What UK universities need to do differently to succeed with online microcredentials
Photo by Ralph Hutter on Unsplash
Microcredentials, oh microcredentials, should it be one word, hyphenated, or two separate words? There’s a certain irony in the fact that the naming convention is as inconsistent as the application of this label to course products. If you look across the HE landscape and observe what tends to get labelled as a microcredential, it can sometimes feel as disconcertingly vague as “meat curry”. However, in spite of their identity crisis, microcredentials are much discussed and frequently feature in HE news and debate. If there were a HE press equivalent of the Daily Mail headline generator, microcredentials would certainly feature. My contributions to that would be: “University researchers publish new framework to define existing microcredential frameworks” and “New survey finds 97% of employers say they value microcredentials, when asked in surveys about microcredentials”.
All jokes aside, in the past couple of years I have witnessed much greater interest in developing and improving what I tend to call online sub-degree offerings. This is my catch-all term for describing the range of shorter course products that are less costly and involve less commitment than a degree. In general terms, I see the main drivers of increased attention from UK universities as being income diversification and alignment with a growing narrative about the need for shorter, targeted, and more affordable forms of professional development and upskilling. There is also, of course, another lingering factor, the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), currently due to launch in September 2026 and intended to enable module/course-level funding. Although only if I managed to acquire a souped-up DeLorean would I be confident we’ll actually see it then, if at all.
There’s been a lot of hype surrounding microcredentials, and talk of them as the next big thing has been prevalent for years. However, it is always worth acknowledging that UK universities have offered shorter forms of provision, whether credit-bearing or non-credit bearing, for many years. We may not have been using the term ‘microcredential’, but there is a long tradition of offering shorter forms of provision, and the UK higher education sector has reported annual revenue in the hundreds of millions for continuing professional development (CPD) and continuing education (CE) provision for at least ten years. The last twenty years have also seen an overwhelming array of opportunities to take shorter online courses, offered by individual professionals, freelancers, SMEs and large online course platforms.
Whether you believe that a fundamental revolution is under way in terms of smaller forms of provision taken across one’s lifetime, or that moving to this model is a future imperative for universities and the HE sector, the fact is there is definitely more appetite and interest in developing shorter forms of online provision. However, UK universities face a number of challenges in doing that effectively, and overcoming these challenges will require different capabilities, investment, and change.
Here are just a select few changes I think UK universities will have to make if they want to develop successful and sustainable online sub-degree and microcredential provision.
Making course titles easier to find and understand
There is a certain degree of uniformity when it comes to degrees. Although there is some variety, each subject area tends to have a set of similar and consistent titles that have become established over time. That consistency makes the course discovery process easier for prospective students, enabling comparison and guiding their search. However, for shorter forms of provision, such consistency does not exist in the same way, and so more effort is needed in naming courses that align with what prospective students are looking for, particularly given that this type of provision is unlikely to be easily aggregated into a central conduit like UCAS, and instead must be discoverable through applicants’ own research.
The naming of a course might seem like a minor point, but given the greater challenges involved in making these courses visible to prospective students, it is a key part of offering this form of provision. Unfortunately, course titles are too often governed by how those behind them want to describe their course, rather than being shaped by what students are searching for and the value proposition to them. Part of the reason for this is the lack of involvement from marketing professionals in the course development process, an important change to consider when developing online sub-degree courses that aim to successfully reach and recruit students.
Running short courses on a predictable schedule
Even for universities that already offer shorter forms of provision, this type of provision often sits a couple of rungs down the list of course priorities. The result is that much of what is on offer, to put it politely, suffers from scheduling optimisation issues. What I’m referring to here is the vast array of courses that seem to run only when a university feels like it, or are offered on the basis that there must be a significant level of expressed interest before the university fires up the engines and actually runs the course.
Courses that are contingent on a build-up of expressions of interest are problematic in and of themselves. But for universities to build financially viable and sustainable shorter forms of provision, they need to run regularly and be both planned and scheduled in advance, so this can be clearly communicated to prospective students. This might seem the most basic thing to many, but there are numerous examples of courses listed on university websites that lack any clarity about whether they are still running, when they might run, or how often they are offered.
This was a fundamental problem with UK universities’ engagement with MOOCs during the 2010s. It was often staggering to see the high percentage of university MOOCs that were not actually available to prospective students via the main MOOC platforms. This is hugely problematic if you’re running a commercial online course business, where learners expect to be able to go to a platform, search, and either enrol or at least know when they can enrol. It is arguably even more problematic if you’ve invested the cost, time and effort to develop a course and are largely operating with public funds that should be stewarded responsibly.
One of the core financial viability challenges of online sub-degree provision is the tight margins associated with lower-cost course products, which can still incur significant marketing, development, and delivery costs. If you’re not set up to offer courses on a regular or predictable basis, these challenges will only be exacerbated.
Improving course pages to support discovery and enrolment
Another related challenge is the need for universities to improve and become far more dynamic with course product pages on their websites. Overall, UK universities need to raise their game significantly when it comes to using their websites as product marketing and recruitment tools, but shorter forms of provision are often where I witness the most neglect and the most egregious examples. Some university short course webpages are among the best examples you’ll find anywhere on the internet of pages most likely to achieve a 100% bounce rate.
There are countless poor examples of course pages that lack the fundamental information needed to support a decision. The list of commonly missing details includes pricing, start dates, time commitment, duration, curriculum content, and eligibility criteria, to name just a few. There are also frequent instances of ambiguity around course modality, and the absence of a consistent design system or agreed terminology often results in a confusing and inconsistently applied set of labels.
These are simply the basics, yet they are often overlooked. One reason is the lack of professional resource to carry out this work effectively, and/or a lack of institutional culture that recognises its importance. This leads to another key point, the need to invest in the roles required to market these types of courses across different channels, not least via course product pages on the university website. That means investing in skilled professional staff to do this work, rather than relying solely on academics to populate course pages, who are unlikely to have the skillset to do so effectively. More broadly, universities need to develop far stronger product marketing capabilities, as their marketing efforts have historically focused on promoting the university brand and the location or campus-based experience.
So far, I’ve only covered the very basics of a course product listing, but for some the bar is set low. There are additional areas to consider, such as SEO, but some universities need to walk before they can run. Nevertheless, if universities want to offer financially sustainable online sub-degree courses, their web presence and presence on other channels will need to be vastly improved, and the work that underpins it will need to be more dynamic, sufficiently resourced, and significantly enhanced.
What this all means for universities
There is much more to say about the changes UK universities need to make to develop an effective and financially sustainable online sub-degree portfolio, but these are just a few areas that stand out. As with online education more generally, universities need to be brutally honest with themselves about their weaknesses and the need for change. Success in one form of provision does not automatically translate to others, and simply having functions such as marketing does not mean the necessary capabilities exist by virtue of job roles alone.
I’ve often cited universities’ engagement with MOOCs as an example of the clear capability gap when it comes to developing financially sustainable, market- and learning-oriented course products. While universities can point to a range of benefits from their involvement with MOOCs, income generation was not one of them.
Budgets are now tighter and the need for income generation greater, coinciding with increased appetite to develop new, shorter forms of online provision. Universities need to go into this with their eyes open and set themselves up for success. For some, there are relatively simple ways to make initial improvements, but this requires greater prioritisation of courses that are all too often tucked away in forgotten corners of the website, which, in one sense, tells you everything you need to know.
