There is reason to believe that shorter, competency-based programs will play an important role in the university landscape in the coming years.
Australian commentator Stephen Matchett expands: “MCs are the wild west of post-compulsory education and training, with neither law on what they actually are or order as to how they interact with formal providers. … Until (or if) this is sorted by regulators there needs to be a sheriff providing workable rules that stop the cowboys running riot.”
The lack of standards is also an issue in Canada. While degree standards have been agreed upon – the Canadian Degree Qualification framework, contained in the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC)’s 2007 Ministerial Statement on Quality Assurance of Degree Education in Canada, outlines expectations for bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees – the CMEC has yet to issue a pan-Canadian framework for microcredentials.
In the absence of a pan-Canadian model or definition, for the purposes of this column I will use the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO)’s definition, put forward in its May 2021 report, Making Sense of Microcredentials:
“A microcredential is a representation of learning, awarded for completion of a short program that is focused on a discrete set of competencies (i.e., skills, knowledge, attributes), and is sometimes related to other credentials.”
Developing and running effective microcredential programs is not simply a matter of bundling a group of existing classes into a new sub-degree level program (although there will certainly be some who try that approach). Effective microcredential programming needs to be an institution-wide effort, with appropriate resourcing and guidelines, along with effective recruiting and student support.
department chairs and other unit leaders to lead collegial discussions about the following questions:
Gaps: who is not being served by our current degree offerings? Is there potential demand for our disciplinary knowledge and skills from people who don’t want a full degree program? Are there ways people could upgrade their skills by taking certain types of our courses? Can we identify potential short programs to meet new, distinct learning outcomes?
Student diversity: are there opportunities to develop short programs that could introduce a new demographic of students to our discipline? How might microcredentials be developed that meet the needs and interests of Indigenous students, first-generation students, or international students?
Connection: how might we create partnerships with external organizations to inform our understanding of skill-training needs? Can these partnerships be leveraged to create new career pathways for students, and/or new research opportunities for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students?
Impact: in what ways do our discipline’s insights relate to Canada’s current and future public needs? How might our disciplinary knowledge be combined with knowledge from other disciplines to train students to help address particular challenges? In what ways could our discipline contribute to student competency development that we consider meaningful and impactful?
A recent Educause study found that 63 percent of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada mention the use of remote proctoring on their websites.
One reason colleges are holding onto proctoring tools, Urdan adds, is that many colleges plan to expand their online course offerings even after campus activities return to normal. And the pandemic also saw rapid growth of another tech trend: students using websites to cheat on exams.
The recently signed $1.2 trillion federal infrastructure package includes $2.75 billion for digital equity and inclusion work, delivering an investment that advocates are calling unprecedented and historic.
Within the $65 billion going toward broadband, the $2.75 billion for digital equity and inclusion is set for two programs made up of grants. First, the money will go toward a digital equity capacity grant program for states.
By reflecting-in-action, the practitioner is able to gain metacognitive awareness and perceive his/her intuitions and biases, test hypotheses, and take on new perspectives. The approach of having students learn by designing their own games combines design thinking and game-based learning (Kafai, 1995, 2006; Li, Lemieuz, Vandermeiden, & Nathoo, 2013). Design thinking also supports new forms of literacies brought on by new media technologies as well as game-based learning.
It is likely that the effects of gamification cannot easily be measured satisfactorily through surveys of motivation, engagement, attendance, or grades because there are too many variables that could affect how students respond. Critics of gamification argue that it over
simplifies complex problems (Bogost, 2015; Robertson, 2010). However, both gamification and design thinking are approaches to problem-solving. With design thinking, gamification may be used in more meaningful ways because design thinking offers a different lens through which to conceptualize the problem.
Reconsidering Technical Labor in Information Institutions: The Case of Analog Video Digitization
Zack Lischer-Katz
Library Trends, Volume 68, Number 2, Fall 2019, pp. 213-251 (Article)
empirical study conducted by the author from 2015–2017 that used qualitative-interpretive methods to study the discursive and material practices of professional media preservationists as they worked to digitize analog video recordings in small-scale, high-quality (“artisanal”) digitization projects
p. 215 Furthermore, understanding technical work in li-braries can contribute to ongoing debates in information studies and the digital humanities on the relationship between “doing” and “signifying” in terms of scholarly production (Cecire 2011)
Big news: the US copyright office rules that researchers at universities can break DRM on ebooks and DVDs for non-commercial scholarly research. Works need to have been legally obtained and owned by university, and protected by security measures like other sensitive data. 1/3
