The federal Australian budget included $26.1 million for 5000 short-course places for domestic students at non-university higher education providers. The funding aims to help private providers, struggling with the loss of international student enrolments, to change their business models and serve more domestic students. A spokesman for the federal Department of Education said the short courses were undergraduate certificates or graduate certificates, regulated under the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF). The short courses are a type of micro-credential. The short course is a credit-bearing micro-credential, meaning that it can be used to ‘stack’ into a full qualification at a later time.”
