 So, welcome. I'm Dr. Marie Nicola V. Heal from Dublin City University and we're here today to talk about a primer. It's a webinar being delivered on behalf of Eden and we have some great panelists with us today. I'm delighted to be here. And this is a primer to help people and for those of you who are joining in today with respect to implementing and engaging with micro credentials. We've got a really, really, really good panel put together. There are people who have a vast amount of experience in implementation, in policy and in thinking about the theoretical and in the abstract with respect to micro credentials and other forms of learning. And so I'm delighted to introduce them and I'm also going to apologize to you all because I have a very severe cold. So I will be turning off my mic quite a bit and I hopefully won't be coughing too much on it, but no COVID, just a cold. And you're very, very welcome and a big thank you to Sandra as well and to the Eden Secretariat for supporting us. So quick introduction to our panelists. We have Professor Rebecca Ferguson from the Open University and Rebecca, if you'd like to say a few words about yourself. Oh, right. Thanks. Yes, I'm based at the Open University where I've been the academic lead on micro credentials for a couple of years. I've also co-authored five micro credentials. I've studied one to completion and I've been involved in the evaluation of our micro credential program. Thanks very much, Rebecca. Deborah Arnold from Enge, France. Enge. We'll work on that French accent. Oh, no. Yeah. Okay. Deborah Arnold. So I'm a project coordinator at Enge, which is the French Digital University for Management and Economics. We're a member association. We're not a university ourselves. So we support our members in pedagogical innovation, anything to do with digital. And in that capacity, I coordinate a project under Erasmus Plus, which is called ECHO, the European Credential Clearinghouse for Opening Up Education. And I'll be telling you a bit more about what we're doing there. So when we talk about micro credentials or digital credentials in ECHO, we're interested in the object, the digital certificate that attests to the competences. And this is an interesting conversation I think we can have about the language we're all using and what we mean when we say micro credentials. That's all for me for now. Thanks very much, Deborah. So moving on to Ulf Daniel Ellers. And hopefully my German pronunciation professor Ulf Daniel Ellers is better than my French. Well, yeah, it's quite good, actually. My name, at least, is much, much better than the usual Italian or French pronunciation. It's Ulfe or Ulf. Tell us a bit about yourself. I'm based in the south of Germany here. I'm a professor for education, education management and lifelong learning is my denomination, how we say here. I'm running an institute which is called Next Education and we do studies, research and also teaching in the field of future higher education, digital transformation of higher education of learning and of organizational processes. That's our interest on micro credentials. I have been focusing in the past. Because the big question is, are micro credentials the key we need to unlock the flexibility which our students apparently might need in the future when they are not any longer studying in beginning their study in university one and ending their study in university one but when there is a lot of flexibility and mobility around possible. And we have defined in several studies scenarios for the future of higher education. That's what I want to contribute also today a little bit more. Okay, thanks very much to the panelists and just a brief interview or a brief overview of myself. My name is Dr. Marie Nicola V. Heal. I'm director of microcredential strategy and innovation in Dublin City University. I am head of what we call DCU Studio and part of the role of that is the rollout of microcredentials and implementation. I'm also a member of the MC2 project which is a national project run in Ireland for the development of a national platform for microcredentials and that's funded through the HCI or the Human Capital Initiative here at National Training Fund. So microcredentials is very much part of the DNA of what we're doing in Ireland at the minute and also DCU is part of the ECIU University Alliance and we work closely in DCU on the work package for some of our colleagues for implementing microcredentials as that is the approach that we're taking as part of the Alliance. So we've a huge amount of experience in developing out and understanding what microcredentials are. So what we really wanted to do today in this sort of a primer is to talk to the panelists and to moderate from my own perspectives on how and what microcredentials are really as a primer really getting to grips with the key questions that we've all dealt with when we've been dealing with microcredentials. So I think just as a quick sort of opener and Rebecca I'll start with yourself. What would you say are the top three affordances of microcredentials? What are they really delivering for learners from learners in the first instance? What we'd say at the Open University and I know that people's perspectives are going to be different. We see them as offering opportunities to upskill and reskill without committing to three or more years of study which is what you'd normally have to do at a university. Instead you can commit to a 10-week course, a 12-week course and come out of that with professional skills, work-related skills and also with some academic credit. We'd see an important aspect as being you can study alongside work responsibilities and all your caring responsibilities. Now at the Open University we're a distance university anyway so most of our