Credentials without gatekeepers?
The promise and the capture of micro-credentials, from Brussels to Hanoi
This event is part of a demonstration of what Lera offers for running knowledge events. Its content is written with care and draws on real sources, but the conference has not taken place, and apart from the convener its participants are fictional.
In June 2022 the Council of the European Union adopted a recommendation on "micro-credentials": short units of learning that are assessed, described by a set of standard elements, stackable, and portable from one country to another. Supporters see in the idea the end of the four-year degree's monopoly. A nurse in Hanoi or a refugee in The Hague could have what they have learned recognised without sitting through years of a full programme.
Nguyễn Thị Lan tests this promise from Vietnam, where the government and large learning platforms have presented online certificates as a quick answer to gaps in the labour market. What she sees in practice is this: the main issuers of such credentials are neither public universities nor local communities but global platforms and companies whose certificates are in English and designed around the needs of their own products. Recognition comes from the centre, too. A certificate from an American company shows up in job advertisements, while a course in Vietnamese run by a provincial teachers' college barely counts.
Her argument is that a credential is, before anything else, a social contract about who has the right to judge knowledge. Randall Collins showed in 1979 that credential inflation tells us less about skills than about the boundaries drawn between groups. Micro-credentials do not remove the gatekeeper; they move the gate. It moves from the faculty to the platform, from the national language to English, and from public assessment to an algorithm no one outside the company can inspect. In 1971 Ivan Illich wanted to free learning from the school. What we see today is learning freed from the school and caught in the market.
The idea itself should not be abandoned, though. A credential can be built as an open, verifiable record: what was learned, in which language, who assessed it and by what criterion; readable by machines, independent of the issuing platform, and readable in the learner's own language. This is where the language-agnostic approach to knowledge matters. A learning outcome is a single object, and its Vietnamese, English or Persian descriptions are representations of that same object, not separate certificates of unequal value.
The talk closes with three proposals: public and non-profit issuers alongside universities; open standards owned by no company; and an obligation on the European framework to recognise credentials issued in non-European languages as fully as it recognises those issued in the Union's official languages.
Questions for discussion
- If micro-credentials move the gate, into whose hands should the gate be placed?
- How can a course in a low-resource language be recognised without depending on an English translation?
- Can an open learning record stay independent of platforms, or does it simply become new data for them?
References
Council of the European Union. 2022. Council Recommendation of 16 June 2022 on a European approach to micro-credentials for lifelong learning and employability (2022/C 243/02). Official Journal of the European Union C 243, 27 June 2022: 10–25.
Collins, Randall. 1979. The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press.
Illich, Ivan. 1971. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.