Transforming CS Curricula into EU-Standardized Micro-Credentials

Micro-credentials are a way to integrate flexible learning pathways into the classic forms of education defined in the European Qualification Framework (EQF). They allow members of the workforce to get necessary skills described, certified, and recognized in a transparent and portable way. One way for universities to enter this market for lifelong learning is to convert existing study programs into smaller units, namely, micro-credentials. This process of converting a study program consisting of modules into small, independent pieces is called unbundling. When unbundling a program, the existing modules have to be converted to a standard EU-wide recognizable form. In this paper, we will describe the process we used to convert modules from our study program at DHBW. The first step converts the skill descriptions into a standard form. Since there is no common accepted formal standard, we use the Dublin descriptors as a way to structure the skills on the different abstraction levels, and ESCO-terms as a widely used standardized vocabulary. The second step breaks down modules of 3-12 ECTS into smaller constituents (each ECTS corresponds to a workload of around 30 hours). Typical micro-credentials have a size of 1 to 3 ECTS, a group or stack of micro-credentials corresponds to one module. Keywords: micro-credentials, curriculum design, internationalization, computer science, learning outcomes, standardization