One of the most promising educational technology tools, open digital badges, is quickly changing curricula, job acquisition, and workforce credentialing. Learning data, assessments, and expert validation made accessible in social media create a transparency that may well be suited for critical questions in education. Operating from a framework of establishing how badges are currently employed in learning—the influential contexts of individuals and communities, and data aggregation—raises questions concerning the roles of instructors, badge providers, and learning management systems. This “philosophy” of digital badges addresses a variety of epistemological concerns including the intersection of challenges to conventional educational motivation, suggestions of how Platonic and modern models of education are complementary, and implications of how badges may represent postmodern credentialing systems. These concerns are framed around understanding how current work in digital badges can feasibly transform learning; this is both an acknowledgment of how badges are beginning to change ecosystems of informal and formal learning as well as an attempt to demonstrate how an epistemological philosophy of badges can change educators’ thinking and accelerate innovation.
“We envision a world in which the awarding and validation of qualifications no longer occur exclusively under the management of an education institution or an employer and individual students, teachers, and peers take more ownership of the learning experience and its outcomes without compromising on safety, security, and accessibility. The centralised model of the present is no longer sustainable: learning happens increasingly outside the brick-and-mortar lecture halls of schools, colleges, and universities on online platforms, within communities of like-minded individuals, or by contributing to projects and initiatives in the real-world. Learning is far more international than it used to be: key education players open campuses abroad, while students travel to different countries to improve their employability prospects. In the networked, digitally empowered world of the 21st century, education providers often do not have remit or in fact the means and capacity to cover the range of activities learners engage with, which attest their achievements, knowledge, and skills.” – (John Domingue, Director of KMi)
The shift in postsecondary credentialing and the needs of the 21st-century workforce will revolutionize higher education. Colleges and universities have vast potential to be positive agents of this change.
While the modern technology revolution has reshaped nearly every sector of society, higher education has managed to retain its fundamental structure from centuries ago. The U.S. postsecondary landscape is still largely dominated by brick-and-mortar colleges and universities where progress is marked by time spent in a classroom and is denoted by highly simplified transcripts controlled by the institutions awarding them.
The future for digital credentials is still a bit foggy. A new survey on the topic found that just over a third (36 percent) of people involved in human resources and talent management have any knowledge of the topic. Only a quarter of those surveyed have already begun using digital credentials, such as badges, in their recruitment or hiring processes.
This is a brief report and link to a slideshare from the keynote address at the 2016 Midwest Meeting of the Association for Authentic, Experiential, and Evidence Based Learning. It summarizes potential synergy between these two important educational technologies, as well as progress towards this synergy by the seven leading eportfolio platforms and between AAEEBL, the Open Badges in Higher Education Project, and the Badge Alliance.
The current credentialing ecosystem in the United States developed over time to meet the needs of society and economic structures in which often a single credential served an individual well for a stable career over a lifetime. But today’s economy and society depend on ever-higher levels of knowledge and the ability to rapidly evolve and adapt to changing circumstances. Credentials have proliferated to meet the needs of the diverse twenty-first century knowledge economy.
What is the relationship between trust and security, security and privacy, privacy and personal data protection? For some time now, I knew that there was something wrong with the so-called trust technologies, but I did not take the time to pin down what the source of the problem was. Apart from rechristening them as distrust technologies, I did not make the effort to explore any further the matter. Here are two excerpts from previous posts:
Two years ago, Coastal Carolina University implemented Coastal Composition Commons (CCC), a university-wide digital badge initiative designed to make student learning outcomes tied to first-year composition courses more visible to both faculty and students while providing a more unified experience across the program. Just before the initiative was launched, the program founders, Alan Reid (assistant professor) and Denise Paster (assistant professor and coordinator of composition), published a 2014 piece in Campus Technology that concluded with a promising outlook: “[We] anticipate that the Coastal Composition Commons project will yield positive results and become a model template for future badge programs in higher education.”
The Open Badge Network (OBN) is an Erasmus + project which brings together organisations from across Europe to support the development of an Open Badge ecosystem, promoting the use of Open Badges to recognise non-formal and informal learning.
Mozilla Open Badges is an open standard that allows all skills and achievements to be recognised and shared across the web. Schools, Universities, Employers and informal learning providers globally are using open badges to capture life long learning which is currently unrecognised.
This project aims to provide a trusted source of independent information, tools and informed practice to support people who are interested in creating, issuing and earning badges across Europe.
You can see who is already issuing badges on the map above and share your planned or active badge projects too.