students are doing that but we know a lot of our students struggle to do that for long periods of time so the opportunities to do that for three or four months is something that's very welcome. We also see an important thing as you can apply your knowledge immediately in your work environment and we see a lot of our microcredential learners. We've got about 1500 at the moment coming into discussions and saying it was really interesting what I learnt last week and I've tried that out immediately and passing it on to colleagues. So I'd say those are the top three differences we're seeing. Darylba, do you see other affordances that you have noticed in your work you've been doing? Looking at it again from the point of view of the microcredential as the artifact which I think is a complementary approach to looking at it as the learning opportunity itself. Detailed record of learning achievements and I think this links into the ongoing trends which we see in France in particular because this is where I live and work. Within higher education there is a move away from describing diplomas in terms of knowledge to describing them in terms of competences, aligning those with national and European frameworks and competency frameworks and therefore once you actually have that record of learning achievements in a form that is compatible across Europe and hopefully beyond then it's much more meaningful than just a paper certificate or it should be much more valuable than a certificate with the nice university seal and stamp on it. And then that leads to another affordance which is the question of trust and transparency. When you've got everything detailed, when it's transparent about who has issued the credential, who has stamped it, who has validated it, the quality assurance processes that have gone into its recognition then I think there's this huge potential there to support the kind of mobility and flexibility that Ulf mentioned earlier. And Ulf, I suppose from your perspective of it, do you see micro credentials having a specific frame around competency and future skills or is it particularly focused on those types of areas? I think most of the, let's say, the visions have been already put on the table now but of course it depends what a micro credential is actually. In the best of cases, a micro credential is like a small digital certification which you receive which is credible, which is stackable, which you can connect to other learning experiences and qualifications which you can carry around portable also and others understand that they can recognize it. It's recognizable and so on. And you really record in there your experience and your competencies. It's really a record and it's in a way contributing to your portfolio of what you can show to other people. It's not just that you have a bachelor in economics but you so to speak have a collection which you can bring to the table when you go, for example, to an employer or when you are going to another university and they want to know how can we use what you have learned before in the next step which you want to make. So I think if we, let's say, take this vision of micro credentials, then they have a lot of affordances. Allow them my curriculum approach. I can choose what I'm interested in because I can become the owner of my own episode of learning and I can be the manager and the curator of this episode of learning with the course which I take from the next institution and those credentials which I receive make up the portfolio of what is maybe then a larger sense, a meaningful chunk of learning with which I what Rebecca said, I'm upskilling myself. For example, if I have a certain upskill tasks to do. So, yeah, I would just like to frame it like that and not repeat what the others have said. One affordance which I think if you think in terms of a larger scenario, of course, it's giving autonomy from an institution to giving the control, so to speak, from the institution to the learner in the end of the day. He or she is the person, the actor, which has to take care, so to speak, then in the end. And he or she will use this micro credential collection which they receive from the higher education institution in our case for being mobile in the labor market or in society. And one last point maybe we are involved in the current largest study on blockchain skills. And we have surveyed in this very tech sophisticated sector, big companies, small companies across 17 countries of Europe. And basically, a bottom line is that they all say there is no higher education program which we can recommend to our employees to upskill them. They really need micro credentials, they need short courses, chunks, pieces, which they can bundle together. There is nothing available right now. There's just one higher education degree program which is focusing on that in Europe, at least what we found. And that's not enough for this growing sector. That's also an affordance for these very far front risky areas in which people want to put a foot and want to want to work and want to be skilled. I'm from just to build a suppose on that point. And, you know, one of the so called affordances or the bandage around the literature is the connection between micro credentials and industry. And as you said there, you know, there's that effort or that requirement by industry to have certified learning in very niche and specific areas. Does that bring particular challenges so as well for higher education institutions because at the end of the day, are we will we end up to be an on demand service providers for very specific niche learning opportunities through micro credentials, or could that underice because they've got in danger, the integrity of micro challenges micro credentials and wider credentials. And I presume