Hybrid Credit

The recent news about the projected growth of the global e-learning market has me thinking about the gap between where non-credit e-learning is headed and what most universities (particularly private universities) are not doing about it.

The e-learning services market is projected to reach $843 billion by 2030, with nearly all of that growth happening outside of degree programs with non-credit corporate training & development. These are the courses from companies like Udemy, Coursera, Khan Academy, and LinkedIn Learning, and they are the platforms where our online part-time adult learners are quietly upskilling themselves while simultaneously toiling through semester-long credit-bearing courses to complete their degrees.

I'm hopeful that we will soon see a progressive university determine how to give real and degree-applicable credit for non-credit e-learning courses completed concurrently with credit-bearing courses. It's the core idea of "credit for current learning" that is getting serious attention from organizations like CAEL and ACE. Most of our institutions do the credit for prior learning thing (PLA) and spend a lot of time talking disingenuously about it in our marketing materials. But where PLA looks in the rearview mirror, credit for current learning runs alongside the learner while they are completing courses within the degree curriculum. In the hybrid credit model adopted by the progressive early-mover university, the student enrolls, starts taking credit-bearing courses and simultaneously completes relevant e-learning courses on an outside platform. At defined checkpoints, the student submits an assessment demonstrating learned skills, knowledge or competencies and how it all maps to degree outcomes and objectives.

A hybrid credit model like this is precisely what working adults taking one or two courses per semester need to stay enrolled and persisting toward degree completion. Many of them have years of professional experience that qualified them for credit for prior learning. What the e-learning market projections tell us is that many of them are likely already using e-learning platforms because the content is good (in some cases, really good) and the price is right (in many cases, free). A hybrid credit model adopted by a progressive university that is willing to operationalize their marketing hype about begin accessible to adult learners would simply be formalizing what their online adult students are already doing by awarding them academic recognition for it.

This wouldn't be hard to mount. You just need the will and right team to do it.