New partnerships and pioneers are giving Digital Promise’s badging movement a new push
Educators are, by definition, continuous learners. They spend their careers striving to become better practitioners, whether through formal professional development activities like workshops and in-service days, or informal engagements like Twitter chats, EdCamps, and virtual coaching and communities. In fact, research conducted by Digital Promise and Grunwald suggests that educators often pursue these learning activities to satiate their own love of learning and desire to better serve their students.
While we know educators are always learning, our systems for recognizing that learning have not quite caught up. Professional development structures typically recognize educators for the time they spend learning in formal activities and rarely acknowledge informal learning. Similarly, these structures often do not focus on competency (whether an educator can apply their learning in their classrooms), which is an important step toward understanding the impact of each learning activity.
Over the past year, we have been working on a set of tools to issue, display, and verify digital credentials using the Bitcoin blockchain and the Mozilla Open Badges specification. Today we are releasing version 1 of our code under the MIT open-source license to make it easier for others to start experimenting with similar ideas. In addition to opening up the code, we also want to share some of our thinking behind the design, as well as some of the interesting questions about managing digital reputations that we plan to continue working on. You can find links to our source code, documentation, and discussion on our project homepage: http://certificates.media.mit.edu.
Last year, the MIT Media Lab began issuing digital certificates to the participants in its Director's Fellows program. The authentication behind the certificates relies on blockchain technology, best known for its connection to the cryptocurrency bitcoin.
In a blog post, Philipp Schmidt, director of learning innovation at the Media Lab, described how blockchain works: "In essence, it is a just a distributed ledger to record transactions. What makes it special is that it is durable, time-stamped, transparent and decentralized. Those characteristics are equally useful for managing financial transactions as for a system of reputation. In fact, you can think of reputation as a type of currency for social capital, rather than financial capital."
It sounds cutting-edge, but the concept of a competency-based education that results in an institution-agnostic microcredential isn't new. For well over a century, industries have worked with colleges and universities through various types of extension programs to salt the workforce with better-qualified candidates. But in the Age of the Internet, for-profit online education providers such as Udacity and Coursera have tweaked that model by collaborating with companies to develop programs tailored to their specific needs.
AT&T was one of the first companies to work with the new generation of online education providers to develop a credentialing program designed to fill a specific staffing gap. In 2014, the telecom company was in the market for "a ton" of entry-level front-end web developers, according to Udacity's then COO (now CEO) Vish Makhijani. "They knew exactly what kind of person they needed, so we knew exactly how to build a curriculum to generate those competencies," he said in an earlier interview. Together the two companies created the Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree program, Udacity's first branded microcredential. ("Nanodegree" is trademarked.)
Two weeks ago, during the Badge Alliance weekly Community Call (link) when Nate Otto presented the outcomes of the Badge Alliance Board Meeting, one of the slides (c.f. below) triggered a discussion on whether Open Badges are “just about credentialing”:
The value of things that count We live in a world dominated by credentials. Credentials carry with them a public perception of rigor, assessment, brand. Credentials are the things that “count.” They’re what we look for on resumes, and what we ask about in conversations; they’re the lodestones and compass points of our social, cultural, personal, and political worlds. Unfortunately, some of our current social problems revolve around the basic binary nature of credentials: either you have them or you don’t. Either you have something that indicates your worth or you don’t.
In recent years, digital badging systems have become a credible means through which learners can establish portfolios and articulate knowledge and skills for both academic and professional settings. Digital Badges in Education provides the first…
A couple of weeks ago, prompted by a post I wrote about Open Badges and HR, Alan Levine wrote a post entitled Seeking Evidence of Badge Evidence. He made many good points in it, which led to Nate Otto (Director of the Badge Alliance) to invite Alan, myself, and a couple of others to engage in a panel session during today’s Open Badges community call.
This post is me thinking out loud about Nate’s proposed questions:
1. What type of evidence are people collecting for badges today? 2. What are challenges and barriers to effectively using evidence with badges? 3. What services and capabilities could be solutions to these challenges? 4. Who should hold and control badge evidence? Issuers? Earners?
I’m going to answer these in two sections rather than point by point.
A more accessible and easily understood system for credentials could have a major impact on learners, employers and education providers moving forward. What will it take to make credentialing an easier process for students? How can education stakeholders validate credentials? What do employers need from today’s credentials? How can minority learners better take advantage of credentials?
Those are just some of the issues addressed in a new report from Lumina Foundation concerning the Connecting Credentials partnership, which aims to address problems that hamper students’ efforts to attain high-quality credentials in the current higher education system.
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