The impact of issuing micro-credentials for a higher education institution

Higher education institutions lead in innovation application and test various technology-enhanced solutions to correspond to student and labour market needs, foster and analyse innovative scenarios, and their impact on teaching and learning processes. There is a limited number of shared good practices that discuss technologies used for the issuance of micro-credentials, and this paper aims to reveal the higher education practice of testing some virtual infrastructures for issuing micro-credentials for students attending non-formal university courses. This research experimented with and tested VLE Moodle and Europass EDC infrastructures to issue micro-credentials. It was found that both Moodle VLE and Europass EDC infrastructure can be used to issue micro-credentials. Europass EDC infrastructure is more end-user friendly, while Moodle collects data during the learning process and can automatically transfer results to the micro-credential. However, both virtual infrastructures have some drawbacks, which may be fixed in the future.