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Since new digital micro-credential technologies emerged a decade ago, there has been a rapid rise in micro-credentials in the education landscape. Much has been promised about these educational technologies, yet there is much confusion by key stakeholders in the digital micro-credential ecosystem. This confusion has led to significant efforts globally to define micro-credentials to ensure quality learning and generate beneficial impacts to learners, employers, education providers and edtech organisations.

This commentary reviews relevant literature on digital micro-credentials and other alternative credentials to determine how these educational technologies can meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to nurture lifelong learning for working learners.

Universities are being challenged to address the changing needs and uncertainty being introduced by the Fourth and Fifth Industrial Revolutions, particularly with implications for workforce upskilling and lifelong learning. To adapt, universities will need to rethink their roles and shift their institutional mindsets in how they may approach the challenges through mechanisms such as digital micro-credntials.

This paper focuses on the analysis of five policy statements about micro-credentials. While these policy statements represent a sample, there is a representation of Western education-related systems. Thus, they skew the findings towards Western education systems thinking.

Understanding how micro-credentials are being positioned within education-related systems is useful for applying the educational technologies by, for example, universities, learners and employers.

Provides an overview of how these educational technologies may provide beneficial impacts for society as it plans to adapt to economic uncertainty and change.

The commentary provides a policy context for the emerging use of micro-credential technologies to examine demands for workforce upskilling.

Knowledge differs markedly from information and data. At rock bottom, knowledge is socially constructed in discourse communities. Because knowledge is not synonymous with information, IT cannot deliver knowledge management. Since there will always be uncodified or uncodifiable knowledge content and contexts – given the social nature of knowledge – several barriers to the creation and utilization of knowledge exist. The task of knowledge management is to identify such barriers and to overcome them.

Globalization and digitization with connectivity are fast transforming fundamental business assumptions. These two forces – more aggressive global competition and accelerating technological change, especially in information communication and Internet technologies – translate into competition that is increasingly knowledge‐based. This increasingly knowledge‐based nature of competition is driving change in how supply chains are being managed within and across firms. It also signals a demographic shift in the workforce to knowledge work whose mobile exponents demand a different type of work environment and executive leadership. There are also heightened demands from more knowledgeable customers. To manage in the knowledge economy characterized by diversity, complexity and ambiguity, firms must therefore harness the competencies of workers, suppliers and customers.

This paper argues that social contexts and social capital enable knowledge integration; that different social contexts combined with different types of social capital enable different types of knowledge integration. Four types of social contexts are distinguished based on the extent of social embeddedness and closeness of interorganizational coupling; four types of social capital are also described. Based on the diversity of knowledge streams, the extent of tacitness of knowledge to be exchanged, and value created through such exchanges, four modes of knowledge integration are identified, namely frontier, incremental, combinative, and instrumental. This paper provides new insights about the processes of interorganizational transfer of knowledge: the unique combination of a specific social context with a specific type of social capital means firms can achieve equally effective yet highly differentiated approaches to different modes of knowledge integration.

This article reviews emergent global trends in intellectual property protection and identifies patenting as a strategic initiative. Recent developments in software and method‐of‐doing‐business patenting are fast transforming the e‐business landscape. The article discusses the emergent global regulatory framework concerning intellectual property rights and the strategic value of patenting. Important features of a corporate patenting portfolio are described.

The purpose of this paper is to identify types of professionalization in Swiss national sport federations (NSFs) and analyze organizational characteristics associated with specific types of professionalization. Such types reveal common patterns among the increasingly complex organizational designs of NSFs and thus contribute to the understanding of professionalization in NSFs.

An online survey of all Swiss NSFs was conducted to identify types of professionalization in these organizations using hierarchical cluster analysis, based on a multi-dimensional framework of professionalization.

