ROUNDTABLE REVIEW
Michele Quintano: “We have applied microcredentials to our fully online programmes and what we are trying to implement now is microcredentials at the custom programmes level, because we think that it is part of the customisation we can offer not only to companies, but also to employees. This is because there is an opportunity to offer employees the chance to gather credits that they can spend at ESADE or another suitable institution. We believe that is a strong incentive. On the other hand, the difficulty is that you cannot create a microcredential for every activity that we do. So, we are trying to identify some patterns in our custom programmes offer and then link the microcredential to some form of standardised model.” Carmen Paz-Aparicio: “Microcredentials are designed to offer upskilling and reskilling opportunities to all kinds of audiences. They act as complementary educational programmes with a practical focus and a capacity of constant content update. We offer microcredentials in all academic disciplines for students with or without previous degrees.” Andrea Ampò: “This is an area under consideration at our institution and what we’re trying to do with short courses at this point is make them stackable. This way, participants can get a credit for each course taken or they can get a certificate if they put a series of courses together. “At the moment, however, microcredentials are strongly linked to the brand, or in other words, the name of the institution or provider. No matter the subject, people show that they have a microcredential from X or Y institution and not just that they have a microcredential. But that shouldn’t be the concept.”
engage with them. So now we are in a transitional stage of bringing the student experience and everything else into one single portal and we have in-house developers for that. This is also where we are using our interactive AI agents. “With no simple solution on the market, many universities that are trying to innovate have found themselves acting almost as technology companies at the same time as everything else. We even reached the point where we had thought of creating a spin‑off company for some of the technologies that we had developed and offering these solutions to other providers on the market.” João Pinto: “For us, digital platforms are not about finding the best content solution, they’re about enabling personalised, meaningful engagement over time. We have been investing in developing AI-powered systems, chatbots, adaptive pathways and so on, but always in service of blended and faculty-led experiences. We have also integrated, for example, the Sulitest tool into our academic learning platform, through which we are able to assess students’ level of maturity around sustainability.” Raffaele Oriani: “Alliances can be important for sharing best practices, staying up to date, participating in working groups on specific topics and defining common models. For example, we are founding members of the Responsible AI Consortium, along with EDHEC, Imperial College and QS. The Consortium invites members to assess their AI readiness across schools’ operations, programmes and content and then work on creating a framework for implementing AI into education.” Are microcredentials gaining significant traction among employers and learners in your region and how are they integrated into your business school offering? José Crespo de Carvalho: “If we are working with a company to deliver training in, for instance, supply chain management
or leadership, we offer this in the form of a postgraduate or executive master’s programme – as opposed to a conventional degree – and provide the opportunity to have credits to take courses on those specific topics. That’s what we do and I think that independently from the type of microcredential an institution has, the basic question we should formulate is around the market value they have.
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“If you look at someone’s CV, for example, you can see all the microcredentials someone has and then you stop at the MBA, or something else they have done that is structural and, in my opinion, you take the decision from that and not from the microcredentials.”
Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2025 23
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