Best practices
Accreditation under the European approach - Challenges arising from the different status of national implementation
Users: Training providers (public) | Training providers (private) | Theme: Accreditation and certification | Action: Education programmes/courses | Beneficiaries: Training providers (public) | Training providers (private)
In our DEP-project EURIDICE, we have designed a method for quality assurance of the digital skills trainings provided by our SME and other non-academic project partners.
It is the desire, in the Digital Europe Program, of the EU Commission 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. So the stakeholders are: non-academic training institutes, higher academic education institutes, trainees and students, the labor market in Europe.
The challenge?
The recognition of non-academic courses in Europe is still not formalised, despite the need to recognise micro-credentials for life-long learning. As starting point, the EU has described (see the European Union leaflet A European Approach to Micro-Credentials, updated Dec 2021) a set of standards to which courses need to comply, to become a microcredential. What is lacking here is the procedure for Quality Assurance. MicroCredentials certainly carry the risk of a further bureaucratisation of higher education with evermore forms to be filled in by staff, box-ticking “accountability” and layers of so-called managerial “control”. So it is important to uphold the autonomy and experience of academic, education and research staff as being leading here. And to state this explicitly in the procedures.
The issue here is: how to do Quality Assurance of non-academic, non-accredited courses? And who is entitled to do so? The issue is how to formalise trust, knowledge and authority.
In summary:
- How can we include the SME short-track training modules into academic curricula, or provide a valid certificate of quality to the trainees?
- How can we assess the quality of the educational offering from SMEs and non-academic partners in our DEP project?
Our solution
We propose a method of assessment of courses, which we call the EURIDICE MicroCredentials Approach. It starts with the establishment of a so-called MicroCredential Board of academic senior experts from universities, companies or sector organisations. Following the following QA (see below), they are entitled to hand out to training providers 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.
The QA procedure is as follows, to ensure transparency and simplicity:
- Course providers 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 (see the template given in Annex I of the 2022 Council of Europe Recommendation (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32022H0627(02)).
- 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 (external) 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.
Peer-review system
[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).]
Outcomes
The EURIDICE project develops courses for students (international joint master DIGISOC, see https://digitalsociety4innovation.eu), plus self-standing modules for teachers and professionals in the sectors of Education, Culture and Communication.
In order to speed up the microcredential work, all courses in the respective course catalogues are described following the European standard elements template provided in Annex I of the above-mentioned EU Council Recommendation of 16 June 2022. These course catalogues for students, teachers and professionals are produced and made public as upcoming (mid-term) deliverables. The idea is then that multiple courses (or even the catalogue as a whole) can be submitted in one go as a batch to the MicroCredential Board for consideration.
Principle of proportionality: Both the MicroCredential course description template and the peer review mechanism make it possible to scale the course writing and review effort, in the same way that in research a 6-page conference article is handled differently in review effort than a whole PhD thesis or textbook.
Key takeaways
Our experience is that microcredentials are generally seen as a very complex issue. It is therefore advisable to keep things as simple as possible:
- A course description according to the European standard elements template (Annex I of the Council 2022 Recommendation) typically already contains the information that teachers would write anyway in any decent course description or study guide for students, so it is possible to avoid extra bureaucratic burdens for teaching staff. Course descriptions are to be concise, as usual in a study guide (per course no more than 1-2 pages, and a limited number of learning outcomes). Simplicity and flexibility of templates, formats and procedures is furthermore important in view of the need to respect (in fact, benefit from) the expertise and autonomy of staff, education and research, and to avoid a counter-productive top-down approach.
- Principle of subsidiarity: The MicroCredential Board has a (limited) validating role, it is not going to redo QA procedures when they are already institutionally in place (such as official exam boards or supervisory/advisory bodies). The peer review mechanism is intended as a back-up system when an institutional QA system does not (yet) exist.
- Uptake: We believe that the above-sketched pragmatic EURIDICE approach to MicroCredentials is suitable and sufficiently straightforward to be adapted and adopted as a possible “best practice” by various institutions, including emerging European University Networks. “Automatic recognition” is a contentious issue, but the above approach has value as a “Confidence-Building Measure” (to borrow a term from the Cold War/détente period).