2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Micro-credentials are digital certifications that verify an individual’s competence in a specific skill or set of skills, showing the promise of serving as a powerful tool for personalized professional development in PK-12 education. In response to the urgent nationwide demands for integrating AI into K-12 education, micro-credentials can be an alternative option to engage K-12 educators in developing competence and readiness for understanding, evaluating, and integrating AI in their own courses. This proposal showcased an interdisciplinary initiative of creating a stack of AI micro-credentials for K-12 educators in a southeastern state of the United States, following an evidence-based approach. An interdisciplinary team, including educational scholars and practitioners, K-12 educators, and AI specialists, developed a stack of micro-credentials focused on human-centered, ethical integration of AI in K-12 education. Each micro-credential included a key method for learning and demonstration of mastery, method components with required activities, empirical evidence that shows mastering the competency benefits teaching and learning, and resources to support or extend learning. Explicit rubrics on determining K-12 educators’ mastery of competence were provided as references. The proposal will also discuss the motivating context and the implementation of the initiatives in detail and propose recommendations for future endeavors of integrating micro-credentials to support teacher professional development in AI education.