Digital Credentialing and Everything in Between
The current workforce employed in any industry buzz around like bees. Young adults and students alike, seek an education system that can keep up with their busy lifestyles. As the world and its needs constantly grow, so does the need to significantly boost skill and knowledge. This forms an outline of what educational institutions should promise to provide: education that can evolve with time, and education that can provide an individual knowledge on the go. With constant innovation comes less time, and with less time comes little opportunity to master niche skills quickly and efficiently.
As innovation continues to grow, its relentless pace takes a toll on the amount of knowledge a student or professional has already acquired. It is a requirement for professionals employed in the grind of work life to constantly upgrade their skill set; it is most preferred if they do this task on a daily basis. It may seem impossible to do this at first, but here's something that has made it come true.
Introducing Micro-Credentials
Here's technology's newest baby, micro-credentials is a new way to help students and working professionals gain the required skill set they need to grow and thrive in an evolving environment. Micro-credentials are geared towards providing success in a professional landscape, and this is done by harnessing the power of today's sophisticated technological developments.
There is no single objective for a digital credential. What a digital credential tries to do is provide a method to tackle the inequality in education and the workplace, and also help all learners with a convenient, flexible, and affordable access to education. Another goal digital credentials wish to achieve is to help learners gain more control over how they plan, track and share their progress and educational accomplishments.
Digital learning also takes into account recruitment trends as companies transition to skill-based hiring, instead of graduates from prestigious degree programs. An advantage of digital credentials programs is that students needn't worry about transferring credits when changing universities, as the transfer of credits would occur and automatically and seamlessly.
How have they affected the Education System?
Due to profound effect they have on education, and because of the way they connect learning to the workspace, these have proven to be useful tools in providing students a way to plan their future both in and outside the classroom.
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Bite-sized Skill-Based Learning. Digital credentials allow a user to acquire certifications for the completion of certain skills or competencies that are required by the company. For this, these digital credentials need to be linked with a company in the industry in order to ensure that this skill is valuable and useful to learners. These can be used for a number of skills, including soft and technical.
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Personalized Learning. As digital learning allows material to be broken down into specific skills, students and educational institutions can tailor their plans according to their needs. For example, Digital Promise, which is a digital credential pool that offers professional development badges for teachers, offers over 350 digital credentials from over 20 different issuing organizations. This option proves that teachers can find options that fit their needs. Another aspect of digital credentials from a personalized learning standpoint is that these badges can be completed anytime, anywhere.
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Open Standards. Digital credentials, as mentioned above, give a portable and verifiable method of learning to students that use this technology. What it also helps in is to break away from the traditional relationship between a student and educational system. Platforms like IMS Comprehensive Learner Record allow achievements and certifications to be included in a student's transcripts, with these being carried forward to the working environment. Therefore digital credentials help link specific skills with the needs of an employer.
Digital Credentials are extensively used in the working space and institutes of higher education. It is yet to be introduced into the K-12 space.
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