that comes back to this, you know, my next question to you or the challenges you spoke a little bit about some of the portability and stackability and getting the envelope right as we spoke about and being able to recognize learning. My question is, is that are we trying if we're trying to do something a little bit different about micro credentials. We have to get all of the structure things right, obviously, but I think we have to get the learning design and the connection out to industry as well we have to work on those relationships as well. So maybe, Rebecca, you might have a little think about that and respond. Yeah, so I think I'm going to come at it from a sort of learning course perspective again. So what was was talking about there was was the learner as a sort of manager and co creator of their own learning. One of the things that we have found, and this is in micro credentials and previously in in massive open online courses the MOOCs is that not all our learners have the skills necessary to do that straight away. Now one of the things about micro credentials which is quite unusual is is they are primarily an online approach. At the moment they they don't necessarily need to be, although if we're talking about digital credentialing, probably they will do in the long run, but they're mainly online. And a lot of our learners don't have the skills necessary to study online. They used to studying face to face and they haven't developed that skill set. And they don't necessarily have the self regulation skills, things like being able to set a realistic goal, being able to set themselves the steps towards that goal, the time management skills, the reflection skills. Now that that is no attack on our learners. Those are things that in most education, education environments, especially up to university level have been taken on by the teachers. But in an online setting in a micro credential setting, they're going to have to take responsibility for those. So to some extent we have to build into our micro credentials that skill set so that our learners not only learn the skills and the competencies, but they learn how to learn and they can take that to other micro credentials. So I think that's something very important. Another challenge we've we've encountered is the thing about international reach now international reach has very, very positive aspects. You know, it brings together lots of perspectives it opens up these these courses connects people. But it does mean that we're writing for an international audience who may not be studying in their first language. In a lot of cases who are finding micro credentials really expensive. Now, when we say that we sometimes think about people in Africa or parts of Asia, but actually in parts of Europe where people are used to the fact that the government is usually pays for your courses and suddenly they're being asked to pay for the course. So we see that, for example, within the UK that our Scottish students and our Welsh students aren't having to pay very much or English students are having to pay a huge amount. So some people are finding expensive, some aren't. And we're also finding that people have different understandings of the terms which are used in a course produced by a university. So some of those things like discuss and explain. But one of the key things we're seeing is understandings of plagiarism, which of course we know is is understood differently around the world. And coping with cases which in our normal context, we'd say, oh, this is academic misconduct. But in these cases, we're saying, well, actually, it's probably just a misunderstanding about what is acceptable and what is good practice and what is bad practice. So those are some of the international issues that we've been encountering. And we've also been encountering the sort of clash between a skills based professional curriculum and the association with academic credit. Because one of the points that people have made is you can get both together. But if people are getting academic credit, if they are studying with the university for academic credit, then should they be able to access the entire offering of that university. And if you think about the offering of your university, for example, might have employment advice. It might have counselling. It might have access to a huge online library. Lots of things that when you put them together are quite a valuable offering, which you might not be able to afford to offer to students who are only with you for three months. So that's a summary of some of the challenges we've been meeting. And I think some of the ones that you have, they're reflective of what we know about international education. Anyway, do you know that type of way and what we've had to learn? I think the tension there with industry is an important one. One of the questions that's come in for the Q&A and I might get the panelists to respond. In Sweden, you're able to sign up for standalone courses, campus or online with clear learning outcomes, examinations. And if successful learners are rewarded ECTS as small as one, would you consider this as a microcredential? Deborah, what do you think? Oh, sorry. Could you repeat that, please? Sorry. I can have a look at the Q&A myself. You're able to sign up for a standalone course, campus or online with a clear learning outcome, examinations. And if successful learners are awarded ECTS as small as one ECTS, would you consider this as a microcredential? A simple answer would be yes. I know that there are different definitions of microcredentials in terms of volume and learning. But if you look at it from the point of view of the definition of a detailed record of learning achievements, if the learning outcomes are clear, if the assessment and evaluation