Undergraduate Certificates to be Added to AQF

The Australian Government announced funding for short online university programs, in response to the COVID-19 Coronavirus, on 12 April 2020. There are 77 programs offer from today on the Courseseeker website (look for course category: "Short course"). These are undergraduate certificates (46) and graduate certificates (31), requiring six months full time study. While welcome, I suggest government make some improvements to the scheme, to allow for part-time study, nested programs, and mutual recognition of the certificates. Also I suggest incorporation of compulsory peer support training in all certificates, to address the elevated mental health risk, particularly for young people isolated at home, studying online, during a pandemic.

Study Areas

The emphasis in the announcement was on areas of study to help with the COVID-19 emergency. This is reflected in the programs offered. With health, including aged care and biomedical science, the largest offering, followed by education:

Study Area	Number of Programs
Health	25
Education	18
Information Technology	10
Engineering & Related Technologies	9
Agriculture, Environment & Related Studies	5
Natural & Physical Sciences	5
Architecture & Building	3
Society & Culture	2
Total	77

Acceptance of Certificates

The Minister for Education, Dan Tehan,  caused confusion at the time of the announcement by describing these as "micro-credentials" and "diploma certificates". What are being offered are six month full time programs. A micro-credential is much shorter, requiring only hours, days or weeks of study, not six months. A diploma requires a year of study.

A Graduate certificate is a well known, well understood, and legally recognized term. Such programs have been used in the past as a way for someone from a discipline to gain extra skills and knowledge to work in a specialization. A Graduate Certificate in Australian Migration Law is one path to registration as a migration agent. A certificate in cyber security is useful for an IT professionals to work in security. It can also be an entry point to further studies. As an example, I undertook a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, to help me learn to teach, and to then go on to a Masters of Educaiton.

Graduate certificates are a low risk, low cost, well understood option for universities to provide. The students are more mature than undergraduates, so are easier to teach. The course materials and classes can be shared with graduate diploma and masters programs.

Legality and Acceptance of Undergraduate Certificates

While graduate certificates are well known, as Andrew Norton points out ‘undergraduate certificates’ are not currently recognized in the Australian education system. If a private for-profit educational institution was to offer such a qualifcaiton, they could expect legal action from regulators. However, public universities are offering these with the blessing of government, with legal status to be conferred retrospectively.

While legal status may not be a major problem, industry acceptance and pedagogy may, with undergraduate certificates. It is likely that the certificates will have been created in the same way as graduate certificates, from components of longer diplomas and bachelor programs. As an example, UWS with its Undergraduate Certificate in Information and Communication Technology offers the possibility of credit towards a degree, and presumably the certificate is built from that degree. However, unlike graduate students, these undergraduate students may be new to university study, as well as to online study. It takes time for a young person (the minimum age is 17 years) to get used to study at university, as well as life in general.

While the undergraduate certificates are being offered as standalone qualifications, I suggest they would be better as the first part of a nested qualification. That is, it would be assumed the student was intending to go on to undertake a diploma, and from there a degree. Ideally this would allow for blended learning. That is the student would undertake some study online and some on campus. My rule of thumb is that a typical student would be on campus for 20% of their study, about one day a week (obviously where COVID-19 restrictions allow).

Do We Need Undergraduate Certificates When We Have VET Ones?

While graduate certificates have been accepted as a qualification for particular roles, undergraduate certificates have not. The Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector already has a well established set of qualifications for jobs in the fields the undergraduate certificates are being offered in. These VET  qualifications have been recognized in laws, and in industry hiring practices. The VET sector is experienced in turning out students who are ready with practical skills needed for a very specific workplace role. However, universities have focused on much longer programs and more general higher level skills. In some cases universities have formed partnerships with VET institutions (or have VET arms), where the student does enough training in VET sector to get a job, then then transitions to university for a degree. It is not clear there is really a need for vocationally useful undergraduate certificates, or than Australia's universities are equipped to provide them.

There is also a lack of alignment between VET sector and university qualifications. As an example, to be able to teach in the VET sector, I was required to complete a Certificate IV in Training and Assessment. This was despite already having a Graduate Certificate in the field of education. In practice I was able to obtain 80% of the VET certificate based on my university experience and education. Even so this took months of elapsed time and payment of additional fees.

Will Universities Value They Own Certificates?

Within the VET system qualifications are mutually recognized, but this does not apply between VET and university, between or within universities. A student who has completed a unit of study at a public or private VET institution has that automatically accepted at any other for credit. However, the UWS Undergraduate Certificate in IC&T "may be credited towards the degree". In this case the university is not guaranteeing to recognize its own certificate for further study, let alone one from another university. If the undergraduate certificates are to continue beyond the next six months, I suggest the government make funding conditional on universities accepting their own certificates, and those from other universities, for advanced standing.

Need Part Time Certificates

I suggest government allow certificates, undergraduate and graduate, to be part time.

The certificates offered under the government COVID-19 funding are all full time. This makes sense as a short term emergency measure. The nation needs health and other workers quickly to deal with the pandemic. It is also a way to keep young people occupied while forced to remain at home. It provides them with a qualification to get a job much quicker than a degree. However, undertaking full time study online is very difficult, especially for a young inexperienced student. Adding to that isolation due to COVID-19 greatly increases the difficulty, and the risk of mental health issues.

It has been common practice for Graduate Certificates to be offered part time. This is useful for working professionals, who cannot take six months off work to study. It is particularly useful with online study. Even so, as an online graduate student I found I could not do more than one quarter of a full time course load comfortably. This was under almost ideal conditions, where I was a mature student with very good IT skills, studying with some of the world's top online educators, and already experienced in the field I was studying. The typical young undergraduate is going to have considerable difficulty studying full time.

