Educator Micro-credentials are Grounded in Research

Micro-credentials offer an important opportunity for educators to strengthen their professional learning. Accessed and awarded online, micro-credentials leverage an online technology platform to provide educators competency-based, on-demand, personalized, and shareable opportunities to demonstrate and be recognized for their professional learning.

Grounding micro-credentials in research is central to their gaining acceptance in the field. Since 2013, Digital Promise has put research at the center of the micro-credential development, evidence submission, and assessment processes, creating an ecosystem which includes 40 active issuing organizations and more than 400 published micro-credentials.

Digital Promise’s new white paper examines how the organization has ensured the content of micro-credentials and the process for earning them are anchored in rigorous research.

As micro-credential recognition accelerates, this is an opportunity to convey to the education field the extensive research foundation underlying the Digital Promise framework. The report explores how Digital Promise screens prospective issuers to understand the research grounding their work and helps them shape their concept for micro-credentials. Issuers draft their micro-credentials using the Digital Promise template, about which one issuer said, “[It] forced us to think about the language we were using and the research we were citing. … Doing those additional layers of research strengthened our work and our micro-credential.”

The relevance and quality of the professional learning opportunities afforded by the Digital Promise ecosystem is increasingly validated as micro-credentials are incorporated into professional learning systems. Each semester, micro-credential recognition grows, and along with it the opportunities and incentives for educators to be recognized.

Read the full white paper, “Research and Educator Micro-credentials,” to learn more about how Digital Promise ensures all aspects of the educator micro-credentials available in its ecosystem are backed by solid research. Stay tuned for additional components of this series on the status of the micro-credential field and policy supporting micro-credential implementation, coming soon.