practices are clear and recorded in that digital record, then absolutely, for me, that is a microcredential. And if you look at the different definitions which are circulating at the moment, I've got both the definition from Beverly Oliver who did a lot of work for, who's doing a lot of work for UNESCO on this. A microcredential is a record of focus learning achievement verifying what the learner knows, understands or can do, includes assessment based on clearly defined standards and is awarded by a trusted provider, has standalone value and may also contribute or complement other microcredentials or microcredentials, including through recognition of prior learning and meets the standards required by relevant quality assurance. So if those fit what is being practiced in Sweden, then my answer would be yes, on that basis. Okay, Ulf, would you agree, your mic? Sorry, I would agree as well. I totally that this would be in my understanding, representing a microcredential, of course. One issue which we have to consider, of course, is that one ECTS is a very, very small microcredential. A nanocredential. Quite small. When we discussed microcredential definition in various project contexts or also in the task force of the commission, we were often thinking that the microcredential can well also have several ECTS up to 5 or 10 or so or even more, but below a bachelor, of course. Yeah, and it's interesting because in Ireland, we would say that our quality assurance, our main association, they would say that we already have microcredentials and they run up to 30 credits. So, you know, it's very interesting how different areas are dealing with it and think about microcredentials. So it's not about just the minimum. And for me, if you talk to a lot of industry, industry will say, well, 25 hours of learning is quite significant amount of time to spend learning about something. So I suppose it depends what perspective you're looking from as well. Derek, we're coming back to you on the challenges that you see with microcredentials. What would they be? Lots and lots and lots. Looking at it from, I mean, I think it's nice that the three of us are very, very complimentary here and Rebecca and all focusing on the learner perspective. I'd like to flip that and have a look at it as well from the institutional side. Although Rebecca did say as well that one of the challenges was can we actually afford to offer all of these to our students? First of all, I think asking the big question of why are we doing microcredentials in the first place? To quote somebody that, you know, well, Marie, did many of us do a certain Mark Brown from DCU as well. He often says, what is the problem that microcredentials are trying to solve? I just shared in the chat as well a link to a document that we produced at the Eden annual conference this year. Asking that difficult question of does microcredentialing actually take something away from what we believe higher education should be? There's a lot of arguments about no higher education needs to continue to produce these well-rounded graduates with a full set of competencies and we can't possibly break those down into chunks of learning. And I know that criticism is out there. But I think it does depend on particular situations and contacts. And then you've got to look at those affordances and you've got to look at what learners and society actually need and want. Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle that there is a place for both and that microcredentials won't be replacing the whole of higher education. So let's assume that we have decided that microcredentials are a good idea and that they are valuable to institutions and to learners and to industry and society as well. If we look at it from the institutional side, then the good old institutional inertia is a particular challenge. And I think relating that to actually thinking about competencies when you're designing a programme. Now, certain countries, certain institutions and organisations might be a lot further down the line. But this was the conversation that I had for two and a half hours with French colleagues earlier today when we were talking about competency based approaches and microcredentials. And a lot of the people in the working group said, well, we still haven't managed to convince our colleagues to stop describing our courses in terms of knowledge and to start describing them in competencies. And what does that mean? And how do we have the time to do this? And it's more than just an administrative constraint or a legal constraint because the French Ministry now obliges us to do that. So it's developing that competency mindset around what are traditionally academic subjects. So that's on the academic side, on the administrative and technical side. How do we fit microcredentials into our information system? Our information system delivers diplomas based on the information that we put in on a particular course and not a particular organisation around competencies. We don't have microcredentials in the information system yet. So again, that's another challenge. And our conclusion from the working group this afternoon was that we really need to get everybody round the table at some point. But probably do that progressively as well so that we're looking at particular concerns of particular groups of people and then get them round the table to resolve these. Thanks Deborah. Lots of institutional challenges. I think some of those challenges will be for any new types of offerings that would come through anyway. But I think the frame that you put with respect to competencies and changing that mindset is interesting. One of the things I wanted to come back to Ulf about was looking at, you know, this notion, I suppose, of we're in this world