Posts Tagged ‘badges in education’

Badging Blockchain

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/badging-blockchain-documenting-skills-learned

LinkedIn’s 2020 list of skills in most demand includes these soft skills at the very top:

  • Creativity
  • Persuasion
  • Collaboration
  • Adaptability

And these hard skills at the very top:

  • Blockchain
  • Cloud computing
  • Analytical reasoning
  • Artificial intelligence

Further steps have been taken independently by universities that are utilizing blockchain technology to disseminate transcripts containing rich detail and documentation not available in the traditional paper document.

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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain

more on microcredentialing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=microcredential

EdTech Innovation Chase

EdTech Innovation Chase

https://commons.hostos.cuny.edu/achievements/

[BLEND-ONLINE] Online Technology Training for Staff

Carlos Guevara
Director, Office of Educational Technology
Co-Director, Center for Teaching and Learning
Office of Academic Affairs
Hostos Community College, CUNY
p. 718-319-7915
a. 500 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY 10451

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more on faculty development in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=faculty+development

AI and China education

China’s children are its secret weapon in the global AI arms race

China wants to be the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. To get there, it’s reinventing the way children are taught

despite China’s many technological advances, in this new cyberspace race, the West had the lead.

Xi knew he had to act. Within twelve months he revealed his plan to make China a science and technology superpower. By 2030 the country would lead the world in AI, with a sector worth $150 billion. How? By teaching a generation of young Chinese to be the best computer scientists in the world.

Today, the US tech sector has its pick of the finest minds from across the world, importing top talent from other countries – including from China. Over half of Bay Area workers are highly-skilled immigrants. But with the growth of economies worldwide and a Presidential administration hell-bent on restricting visas, it’s unclear that approach can last.

In the UK the situation is even worse. Here, the government predicts there’ll be a shortfall of three million employees for high-skilled jobs by 2022 – even before you factor in the immigration crunch of Brexit. By contrast, China is plotting a homegrown strategy of local and national talent development programs. It may prove a masterstroke.

In 2013 the city’s teenagers gained global renown when they topped the charts in the PISA tests administered every three years by the OECD to see which country’s kids are the smartest in the world. Aged 15, Shanghai students were on average three full years ahead of their counterparts in the UK or US in maths and one-and-a-half years ahead in science.

Teachers, too, were expected to be learners. Unlike in the UK, where, when I began to teach a decade ago, you might be working on full-stops with eleven-year-olds then taking eighteen-year-olds through the finer points of poetry, teachers in Shanghai specialised not only in a subject area, but also an age-group.

Shanghai’s success owed a lot to Confucian tradition, but it fitted precisely the best contemporary understanding of how expertise is developed. In his book Why Don’t Kids Like School? cognitive Dan Willingham explains that complex mental skills like creativity and critical thinking depend on our first having mastered the simple stuff. Memorisation and repetition of the basics serve to lay down the neural architecture that creates automaticity of thought, ultimately freeing up space in our working memory to think big.

Seung-bin Lee, a seventeen-year-old high school graduate, told me of studying fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for the three years leading up to the Suneung, the fearsome SAT exam taken by all Korean school leavers on a single Thursday each November, for which all flights are grounded so as not to break students’ concentration during the 45 minutes of the English listening paper.
Korea’s childhoods were being lost to a relentless regime of studying, crushed in a top-down system that saw them as cyphers rather than kids.

A decade ago, we consoled ourselves that although kids in China and Korea worked harder and did better on tests than ours, it didn’t matter. They were compliant, unthinking drones, lacking the creativity, critical thinking or entrepreneurialism needed to succeed in the world. No longer. Though there are still issues with Chinese education – urban centres like Shanghai and Hong Kong are positive outliers – the country knows something that we once did: education is the one investment on which a return is guaranteed. China is on course to becoming the first education superpower.

Troublingly, where education in the UK and US has been defined by creativity and independent thinking – Shanghai teachers told me of visits to our schools to learn about these qualities – our direction of travel is now away from those strengths and towards exams and standardisation, with school-readiness tests in the pipeline and UK schools minister Nick Gibb suggesting kids can beat exam stress by sitting more of them. Centres of excellence remain, but increasingly, it feels, we’re putting our children at risk of losing out to the robots, while China is building on its strong foundations to ask how its young people can be high-tech pioneers. They’re thinking big – we’re thinking of test scores.

soon “digital information processing” would be included as a core subject on China’s national graduation exam – the Gaokao – and pictured classrooms in which students would learn in cross-disciplinary fashion, designing mobile phones for example, in order to develop design, engineering and computing skills. Focusing on teaching kids to code was short-sighted, he explained. “We still regard it as a language between human and computer.” (My note: they are practically implementing the Finland’s attempt to rebuild curricula)

“If your plan is for one year,” went an old Chinese saying, “plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” Two and half thousand years later chancellor Gwan Zhong might update his proverb, swapping rice for bitcoin and trees for artificial intelligence, but I’m sure he’d stand by his final point.

