Digital Badges

What is a digital badge?

"A badge is an online representation of a skill or achievement you've earned" - MacArthur Foundation (2013)

Digital badges have the potential to become an alternative credentialing system, providing visible recognition in digital symbols that link directly via metadata to validating evidence of educational achievements (Gibson et al., 2015).

Recognising educational achievement both inside and outside the classroom, digital badges promote the idea that people should be able to gather useful, verifiable evidence of everything they learn, not just what they learn while attending post-secondary institutions (Briggs, 2013).

McGraw Hill Excel Digital Badges (Accredible, 2022)

Badges can represent either a certification, a credential, a competency or a soft skill (Janzow, 2014). Each badge contains a set of metadata defined by the issuer, which allows clear identification and tracking of the skills and knowledge required to earn the badge (Avella et al., 2016).

Goodwill Industries of Denver provide online soft skills training programs which help to develop the professional skills and "people skills" valued by employers (CSU, 2023)

The essence of digital badging is to provide learners with credentials that are 'resumé-worthy', and become an important part of someone's permanent profile (Streater, 2018).

The digital badging system offers mobility, allowing the individual to take all of their expertise, training, certificates, skill set information and awards with them (Avella et al., 2016). Digital badging makes the individual more mobile and helps the acquiring company to know what the new employee can do.

Avella et al. (2016) state that, "digital badges would prove helpful in determining how well an employee works and what additional work or training needs to be undertaken to make the employee productive in the new position" (p. 13).

PoRtability

Validate your certification anywhere you go, right from your phone.

SHAREABILITY

Share your digital credentials to your preferred social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Lifelong learning

By giving learners the compatibility and transparency that they need to validate their learning achievements, badging can promote lifelong learning and add value to professional development (Streater, 2018). For example, employees may be more motivated to undertake workplace training or up-skilling if they are presented with 'resumé-worthy' credentials that can be transferrable between jobs.

Badges introduce the possibility of extending engagement to all aspects of a person's lifelong learning journey (Flintoff et al., 2016).

Badges v Traditional Degrees

For many employers, undergraduate degree are a check box that communicates very little about the skills a particular candidate possesses. Their value comes mostly from presumed general authority of the granted institution. Briggs (2013) outlines several ways in which digital badges can transform the existing system:

Student designed learning: Students can customise learning goals. Students won't just earn badges, they'll build them in an act of continues learning.
Skills-based Learning: Students can get awarded badges for obtaining specific skills, such as Powerpoint, Photoshop or Excel competency.
Outside learning: Badges recognise experience gained through community efforts, online learning venues, and work-related projects.
Anti-Monopoly: It is an open movement.
Not-for-Profit: Open systems make the world more egalitarian and less expensive.
Fluidity: Digital badges can adapt to changing job markets more quickly than school curricula.
Recognition: Recognising and assessing learning serves to motivate learning.
Matching Candidates with Employers: Each badge would allow the employer to click through to more detailed levels of evidence and explanation.
New Ways of Attracting Students: The sharing of badges will help programs and schools connect with new prospective students.
More Adult Learners: The sharing digital badges should help busy adults who are not actively considering further education to see the value of a particular program.
Professional Collaboration: Badges quantify the soft skills of teamwork that are pivotal to success in may professions today.
Clearly Articulated Learning Practices: Deciding what to recognise with badges pushes programs to articulate their learning outcomes.

digital Standards

"Open badge is a digital standard to recognise various achievements, participation, membership, personal qualities and exceptional skills, or the completion of a learning journey" - Cities of Learning (2021)

Because the system is based on an open standard, earners can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of their achievements - both online and off. Badges can be displayed wherever earners want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning (Mozilla , 2017).

Characteristics of an 'open badge'

Open badges are verifiable, portable digital badges with embedded metadata about competencies, achievements, skills or attitudes of their recipients (Open Badge Factory, 2023). They comply with Open Badges standard and are sharable across the web. Each badge is associated with an image and information about the badge, its recipient, the issuer, and any supporting evidence (1EdTech, 2023).

