This article analyzes digital badges through mechanics and psychology. This approach involves understanding the underlying logics of badges as well as the experiential nature of badges-in-use. The proposed model provides additional insight about badges and recommends design strategies to complement existing scholarship. Procedure. This article examines an existing model of completion logic for digital badges. This model is expanded upon by pairing these formal mechanics with relevant psychological theory, summarizing key principles that pertain to how people interact with badges. It then considers three dimensions of badges in use—social, cognitive, and affective—reviewing examples and analyzing the relationship of badging to debriefing.
Badging programs are rapidly gaining momentum in higher education – join us to learn how to get your badging efforts off the ground.
Key Considerations: Assessment of Competencies
During this session, you will learn how to ask the right questions and evaluate if badges are a good fit within your unique institutional context, including determining ROI on badging efforts. You’ll also learn how to assess the competencies behind digital badges.
Key Technology Considerations
This session will allow for greater understanding of Open Badges standards, the variety of technology software and platforms, and the portability of badges. We will also explore emerging trends in the digital badging space and discuss campus considerations.
Key Financial Considerations
During this hour, we will take a closer look at answering key financial questions surrounding badges:
What does the business model look like behind existing institutional badging initiatives?
Are these money-makers for an institution? Is there revenue potential?
Where does funding for these efforts come from?
Partnering with Industry
Badging can be a catalyst for partnerships between higher education and industry. In this session, you will have the opportunity to learn more about strategies for collaborating with industry in the development of badges and how badges align with employer expectations.
Branding and Marketing Badges
Now that we have a better idea of the “why” and “what” of badges, how do we market their value to external and internal stakeholders? You’ll see examples of how other institutions are designing and marketing their badges.
Consultation Time
Alongside your peers and our expert instructors, you will have the opportunity to brainstorm ideas, get feedback, ask questions, and get answers.
Next Steps and the Road Ahead: Where Badging in Higher Ed is Going
Most institutions are getting into the badging game, and we’ll talk about the far-reaching considerations in the world of badging. We’ll use this time to engage in forward-thinking and discuss the future of badging and what future trends in badging might be.
Badges are more than just participation trophies. Design them to commensurately represent the knowledge and skills gained.
While many institutions have used digital badges as an alternative way to recognize the skills and knowledge developed by students, some are also starting to use this approach in their in-house professional development programs – especially in faculty development programs.
By offering well-designed badges that accompany these programs, you can boost both participation and impact. Join us for this online training and learn how to design your badges to encourage deeper engagement that goes beyond “showing up”. Our instructor, Lindsay Doukopoulos, will share best practices for badging criteria at Auburn University, where 82% of participants chose to earn badges at annual professional development workshops.
indsay Doukopoulos Ph.D.
Assistant Director, Biggio Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning, Auburn University
Lindsay’s teaching expertise includes experiential, active, and team-based learning in small and large lecture formats. Her research interests include instructional technologies and the use of digital artifacts (e.g., badging, ePortfolios, etc.) to assess and enhance integrated learning, gameful learning, and metacognition for students and faculty.
After a brief overview of our instructor’s faculty development badging program, we’ll walk through several badges Auburn has implemented for faculty. For each badge collection, we’ll address the following:
How was it designed, and what elements were considered in the design process?
What are the criteria for earning the badges? Why?
Who has earned the badges to date?
What impact did badge earners self-report?
What kind of data or artifacts did faculty submit to earn this badge / badge constellation? What did these show about how faculty were using what they learned?
We’ll close with a brief exercise that will let you start designing your own badge criteria for a program on your campus.
and learn the strategies and processes that other institutions have used to develop digital badge initiatives and programs. You’ll learn the different ways that badges can add value to the learner experience, key considerations for developing badges, and how to effectively connect learners to industry.
An interactive discussion on badges and micro-credentials
Bryan Alexander, special guest Nate Otto, and the Future Trends Forum Community will discuss badges and micro-credentials at present, their future and the challenges they face.
Nate is the Director of Open Badges Projects at Concentric Sky, where he leads development of the Badgr platform for issuing and managing verifiable digital credentials.
Nate’s background in political sciences also informs his work on open standards with a focus on building and maintaining tech ecosystems resistant to monopolies.
Mozilla discontinue and switch to Badgr platform. free accounts to Badgr. current integration of Mozilla backpack with other platforms such as Moddle will be preserved. Backpack solution, or issue badges.
Steve Taylor: Moodle is one of the platforms integrated with Backpack.
This is an extremely useful conversation. We’re working on building a dedicated micro-credentialing platform at our University specifically to provide continuing education material based on the material we are already creating in our various programs.
Open badges extensions for education test course. Two extensions: one describes assessment which goes to a particular badge. Second extension allows the issues to describe. Published extensions. Badgr implemented the assessment extensions: the Digital Promise project – https://digitalpromise.org/.
hurdles to prevent adoption of badges: 1. still not easy enough to start issuing badges, design principles. get ambitious what to do with badges but no ability to start the assessment process. how badges will be awarded. starting small is the way, simple tools, google forms, to help decide what to do. 2. how do we understand the achievements of badges
The Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) is teaming up with software development company Concentric Sky on a digital badging initiative that will use Badgr digital badges to document professional development accomplishments of faculty, administrators and staff across the system’s 34 institutions.
Each college will be able to implement badging as well as guided pathways within their courses or programs, particularly for co-curricular activities that typically aren’t represented on transcripts. Examples of such programs include internships, community service and museum activities.
n a 2016 survey of higher education institutions (study published by UPCEA and Pearson), one in five institutions now offer the opportunity to earn verified digital badges.
The way we learn is continuously evolving. In the coming years we should expect to see organizations of all kinds start experimenting with the increasing number of badge platforms out there. While Mozilla Open Badges seems to be leading the way in the development of badging, other networks including Badge Alliance, Credly and Digital Me are growing their networks as they launch their own competing platforms. Students and professionals use social networks and other digital platforms daily, and with that comes a different way to showcase professional skills.
