Digital Badges and Alternate Credentialling in Education

Mobility matters-especially at Purdue University. Purdue has developed and deployed a large suite of digital technologies designed to improve student success.

Passport: A learning system that demonstrates academic achievement through customizable badges.

Passport guides students through tasks by providing a framework to submit documents, share links, complete quizzes, or gather approvals. Instructors can follow each student's progress and connect badges with course objectives.

With the system's badge-builder tool, instructors can select different styles, colors, icons and fonts for each badge, or upload their own images. They also can set expiration dates for challenges, or reset tasks when a student's first attempt is not satisfactory.

Achievements — such as essays, online discussions, blog posts and podcasts, to name a few — can then be translated into a numeric-based evaluation system for grading purposes.

As web-based learning platforms proliferate, and education increasingly happens in formal and informal settings and in both real and virtual classrooms, there is a growing need for a new form of credentialing that reflects these changes.

Will the Open Badges and growing number of accreditation creators help hasten the unbundling of the degree from higher ed institutions?

Article outlining a winning proposal by UK based DigitalME for the MacArthur Foundation DML Competition. Supporter to Reporter is a real-life learning programme where young people take on roles of sports journalists, media producers and mentors - DigitalME will use the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure to assess and reward skills and competencies achieved.  

I'm delighted that DigitalME will be talking about open badges alongside Doug Belshaw at our JISC RSC Scotland conference on June 8th in Glasgow. For more information see: http://www.rsc-scotland.ac.uk/Dragons/index.htm

To established members of the higher education community, the idea of using digital badges to mark academic accomplishments might seem juvenile, like getting a gold star on a kindergarten alphabet test instead of a real grade. However, many of the academics who are tied to technology see badges as harbingers of an educational revolution, and they might be right.