Digital Badges and Alternate Credentialling in Education

Next time you want to reward students or teachers for going above and beyond, consider how you might turn that recognition into something substantial—something a high-achiever can add to a résumé or an e-portfolio.

Give them a digital badge for excelling in a skill such as teamwork or leadership, and they can take it with them as evidence after they graduate or should they seek advancement in their careers.

A growing number of districts now award digital badges to students who demonstrate creativity and critical thinking, and even for noteworthy experiences in after-school programs.

“I think it’s going to raise our graduation rate,” said Nokomis Principal Mary Nadeau. “It’s going to free us from backtracking. We can just cut to the chase and say, ‘Can you do this?’”
If a student can write a great essay by the end of 10th grade, she pointed out, why should it matter that he or she struggled to write essays for most of freshman year? Once the student can show proficiency in essay writing, his or her grade on that skill in a previous course can cease to be a concern.
“Part of this change has been about equity,” Nadeau said. Deciding to believe that all students are capable of learning all of the standards, she said, “was scary.”

The objective of "Alternative Credentials: Prior Learning 2.0" is to explore how colleges and universities define alternative credentials and work with their incoming students to issue credit for their prior learning. The report defined alternative credentials as those earned in learning experiences such as MOOCs, training that issues badges, and coding or boot camps.

Open Badges – An emerging movement to recognise non-formal and informal learning

Open Badges are growing rapidly. There are deep the implications of this new technology and movement in policy, employment, informal learning and higher education. The three free sessions of this MOOC will guide you through the different aspects of employment, policy and education.

27 Feb 2017 to 2 Mar 2017

IMS Quarterly Member Meetings
Orlando, Florida
IMS Quarterly Meeting & Summit on Digital Credentials and Badges
27 February - 2 March 2017

Hard Rock Hotel

Orlando, Florida

 The February quarterly meeting will provide IMS members the opportunity to draw on the experience and knowledge of other members; provide input about key market applications that need to be addressed by IMS standards; and help shape future IMS initiatives and leadership.

Experts in digital credentials are turning to members of the public to come up with new ideas for getting colleges and universities and industry to work better together in tighten the skills gap.

The crowd-sourced competition is being run by Credly, a for-profit digital credential platform, and the Lumina Foundation, a well endowed non-profit that promotes success in post-secondary education, whether that be through college degrees, certificates or other forms of credentials. They're working with the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and the American Council on Education (ACE) to seek new approaches for using digital credentials to connect qualified workers with available opportunities.

At least one solution among those submitted will be awarded a cash prize, which could be as high as $10,000, and the opportunity to speak at an upcoming conference. As of Nov. 15, 76 solutions had been submitted.

This document is a Candidate Final / Public Draft of the Open Badges 2.0 specification, released on 08 March 2017 by IMS Global Learning Consortium. The specification will be considered final when approved by the IMS Technical Advisory Board and published as Final Release by IMS Global.

Digital platform pioneer Credly, in partnership with Lumina Foundation, the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and the American Council on Education (ACE), announced today the winner of a special ideation challenge aimed at generating breakthrough ideas to help bridge the skills gap for education and industry association leaders.

The winning submission by Chicago-based architect Larry Kearns is a concept for a web-based recruiting ecosystem that matches candidates with potential employers based on a data-driven record of their perspectives and skills, verified by digital credentials.

The judging panel found that Kearns’ proposal for a skill matching application brought a unique perspective to connecting employers and employees and offered an innovative approach to learning pathway design and the role played by industry and trade associations.

How do you prove what you know and can do these days? Sure, you can show someone your CV, résumé or LinkedIn profile, but what does that prove? Isn’t that just a bunch of claims you’ve got about the stuff you can do? Where’s the evidence? What can you point to in order to say: “This is me. This is who I am. This is my value to the world?”

Sometimes, it’s quick and easy to show that you’ve got the skills that are required. A quick on-the-spot check proves that you can build the wall, answer support questions, or stand in front of a crowd and hold people’s attention. What’s more difficult to check are things like whether you can bring a multi-stage project in on time and on budget, or how you deal with pressure. For these, we tend to rely on a combination of academic qualifications, training certificates, and recommendations from people we respect. If we’re honest, it’s all a bit of a mess.

The blockchain – the buzzy, bewildering technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin – is starting to be applied to real-world problems with

Imagine that your verified skills and abilities can be securely shared with colleagues, admissions offices, and prospective employers with a single click like we share using Google Docs, Dropbox or MicroSoft Cloud. Technology is evolving to the point where your documented competencies and achievements will be much more beneficial than those which can be gleaned today from letter grades and abbreviated class titles on a traditional academic transcript.

Presented digitally, open badges are paving the way for greater and more contextualized information exchange for learners everywhere. As mentioned in an earlier post, these badges contain searchable tags and other rich metadata, and promise to provide an additional way for employers and recruiters to identify prospective employees online who possess desirable skills sets — especially those in quickly changing fields like technology.

Students can now earn digital badges when they complete modules in Canvas, thanks to a new partnership between Credly and the learning management system from Instructure. The companies today announced the launch of Credly Learning Edition for Canvas, an application that "allows schools to design rule-based pathways that trigger the award of digital badges," according to a press release.