2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Graduate students are looking for ways to achieve their educational goals while expanding their skills beyond the traditional classroom setting to be more competitive in the workforce. Micro-credential and digital badges have gained popularity in recent years as a way to provide competencies, knowledge and skills quickly and effectively, especially as the needs of the workforce change faster than the curriculum. In addition, there has been an increased demand for transferable skills (e.g., communication, teamwork) among employers and a growing need to possess interdisciplinary skills to meet the needs of a dynamic world and an increasingly complex society.

This paper describes the development process and the delivery of an interdisciplinary micro-credential in Food, Energy, Water Systems Analysis for credit at the graduate level open to master’s and PhD students. The interdisciplinary micro-credential consists of a one-credit, 700-level course, Intermediate Topics in Interdisciplinary Systems Analysis and a zero-credit hour, 700-level Interdisciplinary Seminar. The micro-credential is part of the MICRA project, a collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). The MICRA project brings together engineers, mathematicians, soil and agricultural scientists, and agricultural economists/social scientists to create fundamental knowledge about soil moisture retention to benefit rural communities in the water stressed Central High Plains while building STEM research capacity. Graduate students from the College of Engineering and the College of Agriculture at Kansas State University and the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln enrolled in this interdisciplinary micro-credential in fall 2025.

This paper discusses the micro-credential format, the team-teaching strategies, grading structures for the course and seminar, evaluation of students’ experience and skills, and lesson learned. The micro-credential has been designed to equip students with technical skills to understand and analyze complex systems, in particular adaptive systems that relate to food, energy, and water systems and transferable skills such as team collaboration, science communication, and systems thinking. The one-credit, 700-level course, is a graded course. The seminar is offered on a Credit/No Credit basis, and students need to complete three out of four reflection assignments to receive credit.

Students’ feedback indicates that through the micro-credential activities, they gained in their abilities to perform tasks that support technical systems analysis skills and transferable skills such as science communication and team collaboration. In addition, students found most course activities to be very useful for their skill building, in particular, faculty lectures, guest lectures, and student presentations. Finally, the structure of our interdisciplinary micro-credential can be beneficial to the development of an interdisciplinary micro-credential at the graduate level in other Higher Education Institutions.