The topics of credit transfer between academic programmes and Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) before studying a new programme have a growing literature, the more so with the recent explosive growth of interest in microcredentials – however, few of the many papers on the topics focus on the situation for postgraduate programmes. Yet the development of modular masters courses goes back over over 25 years in the UK – maybe more in other countries.
In consequence, this report on “Credit transfer for online masters programmes” should be of considerable interest. It was commissioned by a Canadian university in 2018 under the working title of the “PLAR Benchmark Report” – where PLAR stands for “Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition”, a typical North American phrase for APL. Now it and surrounding planning documents are publicly available.
The report draws on 16 case studies of university credit transfer approaches drawn from 11 countries including UK, US, Canada, Australia, Ireland, Sweden and Netherlands. More recent research for other universities and projects does not indicate any major changes since 2018, just much more of the same.
The overall conclusion of the report is that there are many good practices in masters-level credit transfer that a university can learn from, including in the area of credit transfer from vocational qualifications into academic programmes, a particular feature of the UK – but not only the UK. However, there is a considerable lack of consistency in how such approaches are used in the various institutions – and indeed the nature and internal structure of of the “typical masters” itself is rather more complex and inconsistent across countries than many realise. This gives rise to issues of comparability and credit transfer that are likely to adversely affect the mobility (real or online) of postgraduate students between countries.
The simplistic ISCED description of level 7 as “Master’s or equivalent level” is just the beginning of a complex story.
The report is accompanied by 11 country-specific annexes. These can be found in the ResearchGate entry on the PLAR project under the tab “Related research“. They are also available via the relevant country entries on the Open Education Wiki in the Recent reports section of each country page. (See for example Australia and its Recent reports entry in Section 12.)
Opening up learning 