Microcredentials for professional development and fun

The ESHA team is a team of lifelong learners. We are happy to be the coordinator of the MicroVET project and to promote microcredentials to school leaders as well as other education stakeholders. We can do it based on experience. Some of our team members used the couple of quiet months when work trips were cancelled in early 2020 to gain new knowledge through certified short courses offered by leading universities like Harvard or MIT, or institutions like the Smithsonian and for example the World Bank.

Positive personal experiences with microcredential courses provide a solid basis for our team’s engagement in MicroVET. The fact that we are working on providing such courses online correspond to our team’s experiences that include the following benefits:

• Flexibility in the actual time spent on a course that differs from person to person not always possible in an in-person arrangement.
• Flexibility of learning depending on other obligations such as work or family chores.
• Highly specialised and focused topics.
• A variety of educational levels various courses target from no requirement of previous knowledge to being designed for people having university degrees in a related field.
• Relevance that ensured completion of the course.
• User-friendly design.
• Clear instructions enabling those not especially tech-savvy to navigate the courses well.
• Modular approaches making it possible to cover smaller fields in just a few hours or combining these short courses into a more complex diplomas and/or being recognised as credits in higher education.

Practice-oriented approach

One of our team members has benefitted from a MicroMasters programme on education leadership for innovation and improvement that consisted of five microcredential courses and providing 12 recognised credits for related Masters’ Degree programmes in case she wishes to gain another such degree. In her case, it was accompanied by employer recognition of her studies. As her degrees are related, but not especially on education leadership, it was paid and considered a compensation for being unable to work as usual. While she already has a Master’s Degree from a prestigious university, this course provided an opportunity to have her specialised knowledge gained through working at European projects in the field certified. The practice-oriented approach of the programme has contributed to this a lot. The modular approach of the five microcredentials and flexibility of self-paced online learning had a special attractiveness and made course completion possible when her work more or less returned to normal after the first round of restrictions for good.

Specialised knowledge

Two other team members chose to do some micro-courses to widen their specialised knowledge related to programmes and projects they have worked on. In their cases, these microcredentials meant an extra, recognised certification on top of their PhD’s. One chosen course, consisting of three independently achievable microcredentials also resulted in a professional certification recognised as an extra diploma in certain countries’ education systems necessary for becoming a school leader. Although the courses were mostly designed for people with lower education levels than theirs, they provided valuable new knowledge that could be used in their daily work due to their specialised nature. The short courses on e.g. equitable educational planning, inclusion, intercultural learning, education innovation, learning leadership, deep learning or family engagement have considerably contributed to ESHA’s high quality delivery in various projects.

The fun part

At the same time, the offer included courses that were chosen for personal development not related to professional requirement. This is another benefit of microcredentials that we are happy to promote. One example of such courses covered by one of our team members is a series of three separate programmes leading to a joint certificate on one of the most iconic pop cultural universes.