Is a National Tipping Point Study Needed to Improve Our Credentialing System?

Participant Profile

CREDENTIAL AS YOU GO PARTICIPANT

Purdue University Global

WEBSITE

LOCATION

Indianapolis, Indiana

COHORT

2023

Implementation stage & efforts to date Full implementation stage

  • PG offers stackable and personalized degree paths and non-credit opportunities for students in an ecosystem of interoperable credentials within select concentrations and micro-credentials. Incremental credentialing has become an integral part of the university’s own credential ecosystem,
  • PG currently offers 45+ market-driven micro-credentials that can be stacked into existing degree programs. Students who complete these micro-credentials are awarded digital badges through Credly. 
  • PG also awards thousands of other digital badges annually for a variety of other credential opportunities
  • PG’s Center for Prior Learning Recognition leads in their creative approaches to awarding credit for academic, professional, and military experience and embraces the potential for external credentials of all kinds to be used toward our own credentials. A notable example is their collaboration with Google to create a series of offerings with embedded Google certificates. 
Goals for 

participation 

  • PG has recently mapped skills to its curriculum and has piloted a version of a Comprehensive Learning Record that shows skills students have gained through coursework, extracurricular activity, and courses with accompanying letter grades. We hope to continue this development further and see incremental credentialing as a key piece of this. 
  • Moving forward, PG expects to refine their work through intentional application of this framework. In particular, we see opportunities in the areas of Add On As You Go and Stack as You Go
  • PG sees tremendous opportunity in collaborating with a strong professional peer network at this important inflection point in nationwide credentialing. 
  • PG sees great potential value in receiving (and providing, when possible) technical assistance to help automate and improve operations
  • In looking to collaborate with peers and utilize available resources, PG looks to further identify strategies to scale offerings to larger populations of both current and prospective students. 

Associated Case Studies

Improving Education and Employment Outcomes