Posted on 04/07/2023 6:45:20 AM PDT by karpov
How do you spot a hot trend in higher education? Hint: Headlines in industry outlets simultaneously insist that everyone wants it, no one is sure what it is, and nobody knows if it’s any good.
Welcome to the wonderful world of “microcredentials.” They’re the new new thing in higher education. And that’s cause enough for well-deserved skepticism. Yet the idea has promise, even if it will require battling to fend off the charlatans and usual suspects.
But let’s start with the basics: What are microcredentials anyway?
The idea is simple: Formal learning has to be somehow measured. Microcredentialing offers a way to more precisely assess and document that learning. Microcredentials signal completion of short courses in specific marketable skills. Some of the more popular and useful ones cover discrete expertise in high-demand fields like IT support, data analytics, and cybersecurity.
Formal education, whether the focus is anthropology or Adobe Photoshop, inevitably entails demonstrating completion of a course of study. Typically, we do this by requiring students to attend a class for a requisite chunk of time and earn a passing grade. Post-secondary education has made a lucrative business of bundling these courses into various credentials and degrees, which can help recipients land a job.
This model has problems. Learners can complete courses without ever mastering essential skills and knowledge. Because credentials and degrees represent a bundle of courses, earning them tends to be drawn-out and unnecessarily expensive and can compel learners to sit through classes they may find unrewarding or irrelevant. Consequently, employers wind up sorting through applicants who’ve spent years pursuing costly degrees of uncertain content, even when all hiring managers really seek is a particular skill set.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Learn to sweat a pipe joint, wire single phase and three phase systems, program PLC’s, weld a decent joint, and operate a backhoe. The work will find you.
I think certification is the future of education. It can be set up so that 4 certificates equals an AA diploma and 12 certifucates equals a bachelor degree, or something like that and it allows somebody tonget an education on their schedule.
Education is more than a set of skills though.
But, admittedly, employers want and need certain specific skills and seem to use college degree requirements as a proxy to demonstrate possession of those needed skills.
I showed a gal my microcredentials to be a gigalo and she just laughed at me.
I bet you could do the work without the certs and others that had the certs had no clue what they were doing.
The whole point of education is to develop a ‘BS Meter’.
That requires a good grounding in Math, History, Civics, Logic, Literature.
It’s obvious that is precisely what The Powers That Be, do NOT want students to develop. They want true believers who don’t question anything that comes from them.
Was that a microaggression?
Well done!
I was recruited to do the work because I knew exactly how to solve the problem. I had to get the cert as a "gatekeeping" function of doing government contracts. Everyone must have an 8570 series cert to be granted access to the network. I did as requested, then solved the problem I was recruited to solve. Since other projects may impose the same hurdle to have the 8570 cert, I did a renewal last November for 3 more years.
The task I was recruited to perform was updating a system that performs security scanning and evaluation of current state of antivirus/anti-malware software on 50,000 workstations. The original system was built, then the vendor lost the contract and all of the employees that ever supported it disappeared into the woodwork. I brought it back to current standards using updated versions of the original tool-chains to permit the system to continue to provide the valuable data in a rapidly morphing operating system and tool-chain environment.
I enjoy taking on tasks of this variety. It polished my skillset in current tools and enabled supporting 3 more contracts. This afternoon I will be meeting with my co-workers to design a rapid fire AI/ML solution to bring in seismic/acoustic sensor data, drop it in a small data lake, trigger the AI/ML processing, then ship out the results to an end user GUI display. Our objective is to reduce the time to process the data to just a few minutes without human intervention vs a nearly full day of intensive work by people with very specialized skills.
Many years ago, a prospective employer looking for interns asked us to include our SAT scores, and picked the applicants with the highest scores.
What I would like to see would be objective measures of reading, writing, and math, like the SAT, not necessarily associated with educational institutions. People could become self-educated or educated in non-conventional settings, take the test, and be hired.
And college graduates who could not read or write would not get hired regardless of diploma.
The issue is, it would seem to be pretty easy to fake it.
At least four years of college does show some kind of commitment. Plus it’s still all about networking, and college does provide ample networking opportunities, if you choose to seek them out.
Hah - try and get a job at Chippendales with “micro-credentials”!
Whoops - wrong thread; makes more sense (maybe) on the micro-credentials thread.
And whoops again - okay, no more morning Bloody Mary’s.
I want to study the letter “A” in detail.
bump
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