Address the elevated mental health risk

Even with all the advantages I had as an online student, it was not the fun depicted in university advertisements: it was a frightening, painful, frustrating experience. The Australian Government ,and universities, need to address the elevated mental health risks, particularly for young people isolated at home, studying online full-time, during a pandemic.

Students are encouraged to take part in extra-curricular and co-curricular activities on campus. This can't be assumed for online students, especially not with COVID-19 measures in place. I suggest universities need to teach students how to form and maintain peer support groups online, and make this an assessed compulsory part of studies. Leaving this as something optional and voluntary, is an unacceptable risk to the health, and the lives, of students. In addition, not teaching students how to support each other will result in a higher dropout rate, and so a waste of public money.

Australian Higher Education Relief Package for COVID-19

The Hon Dan Tehan MP
Minister for Education

The Australian Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, and the Minister for Employment, Michaelia Cash,  announced a Higher Education Relief Package, in response to the COVID-19 Coronavirus, 12 April 2020. Overall the intention of the package is good, but some of the details will need considerable work. Andrew Norton has produced a very useful commentary on this, but here are some additional comments of my own.


The package envisages Australians studying online to improve their job skills, while waiting for pandemic control measures to be reduced allowing a general return to work. Areas of study mentioned are nursing, teaching, health, IT and "science". Short, online courses, from universities and private providers will be subsidized, from May for six months (initially). Strangely missing from the list of areas of study is any specific mention of engineering, or manufacturing, given the need for Australia to rapidly produce strategic products to meet the current emergency.

The announcement refers to the short courses being from "world-class universities", but presumably that is a rhetorical flourish and the intention is not to limit the program to the top half dozen Australian research universities which rank highly internationally. That would be unfortunate as it is the lower ranking regional teaching universities which have more expertise and experience with online learning in Australia. I studied how to do online learning (via online learning),  at the University of Southern Queensland, which while providing good courses and is highly regarded in that field, is not a "world class" university.

In addition, government funding for universities will be "at current levels, even if there is a fall in domestic student numbers". There is no offer of government funding to make up a shortfall in international student fees.

How the new funding for short courses will be administered is not detailed in the announcement. It should be remembered that previously about $2.2B was paid to private trainer providers for courses of dubious quality, or in some cases, not delivered at all. While "innovative micro-credentials delivered flexibly online" is a worthy goal, there are no agreed definition as to what a micro-credential is. Micro-credentials are not currently part of the Australian Qualifications Framework, and some have formal coursework, while some do not. Short courses can range from one hour's study, to about the length of a typical university unit (about 100 hours).

I have worked in this area of education for ten years, designing and delivering short online courses. I have been involved in several micro-credential projects and on professional standards bodies overseeing these, presented papers at international conferences, given evidence to a Senate inquiry, and  blogged on the topic, but I am still not sure what a micro-credential is. Or it may be that micro-credentials mean many different things to university, and vocational providers. 

I suggest universities should take a cautious approach to micro-credentials, due to the high reputational risk from over-promising. As an example, it is common for universities to offer short courses which do not count for credit towards a degree, are not aligned with the AQF, and are not specific to a job. However, a "micro-credential" is clearly intended to be a type of credential: that is a qualification. In the context of the government announcement, by issuing this qualification, the university has certified the holder has the skills needed to undertake a specific workplace task. Universities cannot use disclaimer to say the credential is not a credential, and those so qualified are not qualified.

One way I suggest universities can navigate this legal and ethical minefield, is to integrate short courses in existing AQF qualifications. As an example, in 2016 I set out to design a teaching course for IT professionals. Teaching is a recognized skill in the computing discipline internationally. Australian universities are accredited to provide degrees under well established national procedures. So what I proposed was to create a teaching course within that framework. This way the familiar quality controls of the university system and professions could be applied.

To make a university course into a set of "micro-credentials" I proposed dividing it into three or four parts, with each part aligned with a set of externally defined skills. A student would receive a micro-credential for completing each part. Those who completed all the micro-credentials would receive one course credit towards a degree.

None of this will be new to the vocational education sector, which has been routinely producing nationally standardized job relevant short courses for decades. However, this is a new skill for many university educators (some of us are dual qualified in by VET and university sectors).

Adjusting to the Australian Qualifications Framework

The Australian Qualifications Framework (AFQ) has set standards for Australian higher education qualifications, which is a good thing. But this requires some adjustments by universities. One issue is how much teaching of research methods there is for honors students. There is a "AQF specification for the Bachelor Honours Degree", however honors is a hybrid between undergraduate and postgraduate. Honors is an extra year on a Bachelor degree, "to qualify individuals who apply a body of knowledge in a specific context to undertake professional work and as a pathway for research". Amongst the difficult questions this raises is how much about research do the students need to know and how they gain these skills. With just a year there is not a lot of time for formal research methods courses and then to "... plan and execute project work and/or a piece of research and scholarship with some independence".

What is a doctoral degree?

The European Quality Link (EQUAL) has issued a position paper to clarify what is required for a doctoral degree in management. This is due to concern that Masters level qualifications were being issued using the title "Doctor" or an abbreviation which could be confused with it. The policy also emphasises research, but does not specify how much of the three year degree this is to take up.

The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) has two forms of Doctoral Degree at its highest level: Doctoral Degree (Research) and Doctoral Degree (Professional). Both forms require research, but while this makes up at least two-thirds of the research degree, it is unspecified for the professional degree.

The title "Doctor" is used for both Research and Professional Doctoral Degrees. But the AQF Qualification Issuance Policy also allows the title "Doctor" to be used for Masters Degrees in medicine, physiotherapy, dentistry, optometry and veterinary practice (the people the general public normally think of as "Doctors").