Chapter 1: Introducing Multidisciplinary Micro-credentialing: Rethinking Learning and Development for Higher Education and Industry

This book is neither introduction to Multidisciplinary Micro-credentialing (MdMc) nor about its increasing vitality in the current Higher Education (HE) Learning and Development (L&D) space. Unlike an introduction, introducing is about assessing potential problems, evaluating options, and planning accordingly. Negotiated through a systematic review of current credentialing models, Introducing MdMc offers an Md structure to Mc to propose a HE-industry manifesto. By introducing MdMc, we hope that industry and HE could forge a practical methodology to respond faster and better each time without reinventing the credentialing wheel. Multidisciplinarity presented in this book is a safe route to avoid discipline-based divergences that often manifest in cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary discourses that perhaps have the potential to halt possible collaborations. Multidisciplinarity presented in this book embraces a much simpler attitude to acknowledge discipline boundaries while recognising potential proximities of disciplines to merge and cross borders. Hence, this is an Md response to rethink HE in the absence of systematic approaches to bring diverse discipline groups together to communicate effectively. In a historically volatile transition point of HE, it discourses exemplary examples with daring acts of innovation in order to build a methodology that could easily be adaptable to elevate alternative credentialing models and modes. Even though a significant body of scholarship substantiates the advantages of crossbreeds between humanities and social sciences with engineering and technology, there is not much evidence on how learning content and learning perspectives could crossbreed into a holistic, transdisciplinary learning experience (Exter et al., n.d.). Also, a pulse check on discipline degrees for their changed status quo is vital to ensure sustainable futures for stakeholders in all HE sectors. Due to inherent inhabitations of discipline based HE on MdMc, communication among stakeholders becomes challenging, with a reduced sense of self-sufficiency and, thus, course crossbreed lags. Consequently, credentialing initiatives hardly progress through further testing. Hence, MdMc aims to establish a HE-industry framework to augment new knowledge hybrids where disciplines could identify adaptable Md links and intersections towards self-sufficiency for learners in various learning cycles and phases.