Open Badges are:

Free and open - It's a free software and technical standard any organisation can use.
Transferable - Badges can be collected from multiple sources.
Stackable - Badges can be stacked to tell the full story of your skills and achievements.
Evidence-based - Hard-coded metadata links back to the issuer, criteria and verifying evidence.

Open Badges contain specific information to help verify skills and achievement (AMT Lab, 2015)

Open Badge ecosystem

Issuer - An application that creates and issues Assertions to earners that conform to Open Badge specifications.
Displayer - An application that displays Open Badges.
Host - An application that can publicly host and export Open Badges for earners.

(1EdTech, 2023)

More and more classrooms are embracing personalised learning strategies in ways that leverage technology and honour learning as it happens. Open Badges offer a solution to do this with validity and professionalism (1EdTech , 2023).

Badge Creation

An example of a digital badge created for EUQ650 Future Trends in Learning Design designed using Accredible.

REFERENCE LIST

1EdTech. (2023). What are open badges?. https://openbadges.org/

Accredible. (2022). When to When to Use Digital Badges vs Digital Certificates in Higher Education. https://www.accredible.com/blog/when-to-use-digital-badges-vs-digital-certificates-in-higher-education

AMT Lab. (2015). An introduction to open badges. https://amt-lab.org/blog/2015/4/an-introduction-to-open-badges

Avella, J. T., Ellis, L. E., & Nunn, S. G. (2016). Digital badges and micro-credentials: Historical overview, motivational aspects, issues, and challenges. In Bellin-Mularski, N., Ifenthaler, D., & Mah, D. K (Eds.), Foundation of digital badges and micro-credentials: Demonstrating and recognising knowledge and competencies (pp. 3-22). Springer.

Briggs, S. (2013). Out with the degree, in with the badge: How badges motivate learning and 7 tips to use them right. InformED. http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/badges-in-education/

Cities of Learning. (2021, March 19). Open badge essentials [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCkhuuCy2rE

Colorado State University. (2023). Online soft-skills training program aims to boost resumes, businesses. https://newsmediarelations.colostate.edu/2017/02/06/online-soft-skills-training-program-aims-to-boost-resumes-businesses/

Educause. (2012). 7 things you should know about… badges. https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2012/6/eli7085-pdf.pdf

Educause. (2022). 2022 Educause Horizon report: teaching and learning edition. https://library.educause.edu/-/media/files/library/2022/4/2022hrteachinglearning.pdf?la=en&hash=6F6B51DFF485A06DF6BDA8F88A0894EF9938D50B

Flintoff, K., Willis, James., & McGraw, B. (2016). A philosophy of open digital badges. In Bellin-Mularski, N., Ifenthaler, D., & Mah, D. K (Eds.), Foundation of digital badges and micro-credentials: Demonstrating and recognising knowledge and competencies (pp. 23-40). Springer.

Foster, J. C. (2013). The promise of digital badges. Techniques, 88(8), 30-34. https://www.acteonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Techniques-NovDec2013-PromiseDigitalBadges.pdf

Gibson, D., Ostashewski, N., Flintoff, K., Grant, S., & Knight, E. (2015). Digital badges in education. Education and Information Technologies, 20(2), 403–410. 10.1007/s10639-013-9291-7

Halavais, A. M. (2012). A genealogy of badges: Inherited meaning and monstrous moral hybrids. Information, Communication and Society, 15(3), 354-373. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.641992

Janzow, P. (2014). Connecting learning to jobs through digital badges. The Catalyst, 42(2), 9-11. https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/connecting-learning-jobs-through-digital-badges/docview/1627939612/se-2

MacArthur Foundation. (2013, June 20). What is a badge? [Video file]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDmfE0noOJ8&t=2s

Mozilla. (2017). Badges. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges

Open Badge Factory. (2023). About open badges. https://openbadgefactory.com/en/about-open-badges/

Streater, K. (2018). Digital badging: The future of professional development. https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/digital-badging-the-future-of-professional-development/

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