The analysis revealed four types of professionalization: formalized NSFs managed by paid staff, NSFs managed by volunteers and a few paid staff off the field, NSFs with differing formalization and paid staff on the field, and moderately formalized NSFs managed by volunteers. The types differ in terms of the NSFs’ organizational characteristics, in particular, size, financial resources, Olympic status, and performance.

Applying factor and cluster analysis is a new approach to analyzing professionalization in NSFs that makes uncovering distinctive organizational patterns among a large number of NSFs possible. These results lay the foundation for understanding the professionalization of NSFs, counseling NSFs on their organizational development, and conducting future research on the design types of sport organizations.

This paper aims to present a new master’s programme for promoting energy access and energy efficiency in Southern Africa.

A transdisciplinary approach called “participatory integrated assessment of energy systems” (PARTICIPIA) was used for the development of the curriculum. This approach is based on the two emerging fields of “multi-scale integrated assessment” and “science for governance”, which bring innovative concepts and methods.

The application of the PARTICIPIA methodology to three case studies reveals that the proposed transdisciplinary approach could support energy and development policies in the region. The implementation of the PARTICIPIA curriculum in three higher education institutions reveals its ability to respond to the needs of specific contexts and its connection with existing higher education programmes.

Considering energy issues from a transdisciplinary approach in higher education is absolutely critical because such a holistic view cannot be achieved through engineering curricula. Deliberate and greater efforts should be made to integrate methods from “multi-scale integrated assessment” and “science for governance” in higher education curricula to train a new breed of modern-day energy planners in charge of coming up with solutions that are shared by all relevant stakeholders.

This paper presents an innovative higher education curriculum in terms of the attention given to energy access and energy efficiency that affect the southern Africa region and the nature of the methodology adopted to face these issues.

Several countries in South Asia face the challenge of ineffective educational reforms manifest in increasing rates of school failure and poor learning outcomes after embarking along education for all. Critical voices from the South have questioned the relevance and appropriateness of ideas that have shaped these reforms. Narratives from the region tell us that importation of educational concepts and policy orientations have led to the dismantling of existing structures and processes of education, creating new forms of inequities and disadvantage. The sheer scale and diversity of populations within the region poses formidable challenges and opportunities for contextual innovation. The construction of national imaginaries in the diverse societies of South Asia has the potential to provide new discourses to educational reform; going beyond the abstract goals set by disconnected international experts and the institutional processes they represent. This chapter deliberates on the need to establish a persuasive critical perspective that can influence and shape the trajectories of policy and practice, research and theorization, within the field of comparative education in South Asia, and the global south.

Vocational education and training (VET) in Australia has for some time been driven by an agenda of “reasonable adjustment”, in which practices are modified to ensure equitable access and participation by disadvantaged students. However, the growing marketization of VET has instead encouraged the use of more flexible approaches to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds. They have thus paralleled and confounded reasonable adjustment practices for inclusive development. This study sought to identify the moral dilemmas experienced by VET teachers arising from implementing reasonable adjustment practices.

This phenomenological research project used in-depth conversational interviews with 19 experienced VET teachers from a diversity of teaching fields to identify moral dilemmas experienced as arising from changes in their workplace contexts.

One of the identified dilemmas was responding flexibly to heightened student diversity, to which study participants largely responded by prioritising the economic imperative over social inclusion. Well-intended actions thus led to unintentionally damaging outcomes, raising important ethical questions about the relative value of economic and social development outcomes and the role of reasonable adjustment in their attainment. The study also highlights the lack of appropriate VET teacher training in managing ethical conflicts to minimise risks to themselves and their employing organizations.

As a case study of inclusive development policies in practice, this research may be seen as a cautionary tale for inclusive development policies in other countries with similarly strong VET economic and socially inclusive development policies for sustainability. The paper thus opens a dialogue for critical reflection on the current problems in a reasonable development approach in the field of comparative and international education. Those two parallel agendas have presented VET teachers and trainers with ethically challenging situations in which the economic and social development imperatives are experienced as being conflict with each other.