Greetings friends ✨

In service to making the digital badge and micro-credential space more accessible to the broader community, the Micro-credential Multiverse team has launched a series of conversations with industry leaders in the space we’re calling “Micro-credentials in a Minute”.

Each episode of the podcast will be about a minute long and address critical questions on micro-credentials, digital badges, learning pathways, digital wallets, and more!

Introducing Micro-credentials in a Minute

Episode 3: Grain Size

Guests

Learn more about our guests

Featured

Robert Bajor

Robert Bajor is the founder of Micro-credential Multiverse.

Transcript

Micro-credentials in a Minute Episode 3: Grain Size

Micro-credential Multiverse: This is micro credential in a minute produced by micro credential multiverse.

Robert Bajor: Hi, my name is Rob.

Sheryl Grant: And my name is Sheryl and we are micro-credential and digital badge experts.

Robert Bajor: Today, we're going to talk about grain size. What does granularity mean? We came up with this word while I was at digital promise. The word grain size. And I was thinking to myself, what is the smallest possible research backed skill with a market value? For K-12 educators specifically. So really we were trying to determine what the atomic unit for educator skills and competencies was. And we ultimately landed on a micro-credential called wait time.

Sheryl Grant: That's so interesting for me, it goes back to one of the things that was most innovative about open badges 10 years ago. It was one of the reasons it spread so quickly in my perception, the idea that we can affect a credential to a unit of learning, that's actually smaller than of course credit. And I think it's probably the greatest strength and in some ways, one of the biggest headaches for educators who are designing micro-credentials.

Robert Bajor: Yeah, and I think the confusion around grain size, is that grain size might mean something different to different people if you're coming at it from a educator perspective versus coming at it from a different area of the industry or workforce.

Sheryl Grant: Yeah, I think it is.

I mean, I can, I can pretty much see the whole progression going from digital badges, open badges badges. To higher ed saying, we are going to take this word, but we don't want to call it this dumb name. We love the idea, but we hate the dumb name. And so they came up with digital credentials and then it was micro-credentials because they wanted it to be different than a degree or credential. So it was like turf war around the word.