Author - Raimund Hudak,Head of Research & Labs of Duale Hochschule Baden Württemberg (DHBW), Germany.Digital technologies offer myriad access to learning. As new technologies and traditional education paradigms have collided, credentialing paradigms have also needed review. Traditionally, academic credentials and professional certifications were awarded as students emerged from education and vocational/technical programs. By 2015, global higher education institutions were considering validation of knowledge from online learning coursework in one single common, broad-based credentialing platform, and signed the Groningen Declaration to help forward this agenda. Accreditation for online learning or Massive Open Online Coursework provides challenges for universities to accept and acknowledge learning as credited coursework; awarding credit for different types of educational coursework disrupts higher education’s traditional, formal educational processes for financial and educational accountability.

1. 1DHBW Heilbronn Raimund Hudak MicroHE
Heilbronn, 9. - 10. Nov. 2017
DHBW HEILBRONN
International Conference
“Open Professional Collaboration
for Open Classroom”

2. Why the focus on Micro-Credentials?
As new technologies and traditional education paradigms collide, credentialing
paradigms also need to be reviewed.
By 2015, global higher education institutions were considering validation of knowledge
from online learning coursework in one single common, broad-based credentialing
platform, and signed the Groningen Declaration to help forward this agenda.

3. The Demands, Trends and Challenges
The world of work increasingly demands a quick response from the education system
to provide people with the desired qualifications.
Still most students, learning the traditional way, depend on recognition of widely
understood signals of experience and expertise such as university degrees.
Digital Education is increasingly breaking traditional programmes, into smaller, shorter
online courses.
The discussion in the next few years will centre around whether universities will adapt
to offer large-scale micro-credentials, whether VET institutions will take up the mantle,
or whether it will increasingly become the domain of start-ups and corporations.

4. The Context of MicroHE
Credentialing in the form of digital badges, nano-degrees, and micro-credentialing
is a new concept in HE advocated for use in the acknowledgement of coursework
taken online.
Badges provide a method of accrediting content knowledge rather than course
credit for specific knowledge (Rath, 2013; Reid, 2011).
Digital badges are now being examined and accepted for wider applications in HE.
However, the precise form of these badges is still very much up for debate, with one
approach proposing fully-open credentials which are transparent, and issuable by
anyone, while another model proposes verified credentials which are issued by
trusted institutions.

5. The Accreditation for Massive Open Online
Coursework
Accreditation for online learning or Massive Open Online Coursework provides
challenges for universities to accept and acknowledge learning as credited
coursework
Awarding credit for different types of educational coursework disrupts higher
education’s traditional, formal educational processes for financial and educational
accountability.
The challenge for post-secondary institutions is to look at online learning
opportunities through a lens of reform and innovation and equally, as an opportunity
to increase higher education participation.
(Lemoine and Richardson, 2015, ‘Micro-Credentials, Nano Degrees, and Digital Badges’)

6. The Accreditation Processes (1)
UNESCO defines:
a)Recognition as a process of granting official status to learning outcomes and/or
competences, which can lead to the acknowledgement of their value in society.
b)Validation is the confirmation by an approved body that learning outcomes or
competences acquired by an individual have been assessed against reference
points or standards through pre-defined assessment methodologies.

7. The Accreditation Processes (2)
UNESCO defines:
c) Accreditation as a process by which an approved body, on the
basis of assessment of learning outcomes and/or competences
according to different purposes and methods, awards qualifications
(certificates, diploma or titles), or grants equivalences, credit units or
exemptions, or issues documents such as portfolios of
competences.
Accreditation also applies to the evaluation of the quality of an institution or
a programme as a whole (Unesco Guidelines, p.8).

8. Relevance of the Project – MicroHE (1)
The ‘State of Digital Education Conference’ concluded that there is scope for a
distinctly European solution to the following issues:
The educational reforms in Europe arising out of the Bologna Process were
designed to enable portability and transfer of qualifications, as well as to create trust
between different educational institutions.
These same methodologies apply excellently to digital education, with little
change…all that remains is for governments to deploy the policies necessary to
bring digital education within existing quality and recognition frameworks.

9. Relevance of the Project – MicroHE (2)
In 2016, the European Council produced a recommendation for a new European
Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning, identified the following issues with
the current implementation of the EQF:
• Although the EQF aims to promote flexible learning pathways and focuses on
learning outcomes independently of where the qualification has been acquired,
no common arrangements exist for credit transfer and accumulation for
qualifications related to the EQF.
• No common European format exists for describing qualifications and their
learning outcomes: this hinders their comparability. Moreover, information on the
content of a qualification is often difficult to find as it is in general neither
systematically included in qualifications databases and registers nor shared at
European level.

10. Relevance of the Project – MicroHE (3)
• The current Recommendation stipulates that international sectoral organisations
should be able to relate their qualifications systems to a common European
reference point and thus show the relationship between international sectoral
qualifications and national qualifications systems. However, the Recommendation
did not create explicit provisions on how this direct relation to the EQF should be
achieved.
• The lack of comparability of qualifications awarded in the EU with third-country
qualifications hinders the trust in foreign qualifications and makes their
recognition more difficult.

11. The MicroHE Project
To this end, the MicroHE project consortium intend to:
Propose a standardised ‘credit supplement’ modelled on the European Diploma
supplement, which can be used to document learning achievement for sub-degree
qualifications.
Clarify how the European Qualifications Framework can provide a recognition and
translation framework for all types of documented achievements, in particular,
including micro-credentials, without the need to create parallel systems of
accreditation such as ‘badge’ systems.

12. Future Impacts
While there is a clear increase in the number of MOOCs and other forms of micro-
credentials, the impacts of such radical unbundling in Higher Education are far from
clear.
Micro-credentials change everything from the structure of qualifications, to
pedagogy, modes of provision, types of assessment, economic models and every
other aspect of Higher Education.