MicroCredentials. It is the desire of the Digital Europe program of the EU Commission (see the EU DEP-ADS Call text under which EURIDICE falls) that all course providers are able to hand out to all learners/students (if they wish so) an official certificate stating their achievements in terms of learning outcomes, including the associated amount of work done by learners/students. This is called a microcredential (Figs. 1 and 2 below, taken from the official EU brochure). Below an outline how EURIDICE can achieve this.
Fig1 (above) and Fig 2 (below): excerpts from the European Union leaflet A European Approach to Micro-Credentials, updated Dec2021.
A course description that satisfies the mentioned “EU standard elements” is pretty basic, not difficult to achieve, and does not present much of an additional burden for education and research staff. There must be a good description of the course, but the mentioned standard EU elements are mostly already found in any neat syllabus of a course offering/announcement (including the current JMP up for international accreditation, see the respective docs).
BTW, 1 ects corresponds to on average 25 hours of learner/student work (there are some differences across countries). Also, a 3-4 ects course typically correspond to about 20 hours of senior staff in terms of input contact hours.
Proposed MicroCredentials Approach.
What the MicroCredential Board can achieve is that it hands out to partners (who want, this is voluntary) the right to add to the certificates they hand out to their learners/students a EURIDICE-level “stamp”, as it were: EURIDICE Quality-Assured MicroCredential.
For this we need to agree on a simple and transparent procedure:
- Course providers can submit a description of a course to be accepted as a EURIDICE MicroCredential to the Board.
- The MicroCredential Board validates that this description satisfies the EU guidelines (Fig 2).
- As part of this, the MicroCredential Board validates that there is a quality assurance system in place, and if so what its nature is.
- In most cases this will be an existing and established one (accreditation systems, special appointed committee in place (e.g. exam committee), review or advisory boards etc.), and the MicroCredential Board simply references this. (Thus, we are not going to redo the quality assurance work itself!).
- In a few cases, if there is no defined quality assurance system in place, the MicroCredential Board offers the facility to carry out a EURIDICE review. This takes place in the form of an academic peer review that is fully analogous to the peer review established quality system of research publications.
The role of a submitted course is thus analogous to a paper submitted to a journal or conference, the role of the MicroCredential Board is then analogous to the editorial board of a scientific journal, and it then acts upon the expert advice of appointed knowledgeable reviewers, to make an argued decision (accept or not). In EURIDICE we adhere to the principle to uphold the autonomy and experience of academic, education and research staff and to state this explicitly in our procedures.
Board composition.
For the EURIDICE MicroCredential Board we look for individuals who are experienced senior academic staff and/or seasoned experts in education. All partners have the right to appoint someone in the MicroCredential Board, but this is voluntary. Furthermore, the Board as a whole should be adequately representative of the partnership. A size of around ten seems a good size that is manageable.
We need to come to an agreement on who will become member of the Board. The General Assembly, as highest decision-making body of EURIDICE, formally appoints the MicroCredential Board members.