Microcredentials are now all the rage in Australian universities. The product is mostly a recent phenomenon to the world of higher education – but not to Anthony Smith, UNE’s Executive Principal – Brand, Partnerships & Business Development.

Mr Smith was alerted to the hidden community demand for microcredentials during market research that started in 2014, and he has spent nine years encouraging the University to develop the category with boldness and vision.

He spoke to Pulse about the evidence behind his championing of microcredentials, UNE’s execution of its offerings, and the place that non-traditional forms of education have in sustaining the University’s viability.

Pulse

Microcredentials run counter to the traditional idea that university is about sustained, in-depth study across the range of a subject. What first piqued your interest in microcredentials, and why?

Anthony Smith

As a marketer in higher education, the professional task is to focus is on the student need. The concept of microcredentials came from deep market research into various target markets. Back in 2014, we began an extensive piece of work over the course of years, aimed at understanding the higher education market in Australia, and to identify where the largest growth areas were going to be in the future.

A production mentality says this is what we produce, and it’s marketing’s job to sell it – but this is not true marketing. The “Father of modern marketing” Professor Philip Kotler  said, “Authentic marketing is not selling what you make, it’s knowing what to make”. And when you genuinely follow that process in an evidence-based way, you can start to understand what people are actually looking for from higher education.

Using that approach, we found a very large group of Australians between 25 and 50 years of age who recognised that they needed higher education, but told us that no universities were providing the type of education that they could engage with. We should understand that this group of people that I’m talking about is several times the size of the current enrolments from that age group in Australia. It’s a massive group of people. We came to refer to them as the ‘latent market’.

The idea of shorter form courses came from this deep research into this group of people and what their needs were.

We were talking microcredentials long before anyone else in the Australian sector was talking about them. There’s a follower phenomenon in this sector where once a provider starts offering a course, others follow. I think this has happened with microcredentials. That’s often how education trends start. MOOCS is another example. But that’s not how UNE became interested in the concept of breaking up degrees into smaller, more accessible courses. It came from this market telling us that this is what would engage them.

Pulse

And on the basis of that work, UNE launched a suite of bespoke courses in 2017. How were they received?

Anthony Smith

The first wave of bespoke were non-award courses. The research detailed what the product attributes had to be to secure the market, but the university didn’t embrace all of those features. Some were too difficult to implement or too radical for the university to contemplate at the time.

Pulse

Can you define some of those obstacles to the bespoke course concept?

Anthony Smith

One to mention is the constraint of prerequisites and the ability for students to access directly the content they’re looking for. We’re talking about people who may have been in the workplace for many years: they’re looking for direct access to the content they need right now.

Another to mention is the desire to more freely mix and match subjects across disciplines. The first wave of bespoke was only able to achieve this through a non-award course. But then we pushed harder and developed a course design which drew closer to the optimum design identified in the market research. That was the bespoke Graduate Certificate in Professional Practice which allowed students the freedom to mix and match units, but within a structure that provided an AQF qualification.

That’s been the most successful offering in the bespoke suite of courses. Several hundred students have gone through that course –  but we have not yet offered all the features in a course that the market is looking for. As a result we’ve not yet seen the concept approach its full potential.

Being able to offer the courses this market wants, at a cost that works for both the provider and the student, is also a challenge that is yet to be solved.

Pulse

How have subsequent UNE bespoke course offerings been received, and what might be done to improve adoption?

Anthony Smith

The Graduate Certificate in Professional Practice has highlighted that demand exists for the ability to mix and match the content that people need to address specific workplace challenges. And we need to be able to do that across disciplines. The non-award bespoke offerings haven’t been as successful – which is not surprising, because they are further away from what the research said people want. They want Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) certification or to be able to progress towards one. Once you get AQF certification, it opens up the ability to defer your fees and have all those other privileges of being under the AQF umbrella.

So if we’re going to realise the opportunities represented by the latent market, we have to first push course designs closer and closer to the criteria identified by the research.

The second thing is to fully understand this market, and how its needs change and evolve. We are doing market research right now to understand how the latent student market has changed in response to many universities coming out with microcredentials – to see how the prospective student market is reacting to the various options that are available.

Pulse

There is some resistance to the concept of bespoke courses in academia because it runs counter to much of what a university has traditionally stood for. How do you speak to that resistance?

Anthony Smith

The research we did back in 2014, and are still doing, is clear: this sub-group of working adults is looking for a way to deal with a workplace that’s changing at an exponential rate. These people have a different set of challenges and they need a different type of education to deal with those challenges.  What we’re talking about is responding to what these people need.

This type of education is not a replacement for the existing set of traditional qualifications but is complementary to them. Most people in this ‘Latent Market’ already have an undergraduate qualification but they need more education and they do not believe that standard postgraduate qualifications will give them what they need.

That’s what microcredentials are about: a new way of acquiring knowledge that helps our students better fit into a changing world. This is where the ‘future fit’ idea came from. The UNE tagline, ‘Future Fit Your Life’ is not something that was plucked out of the air. It is a reflection of what people told us they are actually trying to do in their life. You only have to look at our own workplaces and see what’s happened over the last two or three years to know that this is true. COVID was only the beginning. AI and other forces are also accelerating the changing nature of jobs and workplaces.

We also need to think about UNE’s identity as a university.. The first UNE Vice-Chancellor, Sir Robert Madgwick, was responsible for adult education in the Australian army through the Second World War. The idea was that when soldiers were discharged, they needed education to help them fit back into civilian life which had changed dramatically during the war. Madgwick carried this belief in the power of adult education through to his role with UNE. At the time, the Council of Australian Vice-Chancellors tried to kill off his ideas about the role of universities in external, adult education. The reality then and now is that while UNE has a social contract to educate the youth of the region, there are not enough youth to sustain a viable university. The distance education market that Madgwick developed, now our online market, was key to making UNE sustainable. Without the online market, there’d be no economies of scale that would allow us to have a university, let alone have programs to support the region’s youth..

Now, as then, we need to address these two markets together. I think microcredentials are an important and necessary step in adult education – to continue the UNE tradition of listening to what people need, and finding a way to give it to them. That doesn’t happen overnight.

Pulse

When you first proposed this concept nine years ago, most people were sceptical but it was quite prophetic given that many other universities are now working in this space. But it seems that in general, there is still a process of discovery to be worked through around how microcredentials fit into the university structure and how to make them profitable. What do you think UNE should do about developing this concept?

Anthony Smith

I think part of the answer is to persist with market research to understand these peoples’ needs. I suspect some providers have now begun offering microcredentials simply because the competitors are offering them. But this is done without clarity of focus on who the courses are for and why they want them.

I think the secret to securing prime position for this market is to be the provider that most deeply understands who the students are, what they are actually looking for, and to do a better job of giving them quality options that give them that.

It still astounds me that you can do the sort of market research we did – which found that more than a quarter of the Australian population aged 25 to 50 wants higher education – but that no university has been able to give it to them in the form that works for them.

It’s pretty clear that this is going to be the growth market for the next 10-plus years, and that will be a period in which other forms of growth will not be easy to find.