While career and technical schools have offered short-term credential programs for decades, a proliferation of digital badges, bootcamps, and other micro-credentials have recently emerged. A 2021 Credential Engine report identified nearly 550,000 short-term credentials offered by “non-academic” organizations in the United States. How individual states envision their regulatory role in this space remains understudied. Our study focuses on insights gleaned from semi-structured interviews with leaders from 14 organizations, including state authorization agencies, public higher education system offices, and private educational providers. We highlight shared challenges in the authorization process, including budget and resources; institutional responsiveness and knowledge of the process; self-reported data; and infrastructure limitations. We then discuss four emerging themes in the short-term credential landscape, including the need for clear credential quality criteria; balancing state regulation with providers’ autonomy; the tension between viewing short-term credentials as businesses or colleges; and the disruption and opportunities COVID-19 presents to the industry.

This chapter examines the origins and the future role of digitally induced shared learning and, in this context, of micro-credentials as a currency towards earning a degree qualification, possibly in combination with the flexibility where to seek the qualification. We argue that the general trend towards the deinstitutionalization of tertiary education, to be understood as the unbundling and re-bundling of educational services, will help to make digitally based micro-credentials fungible by taking advantage of the so far reluctantly utilized degrees of freedom for accreditation and assessment more liberally. The COVID pandemic is encouraging a merger of the world of theoretically face-to-face programmes, now delivered virtually, and the world of MOOCs and micro-credentials. It will ultimately change the underlying economics of shared learning and will thereby help to make it a core feature of a much more accessible higher education.