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Credit Accumulation (CA) and Credit Transfer (CT) are separate concepts, neither of which are new within Europe, but which have achieved prominence in recent years. This paper seeks to review the need for CA and CT systems, comment on the characteristics of good practice, and identify factors which will lead to future success.
Introduction
Despite the rich diversity of European culture a number of common factors have emerged since the 1960s affecting higher education, among which are:
- A growth in the number of adult students, many of whom are in employment and who seek a different kind of provision to students coming to higher education (HE) from secondary education.
- A consequent growth in the provision of part-time study opportunities from sources which
include HE, but also other providers.
- The emergence and importance of the knowledge based industries.
- The consequent need for professionals to update existing learning and acquire new skills.
- demographic decline in the post secondary school population.
- realisation of the importance of human resource development.
These factors point to the importance of life long learning, the need for 'mass' HE and for the acceptance that learning will occur in many ways besides those of a formal campus based HE course, such as through professional training, competence in the workplace, home based activity and distance education. This was recognised by the CEC Memorandum on Higher Education in the European Community which called for closer integration between distance education and the total structure as a key to development.
Such integration inevitably implies some form of credit tariff system by which students can design programmes of education which may be built on during their lifetimes from a number of sources, some of which will be known in advance, and others which will arise as career and other objectives evolve with changing economic and social circumstances. Such a tariff also represents a means by which educational providers can describe their courses more effectively to potential students who will choose from a range of study options. Such student empowerment can reduce the need for complex administrative systems and provide students with the information upon which to base their own decisions rather than needing resource intensive academic advice. Thus a credit system constitutes a common educational language by which learning outcomes can be compared and quantified by providers and students alike.
It is important to note that CA and CT are not ends in themselves, but 'tools' by which academic objectives can be achieved more effectively. No credit system will represent a perfect tool and so CA and CT are aids to, and no substitute for, academic judgment by academic faculty and students alike.
The Characteristics of a CA and CT Scheme
CA and CT are different but linked concepts. To obtain awards by the accumulation of credit it must be accepted academically that complete programmes of study can validly be built from self-contained units (courses or modules) which are assessed independently and combined with other units. Issues of coherence and breadth must be dealt with by specifying prerequisite knowledge for each unit. Units may be large or small in relation to the complete qualification but units larger than an academic year remove flexibility and units smaller than (say) one week are of questionable academic worth in terms of their learning outcomes.
CT implies confidence between the participating organisations delivering and receiving the learning and accurate impartial information on the units studied being available to all parties. The receiving institution must be satisfied that the quality of the previous learning is of a sufficient standard and is of a similar content and level to the new programme and provides adequate prerequisite knowledge for future study.
Whereas CA has developed rapidly in the past 20 years in both campus based and distance learning institutions, CT is in its infancy, and the opportunity to mix both modes of learning is regrettably rare. In practice most institutions restrict imported credit to a maximum of 50%, of any qualification.
For both CA and CT schemes the following characteristics must be agreed:
- Benchmarks for the assignment of credit.
- Calibrated course units held on a database.
- Levels of study.
- Performance measures.
In practice schemes have developed sporadically across Europe largely as a pragmatic response to the factors in section 1. However results have been encouraging and much appreciated by the students using the schemes. Some schemes use contact hours and others notional study time, in particular the academic year, as their benchmark. Systems of grading vary also across Europe. There is a temptation to attach too much significance to the credit tariff tool and it must not be forgotten that it is a fairly 'blunt instrument' as yet. Thus real comparisons of grading beyond Fail, Pass and Distinction probably mean little. Similarly levels beyond those necessary to indicate progression of understanding and knowledge or mark the endpoint of studies are frequently included in a false attempt to achieve accuracy of calibration.
