Badges are a mechanism to award ‘micro-credits’ online. They are awarded by an organization for an individual user, and can be either internal to a website or online community, or use open standards and shared repositories.
In open online learning settings, badges are used to provide incentives for individuals to use our resources and to participate in discussion threads.
The IBM skills gateway is an example of how open badges can be leveraged to document professional development. EDUCAUSE microcredentialing program offers 108 digital badges in five categories (community service, expertise development, presentation and facilitation, leadership development, awards).
Open Badge Initiative and “Digital Badges for Lifelong Learning” became the theme of the fourth Digital Meaning & Learning competition, in which over 30 innovative badge systems and 10 research studies received over $5 million in funding between 2012 and 2013.
Standardization is the key to creating transferability and recognition across contexts
In 2018, the new Open Badges 2.0 standard was released under the stewardship of IMS Global Learning Consortium.
badges awarded for participation are valued less meaningful than skill-based badges. For skill-based badges, evidence of mastery must be associated with the badge along with the evaluation criteria. Having a clear purpose, ensuring transferability, and specifying learning objectives were noted by the interviewees as the top priorities when implementing badge offerings in higher education contexts.
Sheryl Grant is a senior researcher on user experience at OpenWorks Group, a company that focuses on supporting educational web applications and mobile tools, including credentialing services. Prior to her current position, Dr. Grant was Director of Alternative Credentialing and Badge Research at HASTAC. She was part of the team that organized the ‘Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition’.
advice o offer for the design and implementation of digital badges. She stressed that badge systems need to be designed in a participatory manner together with the target audience who is supposed to receive them. This will allow for fair, realistic and transparent criteria. Another crucial aspect is the assessment portion: Who will make verify that the badge credentials are issued correctly? While badges can offer additional motivation, they can also diminish motivation and create a ‘race to the bottom’ if they are obtained too easily. Specifically, Dr. Grant advised to use badges to reward exceptional activities, and acknowledge students who want to go above and beyond. She also gave guidelines on when to avoid issuing badges, i.e., activities that are already graded and activities that are required.
All current UNC badging pilots used the platform cred.ly for issuing badges. An alternative is the Mozilla Open Badge backpack follow-up Badgr. The European platform Badgecraft is another repository with a fairly broad user base. The badge wiki project offers a comprehensive list with implementation details for each platform: Badge Platforms (Badge Wiki). (23 platforms)
Designing Effective Digital Badges (https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Effective-Digital-Badges-Applications/dp/1138306134) is a hands-on guide to the principles, implementation, and assessment of digital badging systems. Informed by the fundamental concepts and research-based characteristics of effective badge design, this book uses real-world examples to convey the advantages and challenges of badging and showcases its application across a variety of contexts.
My Note: synchronous vs asynchronous; Adobe Connect vs Zoom. Also Flipgrid for asynchronous videochats.
From: EDUCAUSE Listserv <BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> on behalf of Celine Greene <celine.greene@JHU.EDU> Reply-To: EDUCAUSE Listserv <BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 at 2:38 PM To: EDUCAUSE Listserv <BLEND-ONLINE@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU> Subject: [BLEND-ONLINE] Advice for Synchronous Online Classes Using Zoom Meetings?
Our school is transitioning from using Adobe Connect to using Zoom Meetings for synchronous online class sessions, of which most of our online courses schedule at least a few times each term. So after years of “controlling the user experience” with the Adobe Connect layouts and relying primarily on text chat, we are heading in the direction of screen sharing with the enhanced social and community-building experience of video “taking over” chat. Some people are very excited about this move, given the popularity and ease-of-use of the Zoom platforms. Other people are a little more wary – especially when it comes to large (e.g., 40 to 200+ students) classes.
Please share your thoughts and experiences on what faculty and students should be aware of when using Zoom Meetings (not the webinar) for a synchronous class session. Here’s some of the things I was curious about…
Do you have a set of “instructions” or recommendations for students — e.g. so they see the chat as it happens?
Are there any best practices in terms of meetings set-up that you recommend for your faculty? (Mute participants upon entry, always show meeting control bar, etc.)
Have there been some scenarios that have been fantastic or some that have been horrible for using Zoom?
Is there a class size where the number of participants starts negatively impacting the learning opportunity? (i.e., I realize Breakout rooms are an option but also not appropriate for all situations, such as having a guest speaker come in to have an interactive Q & A or having a software demonstration.)
Are there any major “fails” you’ve learned from or, alternately, success stories?
Are your students required to have Zoom accounts?
Do you have a method for tracking attendance?
…
Thanks for your input! – celine Celine Greene Instructional Technologist Center for Teaching and Learning, JHSPH http://ctl.jhsph.edu
Because of technological advances and the sheer amount of data now available about billions of other people, discretion no longer suffices to protect your privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can now infer, with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, a wide range of things about you that you may have never disclosed, including your moods, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation and your health.
There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.
In 2017, the newspaper The Australian published an article, based on a leaked document from Facebook, revealing that the company had told advertisers that it could predict when younger users, including teenagers, were feeling “insecure,” “worthless” or otherwise in need of a “confidence boost.” Facebook was apparently able to draw these inferences by monitoring photos, posts and other social media data.
In 2017, academic researchers, armed with data from more than 40,000 Instagram photos, used machine-learning tools to accurately identify signs of depression in a group of 166 Instagram users. Their computer models turned out to be better predictors of depression than humans who were asked to rate whether photos were happy or sad and so forth.
Computational inference can also be a tool of social control. The Chinese government, having gathered biometric data on its citizens, is trying to use big data and artificial intelligence to single out “threats” to Communist rule, including the country’s Uighurs, a mostly Muslim ethnic group.
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Zeynep Tufekci and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz: Privacy is over
In fall 2007, Larry Berger, CEO of Wireless Generation (now Amplify) was invited to submit a paper to an “Entrepreneurship in Education”
As education entrepreneurs know, growth in K-12 comes hard. Sometimes very hard. We were living Marc Andreessen’s startup mantra: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror.”
The edtech boom of the past two decades promised efficacy and new instructional models. Many teachers instead experience it as “clutter.” But poorly integrated standards, curriculum, assessment, and intervention materials have always been a problem.
When it comes to instruction, the work consists of four segments: core curriculum, supplemental (intervention, test prep, little books) curriculum, assessment, and technology (hardware, infrastructure and connectivity). Each of these workstreams are run by separate teams, using independent funding streams, only rarely coordinating. Schools rely—as they always have—on the hero in the classroom, who has to somehow synthesize everything for a roomful of children, every single day.
Twelve Years Later: How the K-12 Industry and Investment Landscape Has Shifted (Part 2)
Twelve years ago, Amplify CEO Larry Berger and I wrote about the “pareto distribution” of companies in the K-12 sector.
The “oligopoly” was the natural outcome of a highly decentralized system and fragmented demand. To serve 15,000-plus districts and more than 100,000 school buildings, a company needed huge sales and service teams; to afford them, the company needed a bookbag full of products across content areas, grade ranges, and use cases. The structure of demand created the “Big Three”—McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson.
Meanwhile, the number of small players—further right on the pareto distribution—has grown dramatically. Online distribution and freemium business models have enabled companies like Flocabulary, Newsela, Nearpod, and others
few alternative models to consider:
companies like Remind, ClassDojo, and Edmodo, who all adopted a “West Coast” approach: collect active users now, with plans to monetize later.
The second includes the “platform” players—Schoology, itslearning, Canvas, and other LMS-like platforms. They have set out to do something differently, only possible by means of technology—to be the search, storage and distribution platform for instructional content. Google Classroom has instead emerged as the de facto standard platform, fueled by the runaway adoption of Chromebooks.
The third includes “policy responsive” players—companies like Panorama, Ellevation or Wireless Generation. hese companies help school systems meet a new policy requirement—social-emotional learning, English Language Learning, and reading assessment, respectively.
But we’re not “decluttering” our classrooms or in our schools. What would it take for the private and public sectors to work shoulder-to-shoulder?
a catch-22: so long as buying is fragmented, it’s hard to justify the integrated product investment; so long as products are fragmented, it’s hard for a district to create an integrated instructional model.
Research supports the impact that school librarians make on academic achievement, especially with regard to reading and writing scores. For instance, a Pennsylvania study cited in the Spokesman-Review article notes that 1.6% fewer students tested at the below basic level in reading when they had access to full-time librarians. The difference was even greater for minority students and those with disabilities, averaging at about a 5% improvement for those populations. Other research also supports the academic benefit of school librarians and demonstrates how they contribute to learning gains.
The practice is called bug-in-ear coaching, and it has been around for decades in different sectors in some capacity. But in recent years, more and more educators are beginning to try it out.
Yet experts say there’s skepticism from some in the education community, who worry that real-time feedback while teachers are delivering instruction will be overwhelming.
Virtual teacher-coaching services have become more popular in recent years—teachers record their lessons, and remote coaches review the videos and offer feedback. This approach has been especially popular in rural schools, or in districts that can’t afford to staff their own coaches.
As educators see the benefits of the coaching method, experts predict that it will continue to spread. That has been the case at the University of Washington’s college of education, where researchers have done a series of studies with bug-in-ear coaching.
Figure 29: Are your research publications and/or products freely available online through your institution’s repository, a disciplinary repository (such as arXiv, SSRN, etc.), or available elsewhere online (such as your personal webpage)? For each type(s) of scholarly work(s) listed below, please select all hosting sources that apply. Of the respondents that make each of the following types of publications and/or products freely available online, the percent who indicated their research is hosted in each of the following.
Table 8
Which of the following statements best describes your role in deciding what textbooks and other course materials will be used in the courses you teach? Percent of respondents who selected each item.
The oldest members of Generation Z are around 22 years old — now entering the workforce and adjusting their social media accordingly. They are holding back from posting political opinions and personal information in favor of posting about professional accomplishments.
only about 1 in 10 teenagers say they share personal, religious or political beliefs on social media, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Center.
70 percent of employers and recruiters say they check social media during the hiring process, according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder
Generation Z, nicknamed “iGen,” is the post-millennial generation responsible for ‘killing’ Facebook and for the rise of TikTok.
Curricula like Common Sense Education’s digital citizenship program are working to educate the younger generation on how to use social media, something the older generations were never taught.
Some users are regularly cleaning up — “re-curating” — their online profiles. Cleanup apps, like TweetDelete,
Gen Zers also use social media in more ephemeral ways than older generations — Snapchat stories that disappear after 24 hours, or Instagram posts that they archive a couple of months later.
Gen Zers already use a multitude of strategies to make sure their online presence is visible only to who they want: They set their account to private, change their profile name or handle, even make completely separate “fake” accounts.
An interactive discussion on the Innovating Pedagogy 2019 report from The Open University
About the Guest
Rebecca is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) at The Open University in the UK and a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her primary research interests are educational futures, and how people learn together online and I supervise doctoral students in both these areas.
Rebecca worked for several years as a researcher and educator on the Schome project, which focuses on educational futures, and was also the research lead on the SocialLearn online learning platform, and learning analytics lead on the Open Science Lab (Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year: THE Awards 2014). She is currently a pedagogic adviser to the FutureLearn MOOC platform, and evaluation lead on The Open University’s FutureLearn MOOCs. She is an active member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research, and have co-chaired many learning analytics events, included several associated with the Learning Analytics Community Exchange (LACE), European Project funded under Framework 7.
Rebecca’s most recent book, Augmented Education, was published by Palgrave in spring 2014.
Mor, Y., Ferguson, R., & Wasson, B. (2015). Editorial: Learning design, teacher inquiry into student learning and learning analytics: A call for action. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(2), 221–229. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjet.12273
Hansen, C., Emin, V., Wasson, B., Mor, Y., Rodriguez-Triana, M., Dascalu, M., … Pernin, J. (2013). Towards an Integrated Model of Teacher Inquiry into Student Learning, Learning Design and Learning Analytics. Scaling up Learning for Sustained Impact – Proceedings of EC-TEL 2013, 8095, 605–606. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40814-4_73
how to decolonize educational technology: MOOCs coming from the big colonial powers, not from small countries. Video games: many have very colonial perspective
strategies for innovative pedagogies: only certainly groups or aspects taking into account; rarely focus on support by management, scheduling, time tabling, tech support.
Despite its name, the Learning Management System (LMS) is not about learning. The LMS was originally the CMS—Course Management System.
The LMS succeeds as a core productivity tool for educators because it allows institutions to extend their academic capacity and transcend the constraints of time and space. However, the Learning Management System was never able to deliver on the promise of its new name because it was created for a completely different purpose: course management. Learning doesn’t happen within the digital space of the LMS; it happens beyond its borders.
Today’s generation of students is deeply social and collaborative. They rely on real-time online interaction, collaboration and sharing to feel supported, confident and successful. Having grown up on iPhone, Snapchat and Instagram, this generation expects seamless experiences that are deeply social and collaborative.
In the post-LMS world, learning technology is student-centric in its design because today’s students are vocal, creative and eager to share their blue sky ideals and ideas.
The post-LMS world is also social by nature. in the post-LMS world, learning technology is simple, modern and mobile.
