By Professor Mick Grimley, Dean of Future Learning and Development, University of Canterbury
Never before has the landscape of education changed so drastically, disrupted by the advent of new technologies and accelerated by Covid19. Individuals looking to learn a new skill or acquire new knowledge are now faced with a myriad of options. YouTube videos are littered with ‘How to’ videos, free Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) are in abundance, numerous industries offer a variety of courses and almost all universities deliver courses online, including some of the most prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Cambridge. The choice of course provider is huge, and the types of course incredibly varied.
Numerous reports have commented on the ‘skills emergency’ that we are currently facing globally. The pace of change for essential skills, that most industries now require, is huge. The best way to describe these shifting skill requirements is through statistics released by the World Economic Forum. They state that “by 2025, 40% of workers will require reskilling of six months or less and 94% of workers will need to develop new skills on the job; and by 2025 there could be up to 97 million new and emerging jobs, many of which do not yet exist.”
The changing nature of work and the need for new skills is complemented by rapidly accelerating knowledge. Such dramatic changes for employers have added to the rhetoric that the value of generic university degrees is falling. University graduates are perceived by employers as being less employable and often lacking the requisite skills and knowledge required for the industries that they are entering. Modern employers are asking for better skills and more ‘soft skills’ education. Consequently, short courses such as micro-credentials are seen as potential vehicles for bridging these skills and knowledge gaps.
Typically, working adults require flexibility to fit study into their working life alongside other family commitments and studying through smaller bite sized units is essential. Global education has been shifting for some time towards smaller bite sized chunks of learning, typically online learning, characterised by the rise of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) offered by global online MOOC platforms such as edX, Coursera, FutureLearn and Udacity, to name a few. Micro-credentials are often conflated with MOOCs, but MOOCs span a much wider selection of course types and can be short online courses covering any topic. However, micro-credentials are more vocationally oriented courses aimed at supporting the learner to upskill or reskill from an employment perspective, and not always delivered online.
New Zealand moved early to embed micro-credentials into the New Zealand qualifications Framework (NZQF) and to provide a process for designing and developing micro-credentials that can be delivered by all New Zealand Tertiary Education Organisations (TEO). The New Zealand Qualifications Agency defines a microcredential as “[An] achievement of a coherent set of skills and knowledge; and is specified by a statement of purpose, learning outcomes, and strong evidence of need by industry, employers, iwi and/or the community.”
In New Zealand, an official micro-credential is between five and 40 credits in size or between 50 hrs and 400 hrs, when translated into learning hours. They tend to focus on skills and new knowledge that has not typically been taught in longer university programmes. They are designed to fill the gaps that employers have been asking about for some time. Although micro-credentials can only be offered by a New Zealand TEO, industry and other organisations can legitimately partner with a registered TEO to design, develop and deliver a micro-credential. This allows employers and other organisations to co-design micro-credentials for their own context rather than relying on existing offerings by Tertiary providers, which is often missing in traditional courses and programmes.
Many micro-credentials are delivered as fully online courses. The reason for this is that the lifestyle of individuals wishing to take these courses is usually one requiring flexibility – working adults, unable to attend a physical space to learn, time poor and generally without capacity to learn within regular hours.
More and more short courses labelled micro-credentials are emerging globally, particularly in the online space. Although New Zealand moved early to embed the concept of a micro-credential into the official qualifications framework not all other countries have done this, and those that have are likely to have taken quite a different approach to that of NZ. If you search for micro-credentials on the internet, you will discover that there are many, and they vary considerably. Many entrepreneurial individuals and numerous industries have also moved into this space, unwilling or unable to wait for skills development to be spawned by traditional tertiary providers. What this does mean is that micro-credentials can be of variable quality. Globally, micro-credentials do not have agreed standards, and for the discerning learner it is wise to choose a micro-credential from a reputable provider, especially if required as a credential and path in or to employment.
Finally, it is germane to point out that, in New Zealand, microcredential offerings from trusted institutions such as universities are only just gaining traction, but they are coming, and employers are hanging out for them. If ever the world needed professional development in the form of trusted credentials, it is now.