By Michael Simmons, Ph.D.,
Assistant Vice President, Academic Affairs, Curricular Innovation and Academic Partnerships, University of North Texas System
I believe many ideas start on napkins and scrap paper. Most people have napkins or post-it notes or pieces of paper around your office that represent your ideas. The image you see below is our original napkin sketch of the UNT Career Connect project. The sketch conceptualizes various elements of the university experiences that ideally result in well-educated and career ready students. Fortunately for us, the University of North Texas bought into this napkin concept and we were able to evolve into what is known as Career Connect.
The problem we are attempting to solve is the lack of connection many students make among and between their experiences at the university. We believe if we can figure out a way to help students make these important connections it will lead to greater success for them, and for the institution. Fortunately, that is exactly what we are seeing as we enter the fifth year of the work.
So, what does this have to do with the wonderful work of NASH and the TS3? Connect is based on the framework high impact practices (HIPs). As students progress through both traditional and non-traditional learning experiences during their coursework, they are continually demonstrating learning and attainment of skills that accumulate over time. Several decades of solid research show that learning and skill attainment are more likely to occur in HIPs experiences. On that assumption, we have built a system based on assessed student learning outcomes in HIPs that are the basis for the university-issued marketable skills digital micro-credentials, which are then reflected in their Connect comprehensive learner record (CLR). We build the record on the premise that students are experiencing multiple HIPs with our faculty and staff which, when collected and connected, help students make sense of their entire experience in terms of what they have learned and the marketable skills they’ve attained.
While this CLR will be of value to employers, our primary focus remains on signaling to students. Connect’s dashboard feature on the CLR allows each student to view specific skills they attained and demonstrated throughout their learning experiences. It is, in effect, a HIPs dashboard. These insights help learners visualize their learning journey. Students may also securely share these independently verifiable achievement records with other students, members of their learning community, and prospective employers. The university also gains real-time analytics, showcasing how students are progressing through coursework and developing marketable skills. These micro-credentials then ‘stack’ (or scaffold) in various combinations that can result in overall UNT marketable skills or degree competency ‘credentials’ on the CLR. In other words, we have created a scaled, systematic approach to documenting HIPs and their outcomes.
At the end of the spring 2021 semester, UNT expects to have issued over 80,000 of these micro-credentials, the vast majority of which are related to HIPs. We also have promising research findings which indicate positive impacts of UNT HIPs for all students, but especially those students who fall into various at-risk groups. By doing this we are steadily achieving the Career Connect mission to help students collect, connect, reflect, and showcase important marketable skills, support faculty and staff who create or enhance experiential and high impact teaching experiences, and build and maintain the UNT Comprehensive Learner Record to document and showcase student achievement.
For a more detailed perspective on the work, please see https://evolllution.com/programming/credentials/leveraging-credential-innovation-to-drive-meaningful-pathways-to-degrees-and-careers
For more information about UNT Career Connect please see our website at https://vpaa.unt.edu/careerconnect.