Digital currencies for employability and lifelong learning
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Summary: This presentation provides an overview of trends related to micro-credentials such as open badges in business education and the impact of these trends for a range of audiences. How are micro-credentials relevant to professional communication practitioners, educators and trainers? How might these be useful for students and employees? Abstract: Education and training sectors are undergoing radical changes. Future employees need to be more flexible than ever before. Micro-credentials such as open badges and statements of achievement recognise that learning today happens everywhere and can be regarded as digital currencies for employability and lifelong learning. Students and employees share open badges and other forms of micro-credentials on their LinkedIn profiles and other professional online spaces to showcase their skills, attributes, competencies and ongoing professional learning and development. Besides traditional qualifications, students and employees are now able to display information about all learning opportunities such as MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), signalled by statements of participation and open badges verifying and recognising various competencies and achievements. This enables job seekers, for example, to make their personal learning pathways visible to others in ways that academic transcripts, diplomas or certificates are unable to do. How they showcase such skills to potential employers, build their online presence and make continued learning pathways visible online are becoming a new currency for communicating employability and continued professional learning. Such digital currencies offer a more fluid and flexible way to communicate with potential and current employers than the static CVs of yore. Current opportunities for online learning accompanied by new business models challenge the orthodoxy of business education. This has also sparked a paradigm shift for how business educators and trainers credit learning and the kinds of learning experiences valued by students, educators, trainers and employers in the business sector. This presentation provides an overview of trends related to micro-credentials in business education and the impact of these trends for a range of audiences. How are micro-credentials relevant to professional communication practitioners, educators and trainers? How might these be useful for students and employees?
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Digital currencies for employability and lifelong learning
- 1. Digital currencies for employability and lifelong learning Dr Nicola Pallitt @nicolapallitt nicola.pallitt@uct.ac.za Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching (CILT), UCT Association for Business Communication Conference, Cape Town 6 January 2016
- 2. Introduction • Students and employees share micro-credentials on their LinkedIn profiles to showcase skills, competencies & professional learning • Collectively displayed, micro-credentials may be seen as digital currencies for employability and lifelong learning • ‘Micro-credentials’ or ‘professional digital currencies’ include: • Verified certificates (online courses) • Statements of participation & completion (MOOCs) • Open badges • Have been more popular among ed-tech companies than at traditional universities BUT this is changing… • Boundary between formal and informal learning blurring
- 3. Digital currencies – why the hype? • What has changed? • Way we learn • How we share what we have learned • Credibility of those we learn from is being disrupted = how we validate learning & the kind of learning valued in the workplace is changing • New models of learning, assessment and accreditation emerging • More opportunities for à la carte professional learning • Employers consulting potential candidates’ LinkedIn profiles before hiring = increasing
- 4. University degrees & diplomas Certificates … fancy sheets of paper? Verified certificates & statements of participation & completion on LinkedIn Open badges …. connected learning made visible, showcase diverse learning pathways
- 5. Why micro-credentials? • Alternative to years-long degree programs • Heralded as the future of professional learning • Give employers detailed information about the skills students master • Demonstrated competence: “show what you know economy” • DIY Higher Ed and ‘pay as you go’ (free opportunities getting smaller, growing competition) but shorter and cheaper than conventional degrees • Way for adults to get career-oriented skills that are marketable
- 6. Udacity nanodegrees & individual courses
- 9. Open badges
- 12. • Sharing traditional qualifications and a CV is not enough – need for competencies and demonstration of these to be more transparent for employers • Need for more holistic representation of skills and learning that is also relevant to boost employability • Emphasis on job-related skills and ways to showcase these for employers • Various opportunities exist across the landscape of micro-credentials, especially business-related So far we know…
- 13. Discussion • Why are micro-credentials becoming popular in business education? • What forms of micro-credentials will take hold in business communication specifically and why? • What is regarded as ‘currency’ in this field and community of practitioners? • Micro-credentials as solutionist fairytale – career leverage for an elite few? • Whose interests are being served? (let’s be critical)
Editor's Notes
- The landscape has changed quite a bit since my original abstract – lots of discussions on micro-credentials happening online, Coursera not offering free certificates anymore (business vs. freemium model), Learning Store freemium model in US in the works. Criticisms around purpose of these kinds of online learning opportunities more apparent: access VS making money. In context of SA (transformation, #FeesMustFall and unemployment and lack of access to higher ed) are micro-credentials really the fairytale they are portrayed as? Lots of uncritical, technicist and solutionist discourse (connected learning, diverse learning pathways, etc). I think micro-credentials highlight inequalities as it serves an elite few and aids highly specialist fields and industries. Business and tech seem to be the biggies if you look at the paid-for certificate courses on offer.
- http://www.kineo.com/za/blog/market-update/archive/march-2013 https://openbadgepassport.com/en/about
- Image source: https://opensource.com/sites/default/files/images/life-uploads/openbadges_progress.png Traditional models of learning vs models more suited to connected learning
- http://www.educationdive.com/news/micro-credentials-open-higher-ed-to-those-looking-to-broaden-skills/406469/ http://gettingsmart.com/2015/09/micro-credentials-the-future-of-professional-learning/
- MOOCs seen as DIY Higher Ed (but are free courses really free? MOOC providers struggle to achieve sustainable business models) Nanodegrees are short-term certificate programs that can be completed in six to 12 months. They are skills based and designed in collaboration with employers, in areas such as Android development or data analysis, at a price of $200 per month.
