13 May 2022, UNED (Madrid, Spain)

This multiplier event, entitled “Digital micro-credentials. A solution with a vision for tomorrow’s educational needs” and organised as part of the ECCOE project, focused on the highly relevant and cutting-edge topic in the present and future of education: namely the role of micro-credentials (MCs) in the unbundling of higher education. Among the 25 participants who attended, there were 6 international (Croatia, Portugal, Iran, UK and Tunisia), and 19 national participants coming from other Spanish universities and from different professional contexts as commented below.

During the event, different aspects of this topic were explored, such as the importance of personalised lifelong learning, the need to include more diverse and international types of educational offerings in formal education systems, how to relate such systems to the world of work, as well as the importance of the processes of recognition and accreditation of such learning experiences. To this end, a reflection was made on what MCs are and their main applications, and the results of the ECCOE project were presented, together with the components of the ECCOE system, that could be explored by the attendees. A real example of an MCRA (Micro-Credential Recognition Agreement), developed in the ECCOE system, was presented to show how two higher education institutions can work with the outputs of ECCOE to make the cross-institutional recognition of MCs more agile.

Finally, an informal discussion was undertaken with the participants on the relevance of MCs in different educational and professional contexts, to reflect the diverse national and international nature of the attendees to the event: including graduate students, university lecturers and policy makers, teachers from other educational environments, as well as professionals from the labour market.

The program was as follows and in this link you can watch the recordings of the presentations:

  • Welcome (Timothy Read, UNED)
  • Developing an Agile and Unbundled Higher Education for a Personalised Life-long Learning (Ángeles Sánchez-Elvira, UNED, Spain).
  • The What, Why and How of Micro-credentials (Timothy Read, UNED, Spain).
  • A Practical Solution to Micro-credentials: The ECCOE (Beatriz Sedano, UNED, Spain).
  • A Real-World Example of the ECCOE System (Jorge Arús-Hita, UCM, Spain).
  • Debate: What will micro-credentials mean for me? (This part of the event was not recorded for data protection of the participants).