1. Share your ideas and practice of badge distribution and/or microcredentialing
2. What is a digital badge/microcredentialing?
3. How to create and award D2L digital badges for your class?
4. How to motivate the students in earning digital badges?
5. How it aligns with COSE’s strategic plan 2022/Husky Compact?
What we hope to achieve
• Create a community of digital badgers
• Catalyze professional development opportunity for faculty/staff
Managing Relationships with Partners in Non-Traditional Badge Development
Live Webcast:October 28, 2019 | 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. Eastern Webcast Recording: Available 10 business days after the Live Webcast
$450.00
Non-traditional badges represent a growing market full of opportunity. However, you may not be pursuing badges of this type, because you’re not sure how to work with industry partners in development and management. Don’t let that stop you!
Join us for this webcast to learn tips on how to engage with industry partners for non-traditional badge development. We will profile a typical relationship with industry partners and share common pitfalls to avoid.
Michael P. Macklin
Associate Provost for Workforce Partnerships/Development, Colorado Community College System
Michael’s primary focuses are workforce development, noncredit programming, and business partnership development. Through Mr. Macklin’s work with digital badges, he is leveraging the power of digital credential opportunities in advanced manufacturing, healthcare and information technology. He understands that digital badges are key in sustaining and expanding workforce skillsets with community and business partners as this allows for unprecedented access to affordable reskilling and upskilling opportunities. Read Michael’s full bio here.
According to the authors of a newly published report, at least 10 state education agencies—Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington—have launched official microcredential pilots. And another five states—Illinois, Maryland, Montana, New York, and Wyoming—are experimenting with microcredentials in some way.
sponsored by the non-profit Digital Promise, the report argues that we’ve reached a kind of tipping point in the evolution of the “emerging micro-credentialing ecosystem,”
Reports from early adopters (among them, the NEA, the country’s largest teachers’ union) have been promising, and the potential market for such programs is potentially huge. According to Digital Promise, nearly three out of four U.S. teachers are currently engaged in some type of informal professional development or learning.
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.