and we're talking from a higher education perspective. But there is a whole plethora of microcredentials being delivered out there or being called microcredentials by industry. Is there a tension there between us and one of the questions that have come through the chat? Can we work out the standard definition? What are the relationships between this? We'll do all of that, I presume, in Europe. We're going to do a lot of work on microcredentials. Is there still going to be a massive, massive other side or other sort of provision of microcredentials where there'll be very limited or limited control on them? Yeah, I think there is actually. And when we did our interviews for the study I just mentioned on the blockchain sector, there was an entirely disconnected sphere of microcredentials, which the people talked about. But they were not very afraid of that. They were just saying, you know, since there are no higher education certifications for which we are looking for, that's not a big problem. We are happy if people bring badges and from things they have done somewhere and from experience they had somewhere and then they tell us and we will listen to it and then that works as well. So I think that this kind of disconnect is a process which we have to recognize in a way. And it asks, this kind of disconnect asks questions. It brings up questions which you can ask in both directions. Are we fit as higher education institutions to serve this need? Or the other direction would be to ask, is this process we can see there a dangerous process to society undermining social equality? As everybody, even those people with not a lot of money for paying for some kind of further education, the same chances or potentials to access this kind of credentials as well. So I think this is something we really need to observe. And we need to, in my feeling, that's why I'm getting up every morning to work in my feeling, we need to make higher education fit to really live up to the task, to the challenge, because our society is demanding different kinds of qualifications, is demanding often more flexible pathways between different education sectors and is demanding not big but small chunks. And I can tell you, I'm amazed, Rebecca, what you're telling about your university because I've just pulled up some data from Germany and we have 426 universities. And out of them, I think we have like below 100, which are starting to experiment with microcredentials in some small pockets of their activities. And I just saw in the chat that in Sweden, how the person, I don't know who it was, expressed himself or herself, the standard size of a microcredential in Sweden is between 5 and 10 ECTS. I wouldn't know if we have a standard size in Germany, to be honest. I think it's a big, big discussion. And people are between this idea of clinging to what we have, which is short courses, which is further education, academic further education, short courses. And sometimes universities open up to industry or to other target groups and providing something shorter than bachelor and master degrees. This is what we have. And people are between this belief of are microcredentials actually that, what we know already? Or are they something different? And if they are something different, what of us do we need now? Do we need new quality assurance agencies or processes? Okay, so this is the situation in my view. I mean, maybe, you know, higher education is always a big choir of people analyzing it. But that's the situation. I would like to make one more point, and that is a little question mark, holding up a little question mark, and that is this issue of competencies. You know, when one potential this whole development has is to talk again in a reinforced in a deeper way about assessing competencies. But it's really difficult to talk about a competence if a learner is doing some quizzes after 12 hours of learning, and then, you know, certifying that this learner has a competence competence, defined as the ability to to act in an unknown complex problematic future situation in your field of profession. So, so there is also a danger that we are calibrating down our ambitions, which we had so far into very, very small chunks and we are losing losing cohesion, cohesion and consistency. That's the big issues with micro credentials. And I think we need to be taking good attention that we are not going down this road of of what you just mentioned, my read. When you said there is a danger that we're just selling out what we did so far in a cheaper and smaller way to to to what actually to not to watch. So that's also a danger. Okay, thanks very much. Deborah, I know you're very much into the competency based area as well. Is there anything you'd like to maybe to respond to what Ulfa said. Sorry. I think office has put it really, really well. And it comes back to this question of how we assess competences. I mean, it really makes us ask the question, well, what are we asking the learners to do to prove that they have that they demonstrate that that competency. When you look at a lot of assessment mean off mentioned quizzes, we could even think of the traditional three hour exam in a massive hall, which tests recall short term memory but how do you actually a test that a particular learner has has demonstrated the competences there's all the work about portfolios proof of of learning proof. But if we're going down the road of authentic assessment for everybody who wants to take a micro prudential because they have to do that so that an institution would deliver that micro prudential. And then that's a whole other question just a whole other business model as well for for universities. Again, I don't have the answer but I agree with all that we have to be very, very careful about what we are