- https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/14/group-seven-major-universities-seeks-offer-online-microcredentials The idea is to create an “alternative credentialing process that would provide students with credentials that are much shorter and cheaper than conventional degrees,” said David Schejbal, dean of continuing education, outreach and e-learning at Wisconsin Extension. As with a department store, Schejbal said, the University Learning Store is about offering students different products from different providers. Students will be able to use online content and assessments -- with pieces from different universities -- to prove what they know and can do. The microcredentials could be in job-related soft skills, such as in communication, working with other people and customer relations, or in critical reasoning, logic and problem identification, said Schejbal. They also could be more technical, such content or assessments on climate science, geographic information systems, or agriculture. The platform would be aimed at entry-level employees and students, as well as midcareer and senior employees, said Deb Bushway, interim associate dean at Wisconsin Extension. That means it would seek to attract both bachelor’s degree holders and students who have not earned an associate degree, she said. “Those distinctions start to fade” with microcredentials, Bushway said. “The degree is almost a distraction.” For example, employees who are managers or even executives might seek out the online platform because they are interested in bulking up their skills in leadership or budget management. Or they might want to take and pass assessments to display what they already can do in those areas. And whether or not the project is successful largely depends on whether employers value the resulting microcredentials. 'Freemium' and À la Carte The departure from the conventional college course is what sets this project apart from some of the much more established partnerships between MOOC providers and traditional universities, including some of the ones participating in this prototype… Schejbal said the project’s pricing would be of the “freemium” model. That means some of the content would be free, but students would have to spend money when the universities do. Assessments would come with a price, he said, in part because they would be graded by people rather than computers. Tutoring or other support services would also be fee based. “Students will be able to buy these à la carte,” said Schejbal, “or in a package.” The planned online store would not be designed to be federal aid eligible, said Schejbal, even though the White House and U.S. Department of Education have expressed interest in experimental pathways to aid eligibility for some similar forms of nontraditional credentials. “We’re imagining that this would be cheap enough for a student to afford without financial aid,” he said. Bushway said it was not clear at this point whether the project would pursue credit-bearing credentials. That likely would require accreditation approval, which can be labor intensive to secure. The quality of the microcredentials in many ways will hinge on the assessments students must successfully complete to earn them, said Bushway. The project will feature “authentic” assessments, she said, that in many ways build on Wisconsin’s work on competency-based education. Wisconsin Extension is one a handful of institutions to receive approval from the Education Department and its regional accreditor to offer direct-assessment degrees, which do not rely on the credit hour. If a student passed an assessment in, say, customer service, that documented skill could be paired with related modular online content, Bushway said. Taken together, those pieces would stack into some sort of microcredential, badge, nanodegree or whatever term takes hold. Students would be able to display the credential electronically, as in a digital portfolio. The project’s leaders had been working with an outside provider to help build the platform. But Schejbal said the universities eventually had to change gears and begin an open-bid process. That sort of red tape, which affects public universities much more than ed-tech companies, is an example of the challenges the University Learning Store likely will face. (All but one of the group of seven universities are public.) That said, the assorted universities tout heavy-hitter brands. And the project shows that the group is willing to think beyond what Schejbal calls the “blunt instrument of the degree,” with a focus on students who are working adults, not just 18- to 22-year-olds on residential campuses. “Students really do need to come in and out of education across a lifetime,” said Schejbal, adding that the microcredential project is “looking at people who need them regardless of their degree level.”
- Coursera launched a Global Skills Initiative this week (Sep 2015) linking universities and companies work together to create a course sequence resulting in certification in a Specialization. Initial collaborators include BNY Mellon, Cisco, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Splunk, and UBS. The will work with a university partners to produce online courses in fields like data science, computer programming, and finance. http://gettingsmart.com/2015/09/micro-credentials-the-future-of-professional-learning/ https://www.coursera.org/specializations Coursera offers a Specialization in digital marketing that features a bundle of five online courses from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It costs about $450. Some of the courses are self-paced and include 10 hours of videos and assessments. One course takes four weeks to complete. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/14/group-seven-major-universities-seeks-offer-online-microcredentials
- Traditional colleges and universities are increasingly experimenting with micro-credentials to keep up with the innovation curve Even though elite schools have the benefit of name recognition, micro-credentials could get applicants far by showing, in detail, the skills they have mastered and how they had to prove it http://poetsandquants.com/2016/01/04/49343/2/ http://www.educationdive.com/news/micro-credentials-open-higher-ed-to-those-looking-to-broaden-skills/406469/ http://gettingsmart.com/2015/09/micro-credentials-the-future-of-professional-learning/
- JISC. 2013. So what are open badges? https://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/so-what-are-open-badges-28-aug-2013 Image source: Brownie and Cub compare badges https://www.flickr.com/photos/girlguidesofcan/8488348265/ Date: c1983 Location: Hamilton ON Photographer: Paul Hourigan Credit: Hamilton Spectator Source:Girl Guides of Canada -Guides du Canada, National Archives photo collection
- https://plus.google.com/communities/114382789156190331232