Red Hat, although not quite a household name, is an undeniably significant company, with lots of fingers in lots of pies, especially when it comes to cloud computing and the Linux ecosystem.
The gem in its crown is arguably the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider OpenShift, which directly competes with the Salesforce-owned Heroku and Google App Engine. It also owns and develops Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is employed across several commercial settings, including workstations, servers, and supercomputers.
Red Hat is an enthusiastic contributor to several major Linux projects, playing a role in developing Libre Office and GNOME, as well as the Kernel itself.
While employers increasingly demand that new hires have college degrees, the transcripts supporting those hard-earned credentials are no longer the most informative tool students have to exhibit their skills.
An estimated 1 in 5 institutions issue digital badges, which can be posted to social media, stored on digital portfolios and displayed by other specially designed platforms. When clicked on, the badge lists a range of skills a student has demonstrated beyond grades.
“The reason they’re taking off in higher education is most employers are not getting the information they need about people emerging from higher ed, with previous tools we’ve been using,” says Jonathan Finkelstein, founder and CEO of the widely used badging platform Credly. “The degree itself doesn’t get to level of describing particular competencies.”
For instance, a Notre Dame student who goes on a trip to Ecuador to build bridges can earn a badge for mastering the calculations involved in the construction, says G. Alex Ambrose, associate program director of e-portfolio assessment at the Indiana university’s Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning.
Students can be pretty certain when they have passed calculus or creative writing, but they don’t always recognize when they’ve excelled in demonstrating soft skills such as critical thinking, communication and work ethic, says MJ Bishop, director of the system’s William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation.
Badges have been most popular in the school of education—including with student teachers who, in turn, have created badges for the elementary and secondary classrooms where they’ve apprenticed, says Anna Catterson, the university’s educational technology director.
The campus library is another badging hotspot. Students there have earned microcredentials for research, 3D printing and other skills. These badges are being shared on LinkedIn and other platforms to obtain internships and scholarships.
The university runs faculty training sessions on badging and has established a review process for when faculty submit ideas for microcredentials.
One pothole to avoid is trying to create a schoolwide badge that’s standardized across a wide range of courses or majors. This can force the involvement of committees that can bog down the process, so it’s better to start with skills within single courses, says Ambrose at Notre Dame.
When creating a badge, system faculty have to identify a business or industry interested in that credential.
Badges that have the backing of a college or university are more impressive to job recruiters than are completion certificates from skill-building websites like Lynda.com.
Students won’t be motivated to earn a badge that’s a stock blue ribbon downloaded off the internet. Many institutions put a lot work into the design, and this can include harnessing expertise from the marketing department and graphic designers
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.
“Shifts in students’ learning style will prompt a shift to active construction of knowledge through mediated immersion.”-Chris Dede
The theory of constructivist-based learning, according to Dr. Seymour Papert, “is grounded in the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, rather than having information ‘poured’ into their heads.”
Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing personally meaningful artifacts (such as computer programs, animations, 3D modeling, creating spatial environments in virtual reality or building robots).”
Technologies like virtual reality, especially for Gen Z students’, provides avenues that allow them to engage in a social, collaborative, and active learning environment.
Virtual reality, especially when combined with powerful storytelling, allows the student to participate in the story, develop empathy to experiences outside their current realm of understanding and allows them to be fully immersed in their own exploration and learning.
Digital transformation (DX) is having a profound impact across all industries, but what does it mean for higher education? Join members of the EDUCAUSE Digital Transformation Task Force as they describe their efforts to understand what DX means for higher education and why institutions should be planning for change now.
Outcomes
Explore how DX will impact higher education culture, workforce, and technology
Understand the importance of planning for digital transformation now
Learn about plans under way at EDUCAUSE to help institutions move forward with digital transformation initiative
This webinar for all 2018 LITA Forum presenters was a conversation about creating accessible presentations! Our speaker, Carli Spina, presented and offered guidance on accessibility and design. She explained how to design presentation materials that are accessible, including providing demonstrations of the accessibility features of popular presentation softwares, and how to ensure that your presentation is accessible for all of your audience members.
Carli Spina is an Associate Professor and the Head of Research & Instructional Services at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She holds a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, an MLIS from Simmons GSLIS, and an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has extensive experience working, writing, and presenting on topics related to accessibility and Universal Design and has served as a coordinator for services to patrons with disabilities. She was the inaugural chair of LITA’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee and has also served as the leader of the ASCLA Library Services to People with Visual or Physical Disabilities that Prevent Them from Reading Standard Print Interest Group. She regularly teaches courses, workshops, and webinars on topics related to accessibility, Universal Design and technology. You can contact her on Twitter where she is @CarliSpina.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
ID2ID
Kelly Hermann, VP, Accessibility Strategy, U of Phoenix
“Netnography” has been developed for online community researchers. It is “net” plus “ethnography,” which is based on the traditional ethnography and combines with the qualitative analysis for online interactive contents forms of virtual community members. The aim of doing netnographic research is to study the subculture, interactive process and characteristics of collective behaviors of online communities (Kozinets 2009). Follow the development of Internet technology, the web–based method is more convenient and cost–effect in data collection. Members in virtual groups create a large number of interactive texts, pictures, network expressions and other original information over time, which provides an extremely rich database to researchers. Moreover, from the data collection’s point of view, this online observation method will not interfere with the whole research process, which is better than questionnaires and quantitative modeling (Moisander and Valtonen 2006). Additionally, Kozinets (2009) also pointed that netnogrpahy emphasize on the research background, observers not only focus on the text during communications but also need to pay attention to the characteristics of language, history, meaning and communication types. Even parse fonts, symbols, images and photo data. These content of studies are significant in social communication, which is called “Cultural Artifact.” On the other hand, netnography is based on traditional ethnography as a methodology; therefore it inherits the research processes of ethnographic method. Kozients (2009) reinterpreted these procedures for netnography as Firstly, to determine the research target and understand its cultural characteristics; Secondly, to collect and analyze information; Thirdly, to ensure the credibility of interpretation; Fourthly, pay attention to research ethics; Lastly, to obtain respondents feedbacks. To make my research adapting to this guidelines, I make my research process as 1. To target on Plymouth Chinese overseas students and to explain the Chinese guanxi; 2. To collect and analyze data through the existing WeChat group created by Plymouth Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA); 3. To confirm the identity of key influencers in this virtual group; 4. To get feedbacks from respondent as much as possible.