promising with these with these micro prudentials. And I don't think that we've got to the bottom of it yet. It's a fascinating area to be working on especially when you're looking at soft skills and transversal skills, which I've been doing for quite some time now across the LN projects. And peer assessment is a very, very good way. But then you have to design peer assessment as well, solidly as as many of us as many of us know with with the right guidance to the learners who were doing that. So, yeah, definitely something to be very, very careful of when we say that a particular student has particular competence. What have we done to assess and justify that? And I suppose coming from the assessment part of it and I know, Rebecca, you have an interest in this as well. The quality aspect and the quality of micro prudentials. Who's checking that out and how should we do it? If we do it institutionally in all of our institutions, we have quite heavy frameworks for ensuring quality of learning of our learning offerings. And I think potentially I always go back to podcast and to some presentations I listened to from Maria Callow, the director of the NQA. And she said we should have enough within our institutions. We have enough quality assurance to deal with these. We shouldn't be bringing in more layers within our institutions. Is there anything else, Rebecca, from the quality side of it that you would like to see brought in about for micro prudentials? I don't think it's a question of what is brought in. I think it's a question of thinking about the implications of it. So you can say, OK, we're starting off with 300 hour courses, which is typically one of the smaller courses that you would be. Let's cut it down. Let's cut it down to 100 hours. Let's cut it down to 50 hours. Let's cut it down to 10 hours. But some of the things involved in the quality there make it very uneconomic to do that. Because, for example, you have got to verify that that student doing that work is that student. You've got to have some way of doing that. And as you have more and more students doing smaller and smaller things, the cost of that per student per microcredential rises. You've then got to have somebody who is marking that work. They've got to be trained to mark that work. They've got to be trained to mark that work at the same level as other people are marking that work. So when you're doing that for a fairly large course, it's realistic to look at, are all our markers doing the same thing? Are all the different course teams doing the same thing? Are all the faculties doing the same thing? Is our university doing the same as other universities? Are the universities in our country doing the same as other universities? There are lots and lots of checks that go on. Now, to do that for something very small is completely uneconomic. So then you have to start thinking, well, which of those things do I want to cut out? Every time you cut something out, you're potentially reducing the quality of it and you're reducing its validity when you take it to somebody else. So I would say those are some of the things which are a problem. And another thing which is a problem is people quite often talk about microcredentials in terms of stackability. So the idea is that you can do one, two, ten, twenty microcredentials and you can put them together and you can make something bigger. But if you're going to do that, you've got to bear in mind the quality standards of the thing which is bigger. So if you're going to build up for a degree or a postgraduate certificate, you've got to go along with all the quality standards which are in place already, which will say something like there's a set of graduate skills that they've got to demonstrate across those. They've got to say you've got to see some sort of progression. Now, if you're learners are doing microcredentials in any order, it's very difficult to demonstrate progression. If they're coming in without the skills to learn online and you don't know which order they're doing it in, you're having to keep reteaching those skills or you're having to say you've definitely got to do this course first, which shows you how to do it. So these things aren't impossible, but they are very challenging. And I think quite often people who've been involved in producing courses haven't necessarily had to think about the economics of the university quality assuring. We're now being forced to go and talk to the quality assurance teams and think about that. It's a scaling issue though as well, isn't it? Because you have to get to a tipping point where it makes sense for the university as well. I know that you have done a lot of work with industry and I think could you give us sort of where they're looking now for microcredentials? Are they looking to higher education? Are they looking to education and training or are they going to start looking elsewhere if we don't get our act in order for the microcredentials? It's a difficult question. It's not so easy to answer because when you go to industry, the HR people tell you that there is a lot of need for learning first of all. The question is who can help them with this? And they feel more and more that the learning revolution of today and of the future will actually lead to a learning in which the learner, the employee, the member of an organization has to take more and more the role of the driver, has to take more and more autonomy and that leads to a situation in which currently there is a feeling of helplessness because autonomy in learning can only become reality if an organizational culture is developed for that. And many organizations are just in this transformation process now where they are saying we are coming from a situation in which we worked with universities which were