Publications – Page 4 – Digital Learning Dispatches

Our NIDL team has a strong commitment to Open Educational Practices (OEP), which extends to quite tangible support for Open Scholarship. Not only do colleagues intentionally publish their work in open access publications, such as this recent article by Eamon Costello, Tiziana Soverono and Prajakta Girme presenting ‘A Postdigital Fable‘, but they also play lead editorial roles in several journals.

The Journal is growing from strength to strength and is now a leading Q1 internationally ranked publication in the field of Educational Technology

In particular, the NIDL has a strategic investment as a formal Editorial Partner in the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education (ETHE), which is published by Springer. As an Editorial Partner our support helps to ensure that ETHE remains freely available to educators and researchers.

Therefore, we are delighted to report that the ETHE has consolidated its status as the leading open access publication in the field, as borne out by altmetrics, leading indexes and its social impact. The traditional impact indexes have shown how, for the second year running, ETHE has climbed further up the rankings of academic publications in the field of Education.

In just one year, ETHE has moved from 27th position to 18th (out of a total of 264 journals) in the Journal Citations Reports (JCR) Core Collection for education.

It has also significantly boosted its journal impact factor (JIF), increasing from 3.080 in 2019 to 4.944 in 2020 (first quartile, Q1).

In Scopus, another leading database of international scientific publications, ETHE has moved up from 41st to 11th place (out of a total of 1,531), obtained a CiteScore of 9.2 for 2020 (in 2019 it was 5.6) and entered Q1 of the education and computer science categories.

Beyond these traditional measures, another indicator is how the education community perceives the value and quality of the Journal, and we can report that in 2020 ETHE received almost 1,300 articles, 62% more than in the previous year.

This year the total submissions to September stands at 950, reports Josep M. Duart, Co-Editor-in-Chief from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).

Altmetrics are another set of indicators that measure and analyse social interaction through the number of times an article is downloaded, its presence in bibliographic managers such as Mendeley, its mentions on social media such as Twitter and Facebook, its appearances in newspapers and blogs, etc. They measure the impact of research by quantifying its presence on the social web. There is clear evidence of how ETHE is also showing growth and achieving high impact levels in altmetrics. For example, in 2020, the journal obtained 2,493 altmetric mentions on social media and its articles were downloaded 1,093,680 times.

The Journal has a truly international outreach. In 2020, for example, 186 authors from 34 different countries published their work in ETHE.

A key element to ensure the variety, quality and internationalisation of the Journal’s subject matter is its team of more than 500 peer reviewers. The editorial team and advisory board is also made up of researchers and scholars from all of the world’s continents and regions. The Editorial Board is currently made up of 53 researchers from 27 countries, and balanced in terms of gender too.

*‘ETHE’, an open access academic journal formally supported by the NIDL, has consolidated its position as a world leading publication in the field of Educational Technology.*

The Journal’s team of Co-Editors-in-Chief is made up of Mairéad Nic Giolla Mhichíl, from the NIDL, Álvaro Galvis, from Colombia’s University of the Andes, Airina Volungevičienė, from Lithuania’s Vytautas Magnus University, and Josep M. Duart, from the UOC. Under the team’s leadership, ETHE publishes regular thematic issues with a timely collection in 2019 for example on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on higher education. Professor Nic Giolla Mhichíl is currently leading a forthcoming special issue on the burgeoning topic of micro-credentials with guest co-editors Mark Brown and Beverley Oliver.

You can read more about the history of ETHE beginning in 2004 on the Journal’s website.

Last week, Google announced 1,000 scholarships for Dublin job seekers through a partnership with Coursera. The opportunity this initiative provides to complete a range of short online courses and earn certificates in IT, data analytics, project management and UX design is part of an increasing global trend towards alternative credentials.

These credentials, often referred to as micro-credentials, are claimed by their proponents to more flexible and responsive to current employment needs than traditional university qualifications.

While the currency of these short awards and certificates may not yet rival the value of a full degree, and debate continues over where they fit in the credential ecology, the Madrid Micro-credential Statement arising from last month’s EDEN Conference observed that alternative credentials appear to be the next big thing! There is growing expectancy over the role micro-credentials may play in the future. For instance, a recent global survey of 320 higher education leaders conducted by HolonIQ reports that:

“Over 85% of institutions see alternative and micro-credentials as an important strategy for their future.”

A similar level of expectancy was apparent from participant responses shown below to a poll conducted earlier in the year as part of the course Higher Education 4:0: Certifying your Future.

Given the claims and promises of micro-credentials, it is not surprising that discussions on their role and relationship to traditional macro-credentials are progressing rapidly at national, European, and indeed global levels. Importantly, last year, the European Commission (2020) published a major report proposing a common European-wide definition. However, there are many questions that need to be considered in current discussions, as outlined in the above mentioned Madrid Micro-credential Statement, including:

What are the problems that micro-credentials are trying to solve?
Who do micro-credentials serve?
How do you develop and implement micro-credentials?
What problems stand in the way of micro-credentials reaching general acceptance?
Will micro-credentials live up to the promise they offer?

Currently, several members of the NIDL team are busy undertaking a comprehensive review of the international literature on micro-credentials to help answer some of these questions as part of a wider project for the European Commission. While this literature review is intended to inform the current European policy context the pertinent question, however, at an individual or organisational level is…

What do you think?

Whether a learner, educator, employee, employer, institution or policy-maker, you have a stake in shaping the future of further and higher education. And as highlighted in a recently published report by Skillnet Ireland, A Micro-credential Roadmap: Currency, Cohesion and Consistency, micro-credentials will only work as intended to help close skill gaps and increase participation in lifelong learning when everyone comes to the table. As Nic Giolla Mhichíl et al. (2020) write:

“There is a risk of the transformative potential of Micro-credentials being diminished if the full range of stakeholders do not participate actively in discussion” (p.9).

How can you get involved?

The European Commission have launched a public consultation process to collect the views of individuals and stakeholders on a European-wide approach to micro-credentials for life-long learning and employability. This is your opportunity to share your views on the proposed definition and the most important aspects of micro-credentials to you. This consultation process will remain open until 13th July 2021 so don’t miss your opportunity to contribute to the discussion.

On a related note, the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education has opened an avenue for deeper scholarly discussion and knowledge-sharing through its special issue focusing on micro-credentials. This open access Journal, now ranked 18th out of 263 Education journals in the latest Impact Factor results published last week, is providing an opportunity to consider the “next new normal” for digitally-enhanced and -enabled learning in higher education systems. In particular, the Journal is seeking papers that critically and analytically examine the role of micro-credentials in higher education.

You can read more about this special issue and how to submit a manuscript on the journal website, with a submission deadline of 31st July 2021.

Lastly, please note that the NIDL Micro-credential Observatory provides a comprehensive collection of research, major reports and policy-related literature on micro-credentials. Make sure you take a look at the resources available through this site when preparing your journal submission or response to the public consultation process.