Digital Badges and Alternate Credentialling in Education

The AECT Systems Thinking and Change Division would like to invite you to an upcoming webinar on Thursday, February 11th, 1pm EST/10am PST, titled Digital badging: Transforming education through personalized instruction. Dr. William Watson will will examine the problems of education through a systems thinking lens and discuss how digital badges can play an important part in transforming education to a personalized, learning-focused paradigm. Register now at: https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/registrations/new?cid=yw7wlpiqgv83

Tom Vander Ark of Getting Smart has argued that “parent-managed learner profiles” will by key to both enabling and scaling personalization in education. As Tom envisions, these profiles would include all of the elements of traditional school transcripts, supplemented with richer, more nuanced, and actionable information about student learning attainment, achievement, and needs. Critical to this vision is the ability for the student transcript to both be easily portable (and under direct parent/student control) and decentralized (in that traditional education institutions should not completely control or dictate its contents).

While digital badging and its underlying technical approach points a way forward to solving some of the issues associated with a ‘distributed proof of learning’ system, there has emerged another approach that might hold even more promise: blockchain technology.

For those not familiar with the concept of the blockchain (and I wasn’t until I serendipitously learned of Gridcoin, the socially-conscious kissing cousin to the more famous crypto-currency Bitcoin), here’s a simplified description:

The blockchain is a secure, openly replicated and distributed, ledger of every…transaction ever executed. In addition to this data being openly shared amongst all participating services, there is a mechanism to constantly identify discrepancies and test them across the entire network, automatically identifying and overriding illegitimate transactions as it goes.

(excerpted from Forget Bitcoin – Blockchain is coming: Blockchain will be the banking MP3 disruptor)

In essence, blockchain technology allows a system of trust to be maintained in the absence of a central authority.

Open digital badges are changing how individuals’ credentials are recognized as publicly viewable artifacts that not only contain claims to learning, but also provide evidence of that learning.

Used in a myriad of ways to acknowledge achievements, badges can circulate in social networks to transform how learning is achieved, evidenced and distributed in real time. Badges act as a way for us to take a closer look at the skill sets a person has acquired in formal informal and online settings. Learning occurs naturally outside the classroom setting, but rarely is it recognized or valued in the same way that formal learning is. Badges help connect different types of learning settings, locations and experiences.

Here is a personal history of #OpenBadges in 50+ articles from 2013 through the middle of 2015.

The photographic, media, telecommunication and taxi industries have all experienced the pain of digital disruption but academia has so far been immune. That may be about to change.

OBHE Library curated by James WIllis III

As the federal government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seeks to lift economic growth by encouraging more innovation, it seems likely that blockchain applications will be on the agenda of the Digital Transformation Office.

Key Takeaways

Certified skills are a valuable form of academic and professional capital. In this edition of the NMC Beyond the Horizon virtual event series, we will explore the use of digital open badges. These portable machine-readable credentials can verify the mastery of competencies demonstrated across the learning experience while connecting learners to new opportunities and workforce demand.

The panelists draw on experience supporting a range of institutions in developing digital credential badge programs that verify achievements in competency-based education degree programs, open online courses, cross-curricular literacies, co- and extra-curricular activities, student affairs, and faculty development — among other areas. This online program considers topics including new ways of thinking about assessing skills as well as how digital credentials can inform new programs and strengthen relationships.

Competency-based education has been gaining momentum across the American higher education landscape over the past five years, but in the medical education field competencies have been king since 2000. That said, some main campuses are still wary of the competency-based approach to credentialing and management tools, for the most part, are lagging behind in helping institutions to support these students. In this interview, Larry Gruppen discusses competency-based programming through the medical education lens, reflects on some of the reasons why he and his colleagues launched their Master’s of Professional Health Education program and discusses some of the challenges of managing this program in the current postsecondary climate.

An Australian university with an international online student body expects to begin accepting digital badging in 2016 that could reduce the amount of time required for people to obtain their master's degrees in IT.

New “unbundled” higher education providers are constrained by the regulatory system’s reliance on the traditional bundled model.