providing programs to our employees or with education and training institutions which were providing training offers to our employees. We are coming from this and now we realize that this is even if we had tried to make it flexible. It's too inflexible. We cannot any longer think for our employers what they will need. They will need to do that themselves. And so that's really what the next steps is about and that means the real challenge currently is to work on supporting members of organizations, employers, employees and so on to support them, to coach them, to mentor them into embracing this autonomy, into being able of, so to speak, exercising this autonomy for themselves. And when it comes to micro credentials, what is really an issue is that micro credentials from its conceptual frame demand that the learners are the one who designed the context around it. The larger context around it for what they needed, where it fits, what will follow from this micro credentials, what is a good, so to speak, a base for taking this micro credential in my past. And that is exactly, this is exactly the same thing which I just described when I talked about autonomy. So what is the current situation is a situation in which employers would say we need people who are able to be so flexible, so autonomous and so self organized in their learning, but we don't have them in that amount which we want and which we think it's meaningful. So we need to support them. And at the same time, micro credentials do also demand this kind of skill. They demand this kind of skill to be autonomous, to be flexible too. And so this is something where I think learners are not always there at this position, and organizations are not always there to embrace this and absorb this kind of autonomy which is coming there. And there's absolutely no use if you open the micro credential programs to your employees without having an organizational culture in which they are able to develop. So that there's absolutely no use to do that. And this is also, I think, a breaking point. Very interesting, because I think that's something that Beverly Oliver has also spoken about quite a bit and she's spoken about lots of institutions and lots of organizations. They have a lot of work based training and that they already currently do. And she should speak to, you know, the necessity for companies to look inwards into their own organizational culture to understand, are they a learning organization? Do they support that learning ethos, which is an interesting point. For me, when we did the national study of employees and employers in Ireland on micro credentials, we found one of the biggest issues was that there was an absence of knowledge, there was a huge need for raising awareness. There was a huge need for getting people to understand the basics of what a micro credential was. So that comes back, I think, to points that both yourself, Rebecca and Deborah have meant to say, what are the fundamentals of micro credentials, you know, and that notion of being able to learning to learn and all of that type of stuff. So we found a huge part of it in Ireland, even though we have quite a bit of national funding investing in this across, I think, 26 variety of projects across the higher education sector, huge amount of money being placed into this. But we're actually finding the gap. There's a still a huge knowledge gap. And we have massive amount of multinationals, massive organizations in the country. But there's still that gap in knowledge awareness and that knowledge raising that has to be done both from the employers and the employees. The bit I wanted to come around and I know we have, we have a few minutes left and I want to take some of the questions that have come in and, Deborah, I'm not going to throw you in the deep end on this question, the second questions that's coming in the QA from Monica. I think this question is actually quite interesting one because it comes back to the question that Rebecca will have been talking about the financing and it talks to, you know, is it recognized the public funding for micro credentials. There's specific eligibility requirements for part time education for funded part time through our core grant system in Ireland. So while there is some funding available, micro credentials may not necessarily fall in this. Is this the case, would that also be the case in France or is it more open that's shorter courses, or potentially micro credentials will be publicly funded. Well, thank you for that, Marie. I was actually looking at that question as well and I thought it'd be a nice one to answer. Seeing as Belgium is one of our neighbors. And it also resonates with, again, with the conversation that I had with the French working group this afternoon about this issue of public funding. And it does seem as if this model of public funding based on the number of students is, it's not, it's not disappearing, but it seems to be more and more at risk. And in French higher education, particularly, I was looking at the statistics yesterday and as regards the increasing number of students and the decreasing number of academics and support staff is putting organizations into a very difficult situation. And because our Digital University Association supports management and economics faculties, this was particularly of interest to those management and business schools internal to universities, because there's a lot of competition from the private business schools who are already offering micro credentials. So in fact, the people in the French working group, I would not generalize to the whole of French higher education but in our particular field, actually saw this offering of micro credentials as an opportunity to generate more funding in the face of reduced public