What If “Emerging Credentials” Aren’t Actually That New?
One of my favorite ideas from theAACRAO Credential Chat with Peter Fidrych at Southern New Hampshire University was hiding in plain sight:
Maybe the most interesting thing about “emerging credentials” is how much of the learning isn’t emerging at all.
When it comes to “nontraditional learning,” the learning itself isn’t necessarily nontraditional.
Peter’s team in SNHU’s Office of the University Registrar looks at credentials from two directions.
- Incoming: What verified or verifiable learning is a student already bringing from previous institutions, work, training, licenses, certifications, and other experiences — and how can the university recognize it through credit for prior learning?
- Outgoing: What skills are students developing while they’re at SNHU that deserve more visible, portable recognition through badges and microcredentials?
Peter offered a wonderfully concrete definition of student-centeredness along the way: institutions should be good stewards of students’ two greatest resources — their time and their money.
That means not making someone relearn what they already know.
And in some cases, doing this well might also mean noticing and valuing learning that has traditionally existed without being seen or recognized in formal ways.
For example, students learning how to evaluate credible sources in libraries forever is not new. They’ve long been developing critical thinking, communication, leadership, and other workforce-relevant skills across courses and campus.
Get Noah Geisel’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In other words, when it comes to “nontraditional learning” the learning itself isn’t necessarily nontraditional.
What’s new is our ability — and perhaps our responsibility — to notice it, name it, and formally recognize it.
And that leads to an intriguing evolution of the Registrar’s role. As Peter put it, Registrars have traditionally maintained the academic record. In innovative offices like his, they also get to help expand the definition of what constitutes the record.
There’s much more in our 15ish minute conversation about learning mobility, workforce alignment, CPL, microcredentials, and how SNHU is connecting these pieces.
Dive into the full (15ish minute) conversation in AACRAO’s Innovative Credentials community, where you can also lend your own voice to the conversation. It is FREE to join after creating an account, and it’s also where you can tune into Credential Chats when they stream live!
Thanks for reading. If you liked this post, please click up to 50 times to 👏👏👏 and recommend it to others! If you have thoughts to share about this, I hope to learn from your own response post!
In addition to following Noah Geisel here on Medium, you can find him on LinkedIn. Some other posts you might like:
