As an academic practitioner and manager working in higher education, specialising in the fields of widening participation and lifelong learning, the question of what university is for is one I regularly ponder. I am reminded of it with every twist in government policy and re-alignment of funding priorities.

For me, a fundamental question relates to certification and the value it is accorded particularly in relation to non-formal and informal learning. For many people, including employers it is the award of credit and academic qualifications that signify skills and abilities and which help career development and social mobility.

But, how do we recognise the value of learning in the workplace, for example, or from professional undertakings which employers value? And how do we incorporate this into the currency of academic credentialism, especially at a time when the cost of study has increased and the opportunities for mature and part time students appear to have so dramatically declined?

Attempts to address these questions, through recognition of prior learning, for instance, have been evident since the mid-1990s as many national governments have sought to align national qualification frameworks with lifelong learning policies. At the OU, we are currently exploring ways in which we can reduce the time to, and cost of, higher level qualifications by simplifying the process of recognition and expanding the routes learners might take.

One problematic area of this work focuses on MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Whether awarding academic credit for MOOCs becomes a viable option remains to be seen, but, more importantly, MOOCs have been described as disruptive innovations – innovations which threaten to disrupt existing business markets, or in the case of MOOCs, existing models of delivery of higher education.

And, as with any challenge to the status quo, they offer the opportunity to re-imagine what the university is, what it is for and how higher education might be delivered.

They may, even, allow the notion of credentials to be contested and encourage the academy to give much more thought to how the transformational impacts of higher level learning can be extended to learners with limited access to traditional forms of higher education, to those already in work wishing to upskill or reskill or those who simply wish to learn for its own sake.