Digital Badges and Alternate Credentialling in Education

A recent article published in The Chronicle of Higher Eduction and entitled ‘Badges’ Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas, explores the reasons why there is growing interest in this alternative (or additive) to the power of traditional degrees and credits. What are badges? The author of the article, Jeffrey R. Young, provides this: Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of “badges” to certify skills and abilities. …these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain—intentionally so—to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom.

Hi, I'm very pleased to announce that Totara Learning Solutions (the distributors of the corporate distro of Moodle called TotaraLMS) will be developing an Open Badges solution for Moodle and Mahara. The "Moodle as Issuer, Mahara as Displayer" project will integrate Mozilla's "Open Badges" software to issue, manage and display digital badges in Moodle and 3rd party sites such as social media and also eportfolio systems - we'll develop a solutions for Mahara. We will use Moodle.or to collaborate and get feedback on the specs and of course all the new software will be released as open source to Moodle (ideally integrated into core) smile. All users of Moodle, in all the different contexts, stand to benefit from this initiative.

Michael Olneck, professor of educational policy studies and sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, kindly agreed to let HASTAC upload his paper, Insurgent Credentials: A Challenge to Established Institutions of Higher Education. 

Michael frames badges as a disruptive force within higher education, provoking his readers (initially directed towards sociologists) to evaluate the assumptions and norms of traditional institutions to legitimize and certify knowledge and skills. As Michael writes, his paper "establishes the need to develop sociological explanations for recent developments of certification of skill and knowledge mastery as possible substitutes for, or supplements to, conventional college and university degrees."

Abstract

Badges are digital tokens that appear as icons or logos on a web page or other online venue. Awarded by institutions, organizations, groups, or individuals, badges signify accomplishments such as completion of a project, mastery of a skill, or marks of experience. Learners fulfill the issuer-specific criteria to earn the badge by attending classes, passing an exam or review, or completing other activities, and a grantor verifies that the specifications have been met and awards the badge. Numerous groups, organizations, community projects, and web entities currently issue badges, and they are gaining currency in higher education as well. Although many details remain for badges to be broadly accepted, they represent a different approach to credentials, one that places the focus on individual students and their learning accomplishments.

The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

BadgeWidgetHack is a very basic, lightweight OBI-compliant badge displayer. The UI is not very sexy, but I figure that's ok since you only have to use it once. After you walk through the wizard you...

Badges for lifelong learners' knowledge and skills are considered a 'game-changing strategy.'