Preparing Lifelong Learners for a Diversifying Economy Through Micro-Credentials and Laddering at Athabasca University
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Learners need relevant and transformative skills to adapt to a world of increasing change and complexity. It is important to provide diverse opportunities to support lifelong learning. In response to the Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs report and Alberta’s Recovery Plan to the Covid-19 pandemic, PowerED™ by Athabasca University, Ethically Aligned AI, and Athabasca University’s Faculty of Science and Technology developed three online, on-demand micro-credentials. The three micro-credentials, Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, Innovative and Diversified Energy Resources, and Energy Efficiency in Architecture Engineering (AEC) and Construction Industry, were funded by the Government of Alberta to provide job-ready skills in priority areas. Athabasca University’s PowerED unit is designing and developing these three micro-credentials in partnership with Athabasca University faculty and subject matter experts. PowerED™ is Athabasca University’s award-winning continuing education unit that provides an on-demand approach to the online learning experience which includes a mix of multi-media (videos, podcasts) interactive tools, case studies, gamification, competency assessment, downloadable materials, and AI simulations for immediate assessment. The micro-credentials are being designed to be flexible and can be accessed from any device that connects to the internet. Each micro-credential is made up of a set of modules and learners can combine different micro-credentials to develop specific competencies to focus on specific skill development requirements. Modules are being designed so that in the future, individual modules can be re-packaged into unique micro-credential offerings. In completing these micro-credentials, learners will be able to obtain relevant skills in key areas of employment. These micro-credentials will ladder into the BSc programs at Athabasca University, creating additional opportunities to continue learning in a flexible and accessible way. To facilitate this, we are developing a micro-credential framework at the institutional level that will also align with future frameworks in Alberta and Canada.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it