Microcredentials

 April 30 Word of the Day: Microcredentials

 

Remembering to turn the calendar at the end of the month is a subject no one learnt at school. A pinch and a punch for the first of the month was, at some stage, included in the one-hour microcredential course on offer, free of charge, on the domestic front.

 Later in life, that is to say the following month, it was unfortunate if you caught a cold and missed the class on hyphens, those compounding chemists of grammar busy forcing different elements into new formations. Life is dotted, even dashed sometimes, with the perennial challenge of when a word goes from being a micro-credential, finding its feet so to speak in a joint venture, to microcredential, the fully fledged latest addition to the vocabulary, or if you prefer fully-fledged. There is a lifetime of catch-up (see also, catch up) if you missed the class and find no one (see also, no-one) offers diplomas in hyphens nowadays.

 Accelerated learning is a lifelong practice, if you are alert and open to new experiences. In a single day you may earn degrees for such microcredentials as improved access to tinned goods, opening the jar screwed shut by a robot, or prising the thin plastic supermarket bag at the tear for your selection of peaches – all with no tears!

 Module seems to be the larger or governing term for every kind of microcredential, modules coming into vogue around the time of the first moon landing. An astronaut with microcredentials in moonwalking takes a small step in the belief this is an augury for a giant leap. Though his dependence on modules is too obvious to mention, certainly the astronaut can add small steps to his CV. Golfing on the moon is next level, where just teeing off deserves a microcredential of its own, let alone bunkering out of a crater.

 Some people complain that microcredentials has too many syllables, why not just extras, or skills, or add ons, or add-ons? Resistance to the idea of a Diploma in Details or Certificate in Specifics is observable, while others are too busy organising microcredential reading lists and one-hour interfaces to be concerned with semantics, let alone if microcredentials is a product of our time, or in fact something people do every day without any personal recognition whatsoever, and have done since BC.