The Department of Education Skills and Employment released its National Microcredentials Framework.
‘The framework’s goal is to provide greater clarity and understanding within the tertiary education sector and amongst learners as to the value and recognition of microcredentials’.
For us here at Monash (and probably others in the higher education sector), there’s nothing really startling or controversial in it. If anything, it provides some assurance that Monash’s current approach to designing, developing and delivering microcredentials is aligned with the thinking of the Microcredentials Working Group.
Of interest, is the Independent Tertiary Education Council Australia (ITECA) view that the Australian Government’s new Microcredentials Marketplace look set to fail spectacularly as it won’t recognise vocational training unaccredited microcredentials, having been designed only to support microcredentials in the higher education sector. ITECA’s main issue is that the marketplace has been solely designed to support higher education providers. ITECA note that this design decision was made despite the fact that higher education microcredentials are estimated to represent less than 1% of the microcredentials used by businesses and their employees.
The Microcredentials Marketplace – a one-stop-shop for course offerings
In 2020, the Australian Government announced funding of $4.2 million to develop a Microcredentials Marketplace (the Marketplace) – they say ‘it will be a nationally consistent platform for students to compare short course offerings and credit point value’ and was open to apply to deliver services under the Microcredentials Marketplace grant opportunity in the Higher Education area that will run over 3 years from 2020-21 to 2022-23.
In July 2021, the Universities Admissions Centre (UAC) announced that it had won an Australian government grant to build the nation’s first ever marketplace for microcredentials. UAC must be busy developing the marketplace because there hasn’t been any recent announcements about the marketplace in their News section of their website.
