6 Best Practices for Building a Microcredential Framework
Building a strong microcredentialing framework helps students demonstrate their competence and is increasingly important to the educational journey. British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) based in Vancouver, Canada shares best practices to help institutions build successful credentialing programs.
With more than 50,000 students throughout the Canadian province, BCIT offers practical, flexible, applied education options with instructors who have direct, hands-on experience in their field. In 2021, the institution implemented Canvas Credentials as part of its effort to align educational offerings with the skill sets that students and employers desire. The goal was to provide students with an easy-to-follow and clear educational journey.
First things First: A Laddering Approach
BCIT built a microcredential framework for modern learning that allows for laddering (or stacking) badged courses, microcredential programs, flexible/part-time learning, and full-time education programs. Starting with entry options that were awarded as badges and microcredentials, BCIT stacks its offerings to include:
Combined, the laddered badging and microcredentialing programs provide short, stackable, transferable, and agile competency-based training opportunities. These complement BCIT’s existing programs and help to provide a vital need in the province for upskilling, reskilling, and co-skilling students, while providing pathways for lifelong learning.
With or without degrees, students can use badges to showcase their career readiness by translating learning outcomes into validated skills.
6 Best Practices for Developing a Microcredentialing Program
- Strive for balance. Striking a balance across programs is key when it comes to microcredentialing and badging. For BCIT, offering badges that could be stacked helped to avoid fragmenting its full-time programs and balance the overall volume of badges available among its part-time programs.
- Focus on industry needs. Today’s students desire training that directly prepares them for their future careers. That’s backed up by Instructure’s 2023 State of Student Success and Engagement in Higher Education, which found that 75% of respondents most value the practical application of skills. When it comes to building a microcredentialing framework, partnering with local employers to understand the skills needed for in-demand roles is a vitally important step. Building competence-based courses and programs is next. In BCIT’s case, that included providing a range of offerings focusing on natural resource and environmental protection, construction, digital transformation, and more.
- Build in flexibility. Flexible delivery that meets students’ unique needs and learning interests, makes learning accessible to all, and builds toward mastery that is verifiable is key. Students should also be able to easily access and transfer their credentials and credits.
- Align with educational standards. Aligning to existing educational standards such as common PSI practices (ie. AEST MC Framework) for microcredentialing can help ensure programs stay in sync with the latest guidelines and provide students with optimal value. For BCIT, that meant consulting the Micro-credential Framework for B.C.’s Public Post-Secondary Education System from the British Columbia Education Ministry, which lays out guiding principles around access, quality, relevance, employer and industry engagement, clarity and transparency, and more.
- Centralize oversight and strategy. Ensuring quality when developing digital badging programs calls for more centralized oversight, which can streamline how an institution defines and maintains quality standards for course content, delivery, and assessment.
- Offer faculty and staff badges and microcredentialing. Increasingly, higher education institutions are looking at ways to evolve professional development. Providing badges and microcredentials can solidify employee educational pathways while providing a consistent method to recognize faculty and staff learning achievements. As faculty and staff complete courses and programs, they access digital badging in the same way students do, and have lasting evidence of their strengths and skill sets built into their portfolios. As a result, they can become champions of these new educational pathways.
Read BCIT’s case study, Delivering Digital Credentials for the Modern Workforce, to learn how they implemented a digital badging program.
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