Addressing the Real Challenges of Microcredentials

Last week at On EdTech+, we covered different conceptions of AI (whether to augment or replace humans) as well as recent product announcements by Meta, Coursera, and Pearson. In a separate post, we looked at research that should cause policy-makers to step back and update their mental models around remedial / co-requisite courses.

This post has been in the making for some time, but my frustration reached its peak this week. One of the most common topics clients ask us about is microcredentials. While much has been written on the subject, many reports shy away from addressing the real challenges institutions face when trying to expand their microcredential offerings. In this post, I aim to highlight those challenges for those desiring to develop a more targeted and practical research agenda.

Interest and growth of microcredentials

The growing interest in microcredentials—short, focused, career- and work-oriented courses of study—is undeniable. Much of this interest comes from higher education's desire to equip students with more work-ready qualifications, but the pursuit of new revenue streams is also a significant factor.

Today’s Inside Higher Ed article called out the increasing demand, even from younger students.

But, while the demand for mirocredentials has expanded, reality still lags behind the hype. Many colleges and universities remain unsure of how to effectively launch and grow new microcredentials.

We hear this concern - how institutions can scale programs - from clients frequently, and some public reporting further aligns with this observation. For example, the State University of New York (SUNY) System launched its microcredential program with great fanfare in 2018, but progress has been slower than expected. As of early this year, SUNY had just over 600 microcredentials spread across 57 of its 64 campuses. While this is still a large number, given SUNY's size, it's lower than what might have been anticipated, especially when compared to the US average of 64 microcredentials per institution reported in a recent UPCEA survey.

Obstacles in the way of microcredential expansion

The slow growth of microcredentials is largely due to the challenges colleges and universities face in implementing and expanding them, especially when attempting to do so in a centralized (or at least coordinated) manner. These challenges include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Finding reliable platforms to facilitate enrollment and payment for non-matriculated students (i.e., those not currently enrolled, for non-American readers). These systems should ideally track enrollments, direct payments to specific units, and handle functions such as wait-listing and refunds.

• Understanding the ecosystem and market for these tools, and how different segments intersect. It’s a poorly defined market, making it difficult for universities to navigate. It’s often unclear which products offer which functionality, and the prevalence of vaporware is higher than usual.

  

• Providing access to a learning management system (LMS) for non-matriculated students who don’t have regular university IDs. Most university LMSs are licensed for matriculated students, and access is tied to a university ID.

• Developing a more lightweight social ID for non-matriculated students, and determining what systems and supports, such as library access, these students should have.

• Managing different campus units that may already have systems in place for offering continuing education or professional development options, often using different systems and wanting to retain their unit or college brand.

• Devising a business model and marketing strategy for microcredentials, which are typically priced far lower than degrees.

• Identifying and creating market-attractive microcredentials in an agile manner, often requiring new pedagogical approaches and course design methods that involve teams rather than individual instructors.

• Collaborating with the corporate sector to integrate real-world expertise into microcredentials and foster recognition of these credentials, particularly in the absence of widespread standards.

The issue—and the source of my frustration this week—is that these challenges, and potential solutions, are rarely addressed in the flood of publications on microcredentials that arrive in our inboxes. This week, I read three substantial pieces on the subject but came away barely more informed, and certainly no closer to solving the challenges mentioned above. While these reports offer some insights, they somehow fail to tackle the practical questions we hear from clients frequently. This gap exists for a couple of key reasons.

Defining and classifying microcredentials

Many sources on microcredentials focus heavily on defining what they are and fitting them into one of the larger frameworks that have been developed, such as the New Zealand Quality and Credentials Framework, the Australian National Micro-credential Framework, and the European Approach to Micro-credentials for Lifelong Learning and Employability, to name a few. This was true of two of the resources I read this week: Microcredentials for Excellence: A Practical Guide by Rebecca Ferguson and Denise Whitelock at the Open University, and the report on Micro-credentials Processes produced by Ecctis and the International Baccalaureate.

I understand the need for definitions and frameworks, as they are important tools for addressing issues like shared language, quality assurance, and recognition by other educational institutions and employers. However, the literature on microcredentials is beginning to remind me of the endless debates from 2003-2005 about what constituted a learning object. I plan to take the same approach to defining microcredentials as I did to learning objects: paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart, and saying, 'I know them when I see them.'

Frameworks are certainly useful and will be essential for developing standards for recognizing and transferring microcredentials. This work, for instance, is critical for standards bodies. But for those of us working on the ground, it’s time to move beyond comparing and perfecting frameworks. We need to focus on developing, supporting, and growing actual microcredential offerings. The insights gained from addressing these real-world challenges will be far more valuable in refining and aligning frameworks than the more abstract debates we seem to be engaged in at the moment.

Microcredentials as add-ons to degrees

Sometimes, different models of microcredentials are in play. This is the case with Coursera's Micro-Credential Impact Report 2024. As one of the world’s largest providers of microcredentials, Coursera has an increasing focus on those offered by industry partners like Google and IBM. However, the primary model they use with higher education institutions is to offer microcredentials alongside a degree for currently enrolled students.

You see this throughout the survey report but especially in the emphasis on offering microcredentials for credit.

It’s also reflected in the challenges institutions report facing with microcredentials, most of which involve integrating these smaller units of training into a broader curriculum.

This 'add-on' model of microcredentials is excellent, and I wish more institutions would adopt it. While it addresses one of the main goals of deploying microcredentials—equipping students with more career-oriented skills—it doesn’t fully tackle the second goal: creating additional revenue streams. Additionally, many of the technology and policy challenges faced by institutions offering standalone microcredentials, described above, are avoided, and thus never addressed

The technology and policy challenges need to be our research agenda

Those of us on the more practical, applied side of the EdTech industry need to focus on explaining and exploring the challenges outlined at the beginning of this post, as well as other complex, hands-on issues colleges and universities face when rolling out microcredentials. There are already some valuable contributions in this area, such as the UPCEA survey I referenced earlier. The three reports I critique here also offer useful insights, but we need a more sustained focus on the nuts and bolts if we want to help institutions expand their microcredential portfolios.

Not only will this focus help institutions make progress, but it will also push EdTech vendors to address these issues more directly—something many have been hesitant to do so far.

I take this to be a personal challenge going forward.

The main On EdTech newsletter is free to share in part or in whole. All we ask is attribution.

Thanks for being a subscriber.