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more on AR in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence

more on China education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/01/06/chinas-transformation-of-higher-education/

POD 2017

 

 

2016 POD Network Conference

http://podnetwork.org/content/uploads/2016-POD-Program-Final.pdf

https://guidebook.com/g/pod2016

Studying Connections between Student Well-Being,
Performance, and Active Learning
Amy Godert, Cornell University; Teresa Pettit, Cornell University

Treasure in the Sierra Madre? Digital Badges and Educational
Development
Chris Clark, University of Notre Dame; G. Alex Ambrose, University
of Notre Dame; Gwynn Mettetal, Indiana University South Bend;
David Pedersen, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Roberta
(Robin) Sullivan, University of Buffalo, State University of New York

Learning and Teaching Centers: The Missing Link in Data
Analytics
Denise Drane, Northwestern University; Susanna Calkins,
Northwestern University

Identifying and Supporting the Needs of International Faculty
Deborah DeZure, Michigan State University; Cindi Leverich, Michigan
State University

Online Discussions for Engaged and Meaningful Student
Learning
Danilo M. Baylen, University of West Georgia; Cheryl Fulghum,
Haywood Community College

Why Consider Online Asynchronous Educational Development?
Christopher Price, SUNY Center for Professional Development

Online, On-Demand Faculty Professional Development for Your
Campus
Roberta (Robin) Sullivan, University at Buffalo, State University of
New York; Cherie van Putten, Binghamton University, State
University of New York; Chris Price, State University of New York
The Tools of Engagement Project (http://suny.edu/toep) is an online faculty development model that encourages instructors to explore and reflect on innovative and creative uses of freely-available online educational technologies to increase student engagement and learning. TOEP is not traditional professional development but instead provides access to resources for instructors to explore at their own pace through a set of hands-on discovery activities. TOEP facilitates a learning community where participants learn from each
other and share ideas. This poster will demonstrate how you can implement TOEP at your campus by either adopting your own version or joining the existing project.

Video Captioning 101: Establishing High Standards With
Limited Resources
Stacy Grooters, Boston College; Christina Mirshekari, Boston
College; Kimberly Humphrey, Boston College
Recent legal challenges have alerted institutions to the importance of ensuring that video content for instruction is properly captioned. However, merely meeting minimum legal standards can still fall significantly short of the best practices defined by disability rights
organizations and the principles of Universal Design for Learning. Drawing from data gathered through a year-long pilot to investigate the costs and labor required to establish “in-house” captioning support at Boston College, this hands-on session seeks to give
participants the tools and information they need to set a high bar for captioning initiatives at their own institutions.

Sessions on mindfulness

52 Cognitive Neuroscience Applications for Teaching and Learning (BoF)

53 Contemplative Practices (BoF) Facilitators: Penelope Wong, Berea College; Carl S. Moore, University of the District of Columbia

79 The Art of Mindfulness: Transforming Faculty Development by Being Present Ursula Sorensen, Utah Valley University

93 Impacting Learning through Understanding of Work Life Balance Deanna Arbuckle, Walden University

113 Classroom Mindfulness Practices to Increase Attention, Creativity, and Deep Engagement Michael Sweet, Northeastern University

132 Measuring the Impacts of Mindfulness Practices in the Classroom Kelsey Bitting, Northeastern University; Michael Sweet, Northeastern University

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more on POD conferences in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=pod+conference

designing badges

ELI Course | Digging Into Badges: Designing and Developing Digital Credentials
Register by September 22

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 a result, there’s quite a lot for colleges and universities to consider in the wide open frontier called badging.

During this ELI Course, participants will:

  • Explore core concepts that define digital badges, as well as their 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—and more

Join us for this three-part series. Registration is open.

  • Part 1: September 13 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
  • Part 2: September 19 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET
  • Part 3: September 28 | 1:00–2:30 p.m. ET

more on badges in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=badges

How Open Badges Could Really Work In Education

How Open Badges Could Really Work In Education

http://www.edudemic.com/open-badges-in-education/

Higher education institutions are abuzz with the concept of Open Badges. The concept was presented to SCSU CETL some two years ago, but it remained mute on the SCSU campus. Part of the presentation to the SCSU CETL included the assertion that “Some advocates have suggested that badges representing learning and skills acquired outside the classroom, or even in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), will soon supplant diplomas and course credits.”

For higher education institutions interested in keeping pace, establishing a digital ecosystem around badges to recognize college learning, skill development and achievement is less a threat and more an opportunity. Used properly, Open Badge systems help motivate, connect, articulate and make transparent the learning that happens inside and outside classrooms during a student’s college years.

Educational programs that use learning design to attach badges to educational experiences according to defined outcomes can streamline credit recognition.

The badge ecosystem isn’t just a web-enabled transcript, CV, and work portfolio rolled together. It’s also a way to structure the process of education itself. Students will be able to customize learning goals within the larger curricular framework, integrate continuing peer and faculty feedback about their progress toward achieving those goals, and tailor the way badges and the metadata within them are displayed to the outside world.