The Future
In view of the diversity of provision across Europe, the importance attached to institutional autonomy and the pragmatic evolution of both CA and CT in the author's view there is little prospect of a common qualification system across Europe. Attempts to introduce such a system would suffer from the same problems and prejudices as the common monetary system. The way forward surely lies not in attempting to construct new pan-European qualifications which would unfavourably compete with existing national qualifications designed specifically to meet local need, nor in attempting to equate existing diplomas designed for different cultural systems; but in the calibration of the common learning outcomes which form such qualifications and are differently combined to meet local needs. A widely understood academic currency for academic credit interpreted locally would facilitate both student mobility and the mobility of learning, and the integration of both to the benefit of the student. There is every indication t
hat such a scheme would prove at least as acceptable as the Carnegie Credit Hour Scheme is in the USA.
There is likely to be stress on 3 aspects of HE:
- Continuing education
- Education in partnership with economic activity
- A European dimension
All three demand the forging of new partnerships. Continuing education challenges the concept of the integrity and coherence of the programme of studies. A recognition of learning acquired in industry throws an emphasis on competence rather than knowledge. Pan-European recognition of learning demands a common format for recording credit (a transcript) and databases listing unit credits for HE to which both academics and students must have ready access.
In practice there has been considerable increase in credit based activity in the past 10 years. Most European states have credit based activity with the USA, even if not between themselves. Some governments have fostered national schemes including Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and CA and CT schemes have been widely taken up on a voluntary basis in the United Kingdom and Eire. While the CEC target of 10% of all students achieving mobility is unlikely to [be] achieved in the current economic climate, it could be achieved if distance learning is recognized as achieving the same ends.
There is an acceptance that existing credit schemes may be crude but refinement of the tool will come with experience based on practice of that which can be agreed upon, and it is a mistake to wait for the design of a developed scheme before putting anything into practice. High profile projects such as the European Community Course Credit System (ECTS) have served to give experience and much will depend upon the rigorous evaluation of such work.
Future Issues in Europe
There is a temptation to see CA and CT as good in themselves, but no criteria have been established to measure demand and no serious study has been undertaken to assess need. With 65 million HE students already in the European Community the inevitable expansion into Eastern Europe may present serious economic and logistical problems.
In any one academic institution there will be few students associated with a particular faculty or department using CA and CT and practical ease of operation of any scheme will depend upon the extent to which faculty are prepared to learn the "language" of credit transfer and create and use data bases on courses and credit, and administrators are able to devise economic ways of handling claims for credit and issue transcripts in a common format for comparison.
Confidence will depend on the extent to which faculty retain the ownership of credit schemes and accept the judgment of their peers in other institutions.
Empowering students may not produce acceptable actions for governments or academic institutions. Already ERASMUS has demonstrated the imbalance in the flow of students into France, Germany and the UK and away from the southern European countries.
Academia is not alone in considering the benefits of credit transfer, professional institutions and transnational companies already practice a form of credit transfer (or inhibit it) by their influence on the mobility of the work force.
Apart from the obvious problems of language competence in moving between countries there may also be cultural problems. Thus for instance in many humanities courses there is an assumption of knowledge of the underlying national culture which is needed to benefit from the courses.
Credit based systems measure not only student learning but also quantify the curriculum and throw into sharp relief differences in practice between disciplines, countries and institutions. Some difficult issues arise. Do we really understand the process of HE or are our processes simply residence requirements where we hope that students may absorb knowledge by mental osmosis? Are we prepared to operate an assessment scheme which is open to student scrutiny? To what extent are we prepared to accept an outcome based approach to measuring HE? Can we develop valid assessment techniques to measure learning outcomes in the workplace or other experiential environments?
Conclusion
Among the great achievements of the 20th Century must be the progress made in travel and communication. Mobility of students and mobility of learning follow these achievements hand in hand. CA and CT systems will be demanded by our clients whether those are students, academic disciplines, professions or employers. We are now in a position to analyse the early developments of ECTS and similar national experiments and voluntarily arrive at a European CA and CT system with central principles to be interpreted locally. Any academic can invent their own system, the challenge to Europe is to develop one tool which will allow us to produce a product of quality. In doing this we must define what we mean by quality at an early stage and then ensure that quality assurance systems are developed to match our evolving credit systems.
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