While micro-credentials are often regarded as an attractive and sustainable format for those seeking to meet evolving student demands and offer valuable lifelong learning opportunities, their use is far from widespread in the global management education industry. Business school leaders were therefore invited to debate strategies, initiatives and challenges around realising their untapped potential at a recent capacity-building workshop hosted by BGA in the Merseyside city of Liverpool. Director of digital education at Cranfield School of Management Graham Bell kicked off the day’s opening session by talking about the school’s strategy and aim behind a suite of micro-credential modules launched at the start of last year. Learners can stack these modules towards postgraduate awards, certificates and diplomas and, ultimately, an MSc in business and management, should that be their desire. According to Bell, the school wanted to create “a micro‑credentials programme that is fit for purpose for those who want to work their way up to an MSc, but that is also relevant for those who just want to do a very short programme and bring their skills up to date in a specific area”. The primary goal, Bell explained, was to provide programmes that offer accessibility and flexibility, while retaining the essence of studying at Cranfield School of Management. “We also wanted to think about business opportunities and where we could work with our corporate clients to design something that works across that entire field,” he added. W
MICRO-CREDENTIALS
Injecting immediacy into programme access
To ramp up accessibility, Cranfield has minimised entrance criteria. “We’ve removed some of the traditional restrictions,” Bell advised. “We don’t ask for details of previous work experience or qualifications, so it’s open to people, regardless of their educational background. Of course, as they go further into the programme, classroom‑level English becomes a must and they have to pass modules to move through the levels and work towards an MSc.” For enhanced flexibility, the school went to great lengths to ensure that learners could start whenever they wanted to, right after signing up for their first module. “We’ve experienced programmes from other business schools where you have to wait for a start date and that might be September or it might be the following March,” Bell reasoned. “We didn’t want that to be the case, so our programmes allow people to sign up and get access to the first module within two hours.” “Our programmes allow people to sign up and get access to the first module within two hours” Daniel McCormick, digital education programme manager at Cranfield, then explained how the school achieved this from an operational perspective. “If you wanted to join an open programme, you’d register your interest, talk to somebody, sign up, get an invoice via email, pay and then wait for your start date. We wanted our micro-credentials to offer immediacy, so we created a customer-centric e-payment system.” The system allows the school to take credit card payments for smaller amounts of money than, say, the cost of a full master’s degree, and removes the need to add new learners to its database manually. McCormick described it as “a big step” with wider implications for Cranfield University as a whole. “That little innovation we had to push for has affected many other courses
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Business Impact • ISSUE 1 • 2024
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