Digital badges are receiving a growing amount of attention and are beginning to disrupt the norms of what it means to earn credit or be credentialed. Badges allow the sharing of evidence of skills and knowledge acquired through a wide range of life activity, at a granular level, and at a pace that keeps up with individuals who are always learning—even outside the classroom. As such, those not traditionally in the degree-granting realm—such as associations, online communities, and even employers—are now issuing “credit” for achievement they can uniquely recognize. At the same time, higher education institutions are rethinking the type and size of activities worthy of official recognition. From massive open online courses (MOOCs), service learning, faculty development, and campus events to new ways of structuring academic programs and courses or acknowledging granular or discrete skills and competencies these programs explore, there’s much for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.
Learning Objectives
During this ELI course, participants will:
Explore core concepts that define digital badges, as well as the benefits and use in learning-related contexts
Understand the underlying technical aspects of digital badges and how they relate to each other and the broader landscape for each learner and issuing organization
Critically review and analyze examples of the adoption of digital credentials both inside and outside higher education
Identify and isolate specific programs, courses, or other campus or online activities that would be meaningfully supported and acknowledged with digital badges or credentials
Consider the benefit of each minted badge or system to the earner, issuer, and observer
Develop a badge constellation or taxonomy for their own project
Consider forms of assessment suitable for evaluating badge earning
Learn about design considerations around the visual aspects of badges
Create a badge-issuing plan
Issue badges
NOTE: Participants will be asked to complete assignments in between the course segments that support the learning objectives stated above and will receive feedback and constructive critique from course facilitators on how to improve and shape their work.
Jonathan Finkelstein is founder and CEO of Credly, creator of the Open Credit framework, and founder of the open source BadgeOS project. Together these platforms have enabled thousands of organizations to recognize, reward, and market skills and achievement. Previously, he was founder of LearningTimes and co-founder of HorizonLive (acquired by Blackboard), helping mission-driven organizations serve millions of learners through online programs and platforms. Finkelstein is author of Learning in Real Time (Wiley), contributing author to The Digital Museum, co-author of a report for the U.S. Department of Education on the potential for digital badges, and a frequent speaker on digital credentials, open badges, and the future of learning and workforce development. Recent speaking engagements have included programs at The White House, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Smithsonian, EDUCAUSE, IMS Global, Lumina Foundation, ASAE, and the Federal Reserve. Finkelstein is involved in several open standards initiatives, such as the IMS Global Learning Consortium, Badge Alliance, American Council on Education (ACE) Stackable Credentials Framework Advisory Group, and the Credential Registry. He graduated with honors from Harvard.
In addition to helping Credly clients design credential systems in formal and informal settings, Susan Manning comes from the teaching world. Presently she teaches for the University of Wisconsin at Stout, including courses in instructional design, universal design for learning, and the use of games for learning. Manning was recognized by the Sloan Consortium with the prestigious 2013 Excellence in Online Teaching Award. She has worked with a range of academic institutions to develop competency-based programs that integrate digital badges. Several of her publications specifically speak to digital badge systems; other work is centered on technology tools and online education.
EDUC-441 Mobile Learning InstructionalDesign
(3 cr.)
Repeatable for Credit: No
Mobile learning research, trends, instructionaldesign strategies for curriculum integration and professional development.
EDUC-452 Universal Design for Learning
(2 cr.)
Repeatable for Credit: No Instructionaldesign strategies that support a wide range of learner differences; create barrier-free learning by applying universal design concepts.
Canada will see the fastest growth, with a CAGR of 145.2 percent over the forecast period. Other leaders in terms of growth include Central and Eastern Europe at 133.5 percent, Western Europe at 121.2 percent and the U.S. at 120.5 percent.
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Leslie Fisher Thinks Augmented Reality First, Then VR in the Classroom
An interview with the former Apple K–12 systems engineer, who will participate in multiple sessions during ISTE.
THE Journal: What do you think about virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) in the classroom? Is the cost point for VR prohibitive?
In virtual reality, one of my favorite apps is CoSpaces. It allows anyone to design a 3D space, and then interact with it in virtual reality.
Virtual reality can be quite affordable with Google Cardboard. We can get into basic interaction in VR with Cardboard. There are 40 or 50 VR apps where you can simply use Cardboard and explore. Google Street View allows you to do virtual viewing of many different locations. That technology augments what the teacher is doing.
Most kids can’t afford to buy their own Oculus headset. That price point is quite a bit higher. But we don’t need to have 30 kids using Oculus all of the time. Two or three might work
My note: sometimes around 2011, the Chronicle had a report on Berkeley students listening to coursecasts at 2X (can’t find the reference). Here some other sources about #speedlistening:
the introduction of Overcast, a podcast-playback app designed by the creator of the text-bookmaking app Instapaper. One of Overcast’s key selling points is a feature called Smart Speed. Smart Speed isn’t about simply playing audio content at 150 or 200 percent of the standard rate; it instead tries to remove, algorithmically, the extraneous things that can bulk up the play time of audio content: dead air, pauses between sentences, intros and outros, that kind of thing.
Teaching tool or distraction? The key to any engaging lesson in the classroom, of course, is to connect it to the learning objectives, and Kahoot! makes it easy to do so.
https://www.sli.do/. A basic account is free. this package does not allow question moderation and restricts the number of polls you can ask per class
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The Distracted Classroom: Transparency, Autonomy, and Pedagogy
in my role as director of my college’s teaching center, I hosted a faculty discussion of Jay R. Howard’s excellent book Discussion in the College Classroom, which recommends that we build structural methods of participation into our courses, rather than just relying on the vocal students to carry the conversation.
The first three columns in “The Distracted Classroom” series have explored the fundamental problem of digital distraction in our lives today, the way recent technologies have exacerbated that problem, and the possible solutions. All of those columns drew on the research presented by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen in their excellent book,The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World.
Autonomy. The literature on helping students take a deep approach toward their learning — as opposed to a more surface or strategic orientation — suggests they learn best when they feel a sense of autonomy in class. Another approach to the problem of digital distraction, then, would be to invite students into the process of setting the policies that will operate in the classroom.
Cathy Davidson has argued very effectively for what she calls a “class constitution” — an agreement that the class has reached together about certain aspects of how the course will operate.
Based on my experience in Tallinn, we will see companies become more transparent in how they deal with cyber attacks. After a massive cyber attack in 2007, for example, the Estonian government reacted in the right way.
As a team out of the University of Washington explains in a new paper titled “Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio,” they’ve made several fake videos of Obama.
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Fake news: you ain’t seen nothing yet
Generating convincing audio and video of fake events, July 1, 2017
took only a few days to create the clip on a desktop computer using a generative adversarial network (GAN), a type of machine-learning algorithm.
Faith in written information is under attack in some quarters by the spread of what is loosely known as “fake news”. But images and sound recordings retain for many an inherent trustworthiness. GANs are part of a technological wave that threatens this credibility.
Amnesty International is already grappling with some of these issues. Its Citizen Evidence Lab verifies videos and images of alleged human-rights abuses. It uses Google Earth to examine background landscapes and to test whether a video or image was captured when and where it claims. It uses Wolfram Alpha, a search engine, to cross-reference historical weather conditions against those claimed in the video. Amnesty’s work mostly catches old videos that are being labelled as a new atrocity, but it will have to watch out for generated video, too. Cryptography could also help to verify that content has come from a trusted organisation. Media could be signed with a unique key that only the signing organisation—or the originating device—possesses.
