, no profit.  A too-narrow mandate means it’s hard to imagine these kinds of micro-credentials ever being more than niche products, reliant on government funding.  And that’s a shame, because that’s definitely not how the rest of the world is thinking about micro-credentials.

Take a look, for instance, at the European Framework for Microcredentials, which has mostly been pushed by the big national Open Education providers (eg UK’s Futurelearn, Spain’s MirandaX).  This document is pretty clearly thinking about how to graft a New-Zealand like attempt to put microcredentials into a national credential framework into a multi-national online platform.  Or look at what Google is doing in terms of microcredentials in various types of IT fields.  Or – and this is the one that keeps blowing my mind – take a look at Arizona State University’s new goal of offering 100 million students around the world with online training leading to a business certificate by 2030.  Now, ok, it’s Arizona State and you can never tell with these kinds of announcements whether President Michael Crow wants to be taken literally or just seriously, but damn that’s audacious.   And it’s the kind of scale required for microcredentials to be widely understood and taken up by employers across the board.

Anyways, the point here is simply that the emerging Canadian approach to microcredentials is narrow.  There is obviously a place for industry-related training and maybe ever firm-related training as well.  But if that’s all we’re going to do, then our microcredentials will remain small and be viewed by the rest of the world as provincial and picayune, a sideshow to how the real game being played by Google, ASU and the big European online providers. 

This is of course what you get when institutions don’t co-operate on standards and governments not only can’t grasp the big picture but actively prefer to ignore it.  Welcome to Canada.