Fleming College is helping workers achieve their goals and bridge skill gaps through five rapid training programs, funded by Ontario's Micro-credentials Challenge Fund.
Micro-credentials offer students targeted training in career-specific skills, addressing skills gaps between postsecondary education and ever-changing workforce needs. Micro-credentials take less time to complete than a traditional diploma or degree, allowing workers to quickly upskill.
The Province of Ontario has provided Fleming College with a $250,000 grant to provide the following five industry-focused micro-credentials:
- Introduction to Biomanufacturing: This micro-credential, being developed in partnership with industry, will be the first in a series of stackable credentials. This first micro-credential equips learners with essential skills, including an understanding of biomanufacturing's role in industry, hands-on experience with bioreactors, associated monitoring, quality assurance/control procedures, and familiarity with downstream processing steps. Fleming College and Kawartha Ethanol currently share a partnership that supports this project.
- Indigenous Perspectives in Economic Development: This micro-credential prepares students to engage in culturally appropriate strategies for economic development with Indigenous communities by providing students an understanding of Indigenous culture, history and current events, community research issues and methods, and an introduction to economic theory and business in an Indigenous context.
- Embedded Systems Design 1 - Firmware Development for Microcontrollers: In this first course of the Embedded Systems Design micro-credential series, learners will be trained in the fundamentals of microcontroller firmware development. Programming topics will include the compilation process, variables, data types, operators, branches, loops, functions, arrays, pointers, data structures, interrupt handling, and debugging.
- Embedded Systems Design 2 - Sensor Integration, Motor Control: The second course of the Embedded Systems Design micro-credential series trains learners in the different methods utilized in capturing information from the outside world, conditioning the captured data for microcontroller-level processing, and generating signals to control external actuators. Learners will learn to select and read input variables such as temperature, acceleration, proximity, and distance using the standard communication protocols for interfacing sensors with microcontrollers/computers.
- Embedded Systems Design 3 - Position and Orientation Control: In this third course of the Embedded Systems Design micro-credential series, learners will be introduced to the position and orientation control methods. Students will implement complex sensors such as accelerometers and rotational encoders. The students will be exposed to the numeric methods that can help obtain speed and position, when necessary, through mathematical integration or differentiation of digital values.
All five micro-credentials are still in development. Additional information, including enrolment dates and more detailed course information, will be available later in the fall.
Visit here for more information on Fleming's full roster of Continuing Education courses, programs, credentials and certificates.
