New Partnership to Bring “Micro-Pathways” to Arkansas Community Colleges
Stephanie Tully-Dartez, president of South Arkansas College, says leaders at her institution have been talking about creating robust microcredential programs for a long time. But they never had the resources to get them off the ground.
“On the credit side, we had a few Microsoft credentials and things like that,” Tully-Dartez says. “But the microcredentialing and badging and the workforce development through that, we just couldn’t quite get across the threshold.”
That changed when the college joined a partnership with the Education Design Lab and seven other community colleges in the state to build what the nonprofit calls “micro-pathways”—stackable credentials that can be earned in a year or less and get students into high-demand careers faster. The idea is that the credentials can be counted toward degrees as well, creating an “on-ramp” to more higher education down the line.
