Micro-credentials are a great opportunity for instructors

For anyone who instructs adults, the article "Why faculty need to talk about microcredentials" by Loleen Berdahl, in University Affairs, offers intriguing forecasts for the future.

A trend in adult education is towards micro-credentials. These are short courses, definited by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario as: “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.”

This trend is expected to stay for both the short- and long-term. This is good news for me and hopefully the rest of my colleagues in the PIDP program, because our real-world skills will increasingly be in demand. I have been working in program coordination, public relations, and marketing for about 30 years. I have had opportunities to instruct, but in my small-city college, they haven't been as often as I would like.

I anticipate that my instructor development efforts in the PIDP and the in-demand skills I can instruct about best practices for workplace communications (in person and in writing) and in marketing will continue to increase in demand.

Ms. Berdahl notes that microcredentials are a great opportunity for instructors, since there are gaps in the workforce that short courses will be able to address; partnerships with external organizations will continue to grow and be leveraged to serve adults currently in the workforce, and adult education is well-suited and situation to respond to Canada's current and future needs.

I anticipate that there will be more skill-based evaluation in these short courses than the ones I instruct now. More assignments will require more instructor marking or classmate collaboration time so students receive the input they require. Also, in my community college, we have developed some short courses in communications (a colleague has developed one for Plain Language, for example) but I expect we will take semester-long courses and shorten them for the workplace. A number of years ago I taught a university-level course called Business Communication. This could likely be separated into 5 or more discrete sections.

This is a great opportunity for many adult learning instructors.