Micro-Credentials
Micro-credentials are in the news and higher education is being challenged to modify tradition to comply with realities of the workforce as it responds to economic progress across multiple new advancements and disruptions from innovative technologies. It turns out that the trend is not entirely new. Innovation in higher education is too often bete noire.
Modular design for instruction entered my thinking in the Summer of 1970 in conjunction with a National Science Foundation program centered at what was then Mankato State College. The program drew together around 30 science faculty from the emerging and developing Minnesota State Junior College System.
In the previous Fall of 1969 I was employed at the one-year old Normandale State Junior College in Bloomington, Minnesota. I arrived on campus a week before classes were scheduled to begin with expectation that I would be teaching Human Anatomy for a new Dental Hygiene program that had enrolled 20 students. To my surprise, the Dean of Instruction, Arland Otte, caught me in the administrative wing of the college and told me that my assignment was changed. I would be assigned to teach a laarge enrollment course, Natural Science 101 Biology, because college enrollments were exceeding expectations, and a new laboratory was being set up, along with Natural Science 102—Chemistry, to implement Audio-Tutorial Instruction (ATI).
ATI was the brain-child of Dr. Samuel Postlethwait, a botanist at Purdue University. To reduce lecture time in introductory botany in order to emphasize hands-on laboratory exercises for students. Dr. Postlethwait recorded lectures on audio tape. An open laboratory with playback machines was available to students throughout the week. The lecture content was integrated with laboratory materials, displays and demonstrations. Students attending the AT Lab could stop listening to the tape and go to a section of the lab where, for instance, a plant or plant part might be displayed, perhaps with microscopic images of root, shoot, or flower parts. Weekly discussion and quiz sessions kept student on pace, while providing opportunity to make their own judgments about how much or how little time to spend with the course materials assigned each week.
My experience with ATI in the Fall went reasonably well and although I followed with traditional presentations of courses in Anatomy, Physiology and Microbiology for the Dental students, I found the ATI system greatly intriguing enough to pursue.
The Summer NSF program and a tragic family situation provided an opportunity. My mother, then just 54 years old, had been diagnosed with metastasizing ovarian cancer and was terminally ill, requiring nearly round the clock attention from my father, brothers and me. Throughout the month of June she lingered in and out of coma, so I sat with her in a hospital room through the night but had to stay awake should she need support. To consume the time and keep my mind somewhat free of her tragic situation, I began writing behavioral objectives for the Anatomy course.
Behavioralism was the rage in educational psychology, and Dean Otte, had given me a slim book by Robert Mager that elucidated how to write behavioral objectives using action verbs to spell out precise and measurable expectations for students. These objectives could then be used to design a course based on outcomes and measurement of student achievement. For instance, an anatomy student would be presented with a written behavioral objective: To successfully complete this unit, the student must be able to identify each bone of the human skull and and name each bone to which it is articulated. A Cadaver bones, anatomy texts, illustrations and models were available for student study and groups could practice for a practical quiz. The quiz could then follow with the human cadaver bones presented to the student along with a fill-in-the-blank item to name the attachments with other skull bones. Scoring was straight-forward and mastery was expected—if not always achieved. Scores were high along with student satisfaction.
During those depressing evenings with my mother, I wrote behavioral objectives for every body system and region that the Dental students would study. A secretary at the college typed an impressively long document from my handwriting—a book of sorts.
The NSF program began in late June and along with colleagues in physics and chemistry, I made the daily drive of 70 miles to Mankato to spend several hours in workshops and individual study sessions. Resources were richly supplied to participants and I took advantage of those resources to call Dr. Postlethwait at Purdue. In our phone conversations, I asked about many practical issues with ATI but most importantly asked about his vision for the future. He had been considering and cautiously implementing a modular format, eliminating the rigidity of weekly cycling and opening more opportunity for student choices about what to learn and setting their own pace for learning.
My mother passed away in July. Family matters along with the NSF obligations occupied the remainder of the summer. Design, development and organization of courses at the college along with hiring new faculty and assignments kept me busy while I began to envision the potentials for modularizing the basic science courses. I kept writing behavioral objectives for physiology and microbiology but not with the detail and intensity that had emerged for anatomy. The following summer, the college hired Wayne Becker, a colleague from graduate school days. Wayne immediately recognized potential for behavioral objectives and modularization. In the Fall of 1971, he and I committed to a new path for teaching and learning for the allied health courses, which now included not only dental but nursing, medical technology, and radiological technician programs. The college and biology department was on a steep and exciting growth curve.
Wayne and I collected our efforts into a book; BioMAPP: Bio-Instructional Objectives for Minicourses in Anatomy, Physiology and Pathobiology. This was published by Burgess, an imprint that had also published many ATI materials from Dr. Postlethwait and others. The Burgess editor, Dr. Don Beimborn, a biologist, was an enthusiastic supporter of our efforts, as well as our colleagues at Normandale and other Minnesota two-year colleges. One important result was pioneering efforts with customized publications for laboratory courses and an industry shift that eventually influenced many textbooks. BioMAPP broke new ground and our behavioral objectives were substantially incorporated in undergraduate textbooks for anatomy.
BioMAPP enabled students to complete core assignments but to self-select related topics (the minicourses) of personal interest that would be impossible to include in traditional course structures. For instance, dental students could study in more detail structures and functions of the head and neck as well as microflora of the mouth and teeth. A large fortuitous collection of human radiographs, we obtained from my cousin, radiologist Dr. Richard Lindgren, enabled students to study regional anatomy. Other minicourses included physiology of aging and space-flight physiology and were pursued by interested students but not required of all students. With the BioMAPP Minicourses it became possible for us to create study programs based on student interest and special requirements of a program rather than instructor or institutional formulations or specifications. The fundamental and constant component for each minicourse was behavioral objectives. Achievement of the objectives was enabled as students self-selected resources provided in the Biology Learning Center, as our laboratory came to be called. Each minicourse was designated a weighted numerical value and completion of the titled curriculum-course listed and described in the college catalog was accomplished as students compiled a standard expressed as a numerical requirement. The total value of core and self-selected minicourses must reach a set standard. Grades assigned were a composite of points accumulated for completion, measured through quizes, of the minicourses. In those pre-computer days, record-keeping was never trivial.
Self-paced instruction became a reality with our modular format. I believe this was a forerunner of micro-credentialing in education. Unfortunately the structures of college administrative organization—together with faculty tradition and unionization—precluded useful, in depth, long-term administrative support. The result was and remains college business as usual semester or quarter terms, Carnegie Credits and top-down authority as it had been among colleges for centuries. Not even Gutenberg made much difference to educational hierarchies that demanded conformity and dependence. Education as a practice of freedom remains elusive. Yet micro-credentials are a thin beam of light in a still dark cavern.