The other type of push-back we are starting to see on micro-credentials comes from faculty. It’s not a generalized push-back, but rather something of a boundary-dispute. Sometimes, institutions create bespoke micro-credentials geared towards a particular industry or employer. These are generally non-credit, but institutions also want to make them “stackable” into actual credentials. Not that most institutions offer enough micro-credentials to stack into anything at all – it’s more that people are being offered “advanced credit” for having taken the micro-credential. But still, that creates problems. It’s easy enough to see how offering credit for work that is theoretically non-credit could look like contracting out. It also creates some grey zones with respect to institutional Senates and their authority over degree content, which might not unreasonably be seen as an infringement on faculty privileges.
So, a case of organized management infringement of faculty rights? Well, no, not really. From the management perspective, micro-credentials are a subset of Continuing Education, which at most institutions avoids Senate scrutiny as well – ContEd wants to be able to move quickly to respond to market demands and Senate doesn’t want to deal with the volume of program changes that ContEd creates, so at most universities they are ok with ignoring one another. But the stackability promise of micro-credentials breaches the wall between the two: hence the problem.
There are various solutions to this problem. Adopting a provincial or national credential framework like New Zealand and assigning levels and credits to all courses would completely solve it: that way, even if it was something bespoke for a particular industry or firm, the “value” of the credit could be objectively defined and understood. Without a transparent system of levels and credits, “stackability” is always going to be restricted to micro-credentials offered within a single institution: no plug-and-play across institutions will be possible.
So, what that leaves as a solution is that each institution either must start running micro-credentials through Senates (which I’m not sure anyone really wants), or they must each adopt more transparent prior-learning recognition systems: one which can credibly assign credit values to non-credit courses in consistent ways in a way that Senates can accept without actually having to review each and every course.
Overall, going the New Zealand route would solve this problem with a lot less fuss, but unfortunately, I suspect Canadian institutions and governments lack the imagination to go that route. Which means each institution is going to have to re-invent the wheel to make stackable micro-credentials a reality. If this is true, it’s unfortunate.