Higher Education 4.0: Certifying Your Future (FutureLearn)

Prepare for new employment trends

Social, technological, and employment trends and innovation are all significantly impacting the higher education sector today.

You’ll explore the challenges these changes pose, as well as how they’re shaping the European Skills Agenda – a five-year skills development plan for individuals and businesses based on strengthening sustainable competitiveness, ensuring social fairness, and building resilience in crises.

Discover emerging higher education pedagogies

You’ll study new and emerging pedagogies, and learn how they can be used to better prepare today’s students for the workplace.

You’ll also gain expert insight into authentic, learning-centred approaches, including how they can be used to provide efficient and effective frameworks for deep, meaningful, and impactful new forms of learning.

Explore new approaches to higher education

The rise of microcredentials is recognising diverse skills and providing new pathways for lifelong learning.

You’ll consider why traditional credentials are no longer entirely fit for purpose, and identify the value and potential of these new shorter offerings.

The final sections of the course will ask you to examine cases and examples of how ECIU partner universities are responding to embrace transformative disruptions and explore new digital learning models.

What topics will you cover?

The course explores three key themes which each address the overarching question: What will the university of the future look like? In exploring this question the course is structured around central core topics. You will explore…

- How changing social, technological and employment trends are impacting the higher educational sector

- The potential of new approaches to credentialing, including micro-credentials, as a means of recognising diverse skills and providing new pathways for lifelong/life-wide learning

- New and emerging authentic pedagogies as vehicles for bridging and border-crossing between universities, industry partners and community groups in preparing 21st Century learners

- Case studies of how ECIU partner universities are responding to embrace transformative disruptions exploring new digital models and pedagogical approaches with different stakeholder perspectives.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Explore the importance of defining new future skills, including the challenges entailed in doing so

- Consider how to conceptualise these skills in a changing world, including the possibility of micro-credentials as representations of new forms of learning

- Explore how to assess the quality, scalability and credibility of various types of credential

- Learn about innovative and applied case studies from DCU, at which a learning-centred pedagogical model has been designed and implemented

- Explore diverse perspectives on these future challenges, and the demands for new, flexible forms of certified learning

Who is the course for?

The course has three primary audiences: i) educators wishing to think about the future of higher education; ii) people in ECIU partners universities as part of awareness-building of the underlying concepts of the ECIU University initiative; and iii) DCU staff wanting to learn more about the university’s future plans and developments. More generally, the course will be of interest to the following groups:

- Educators working in universities

- Academic staff at other institutions

- External employer groups and stakeholders

A premise from the part of all participants is an interest in conversations regarding the overarching question on the future of universities along with a desire to understand new accreditation/certification models, and pedagogical approaches, such as CBL.