funding. And given that there is this very strong drive in France towards competency based higher education, they didn't actually see that that was too much of a barrier to take the next leap and then to start envisaging, pulling these together as as a micro credential offering, most probably for that, the lifelong learners, rather than learners in the initial education. Rebecca in the UK has the funding regime there changed in any way or in respect to support micro credentials or is there any new initiatives that have come on? Well, the initiatives are different in the different parts of the UK. So we haven't really seen one in England. But Northern Ireland has been really supportive of micro credentials, very engaged with micro credentials and has sponsored hundreds of free places. I mean, not just on micro credentials, but on other micro credentials. We're also seeing that in Scotland, Scotland very tied up with the skills agenda and also their engaging. We've also seen individually employers and institutions who have been willing to fund their employees to come into micro credentials on mass. We've got a cohort of about 150 going through from one employer at the moment. And we're also seeing it internationally. So the UK government together with the government of Kenya, for example, has jointly funded 32 educators from Kenya to come on to a micro credential. So we are seeing various initiatives come into place. But so far, these are short term initiatives that nobody can guarantee are going to go forward. But they are very positive signs of what might happen in the future. And Ulf, is it the same in this variety of states in Germany as our particular initiatives being rolled out to support micro potential development? Yes, we have, I think, currently three federal projects or initiatives to work on micro credentials and some within the states, 16 states, we have some within the states. But I would say that the discussion is currently quite conservative within the institutions. And also on the on the federal level. But I expect that it's going to take up much more when Europe is developing more and more tools and initiatives in this direction. And we're getting to the point now where we're expecting some outputs to come from the commission with respect to the resolution. With respect, we've had the open consultation process. We've had the working definition of micro credentials. So we have the European roadmap delivering out. So there's some there's some steps to move forward in the coming few months that we should expect some more movement on micro credentials. Before I wrap up, I'm going to ask each one of the panelists to give their one piece of advice to anyone who wants to get involved in micro credentials or potentially to learn more about it. If they want to do that, I'll start off with yourself, Deborah. I put something in the chat saying have a look at the echo website and get in touch. Obviously, looking at micro credentials from the point of view of the of the artifacts, but also asking the big questions. I think I shared earlier as well the this the Madrid statement from the Eden annual conference. So my piece of advice would be to read that and get in touch and continue the conversation. Thank you, Rebecca. I think my advice would be to talk to people who have already done this and to talk to the people who are doing the work around it. Marcus has shared a really good link in the chat here to the MOOC observatory that is picking up on all this. So there are places you can go to find this this information together. I'd also say bear in mind this is something which you probably need to do at scale. It's very difficult for a small team to introduce micro credentials. It's probably going to be a university-wide initiative. So take that into account from the beginning. I also would like to to to emphasize that that it's a total systems thing, you know, that probably micro credential will take up when the systems are tuned towards it. And in that regard, I would like to end with inviting everybody who's interested to have a look at the scenario work, which we did, which is trying to map out scenarios in which micro credentials in a higher education future have a relevant, a very, very relevant role to play as a key to unlocking the flexibility. But there's still a lot of work to be done until we reach that. And that's for the quality, for the assessment, for the verification. So the portability, how do you take it with you? So that's our task, our all common together task, not which we are working on that. And I'm looking forward to that because I think it holds a lot of promise. Well, you're right there. There definitely, it is a global task. And I think if you, we did a massive piece of work over the summer in DCU, myself, Mark and our team Elaine and Crower. And we did a huge amount of a review on the micro credential literature. And it's a global phenomenon, you know, it's quite all around. So I think very much we're in this together. We have a huge amount of work that's happening in Europe, respect to our roadmap and everything that's going on with that. As Mark, I think, has put into the chat, please go to the DCU micro credential observatory. We're trying to curate a lot of resources there. Deborah and Rebecca and Elf have also put in some links, which will be useful. I hope this has been of some use to those of you who are in interest in micro credentials. We will have further webinars on micro credentials. And I suppose all it is left for me to do is to thank Eden for providing us with the platform to talk a little bit about micro credentials. Today. And I wish you all a very good week. And for those of us who are on our last for a bank holiday in Ireland to enjoy the end of the bank holiday. Thank you very much.