Digital Badges in Education

Trends, Issues, and Cases

Lin Y. Muilenburg, Zane L. Berge, Lin Y. Muilenburg, Zane L. Berge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317513360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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 comprehensive overview of this emerging tool. A digital badge is an online-based visual representation that uses detailed metadata to signify learners' specific achievements and credentials in a variety of subjects across K-12 classrooms, higher education, and workplace learning. Focusing on learning design, assessment, and concrete cases in various contexts, this book explores the necessary components of badging systems, their functions and value, and the possible problems they face. These twenty-five chapters illustrate a range of successful applications of digital badges to address a broad spectrum of learning challenges and to help readers formulate solutions during the development of their digital badges learning projects.

PART I

Trends and Issues

1

HISTORY AND CONTEXT OF OPEN DIGITAL BADGES

Sheryl L. Grant

Open badges are digital image files that contain metadata, and their origins are inseparable from the ethos of open source code and software protocols. No central authority controls them—they can be created by anyone with access to badge-issuing platforms or technical skills, and like most of the Internet, they follow transfer protocols that in theory allow them to be moved by their owners with relative ease across the Web, from one platform or site to another. By clicking the image file, viewers can access relevant information about the badge: criteria to earn it; evidence, such as a portfolio or testimonials; and other kinds of information that describe who issued the badge, to whom, and when.

Open digital badges emerged from a new culture of learning made possible by the connected and pervasive digital systems of the twenty-first century. These same highly social and interactive systems also presented us with a new culture of reputation, influencing how we build identities online that others find credible and meaningful. A combination of social media and mobile technology has created unprecedented potential to broadcast to anyone, anywhere, at any time, and the ensuing flood of information—and learning—has raised a fundamental human question: How can we tell what is good? This is not an inconsequential question, as we know from many of our current online practices to measure and rank everything from food, services, products, entertainment, and even dating. Placing open digital badges in the context of the new culture of reputation is not simply a matter of semantics, however. While it is true that digital badge systems have pushed designers to think in innovative ways about pedagogy, learning outcomes, and assessment, these same systems also enjoin us to think carefully about what it means to build reputations online that are grounded in verified, quality judgments. Indeed, many of the badge systems being built include a suite of features that are common in reputation systems: voting, tagging, ranking, rating, “liking,” and commenting, to name a few.

The fusion of these two cultures—learning and reputation—is not strictly a digital phenomenon, although technology has created novel ways of merging the two. In the relatively static infrastructure of twentieth-century education, we are wed to a system of accreditation and endorsement to measure what is good. Our traditional institutions of learning also use grades, degrees, diplomas, licenses, and certificates to determine who is good. To gauge the quality of this “goodness,” a small but influential cottage industry has, for better or for worse, sprung up to measure and rank schools and universities based on a combination of hard data, peer assessment, and intangibles, such as faculty dedication to teaching. While the obvious purview for both students and schools is to teach and learn, the overarching system described above blends different systems of assessment and reputation in order to determine what it means to be good—or competent, or proficient, or even masterful—in the eyes of others.

Open digital badges arise from the same human urge, which is to instill a degree of trust that people are who they say they are and can do what they claim they can do. Badges also reflect a desire to resolve a peculiar and novel problem in the digital age: To whom does reputation belong online? Only on the Internet can reputation be tethered to a proprietary system. For example, eBay, which implemented one of the first peer-to-peer evaluation systems, prevented Amazon from importing customer reputation to its own platform (Resnick, Kuwabara, Zeckhauser, & Friedman, 2000). The idea that our reputations could belong to anyone other than us is a recent phenomenon that applies equally to learning platforms like Khan Academy or massive open online courses (MOOCs) where people earn badges that can only be displayed within the technical system where they were awarded. The badges are thus only visible to those who are logged into the system, which limits the value and portability of the reputation to outside audiences. Open digital badges, however, contain standard technical specifications, and these open standards (not to be confused with academic standards) help foster a digital medium of exchange for credentials that previously did not exist, allowing learners to collect, keep, and share the reputation they have built across different platforms.

Principles of Credibility

Badges also display as interactive image files instead of lines of text, a deceptively simple difference that obscures deeply held beliefs about how we evaluate the reliability and validity of someone’s reputation—including his or her learning. In theory, these open standards or metadata (data about the data) contain evidence of learning, a type of digital shortcut that makes it possible to verify quality judgments directly. While linking a credential to its evidence is not a novel idea, it does take new meaning online. In an open digital badge, if we wish to assess what is good, we have the option to investigate this claim directly. The implications of this cannot be overstated. Our twentieth-century model of education is based on the “assumption that teaching is necessary for learning to occur” (Thomas & Brown, 2011, p. 34), and yet, in the new culture of learning and reputation, digital technologies have made it possible for us to learn anywhere, anytime, from anyone, on any device, including from reputable, trusted sources. As a result, how we learn in the twenty-first century is shifting from “issues of authoritativeness to issues of credibility” (Davidson & Goldberg, 2009, p. 27). Open digital badges will push us to define in greater detail what this means both in theory and practice. We may be tempted to embrace badge systems that conform to more established systems because they align with recognizable conventions and currency. However, if the goal is to create more relevant systems, we need to ask what it means to ground reputation in verified, quality judgments and build novel systems that do more than replicate the status quo of the twentieth century. Open digital badges present us with a design challenge to advance principles of credibility that we have yet to clearly define. These principles are being embraced (if not exactly defined) in different fields like design and software engineering, where employers put less stock in schooled learning and traditional credentials, and reputation and evidence alone can be keys to advancement. Perhaps best known for these practices are Stack Overflow, the popular social Q&A site for programmers, and GitHub, a code repository for developers. In these communities, programmers leave traces of evidence that signal what they can do, both technically and socially. Recruiters looking for talented programmers can find potential job candidates in these spaces, as well as verify communication and collaboration skills that can be hard to gauge from a résumé (Capiluppi, Serebrenik, & Singer, 2013).

This vision of connecting different spheres of learning, both formal and informal, with some type of alternative credential like badges has been around for decades. In 1980, Green wrote,

[C]ertificates, degrees, transcripts, and the like serve an essential role in establishing the ‘medium of exchange’ that permits activities performed in one institution of the system to be substituted for the same activities as if they had been performed in another. Perhaps some other devices could serve the same function but not be recognized as degrees, certificates, diplomas, or transcripts. (p. 78)

Nearly three decades later, at the 2007 American Educational Researchers Association (AERA) conference, Eva Baker proposed a similar medium of exchange she referred to as “qualifications” in her presidential address:

My image of a Qualification is validated accomplishment, obtained inside or outside school. A Qualification means simply that, at various levels of challenge, a student has attained a certified trusted accomplishment…. Some Qualifications, such as securing a certification in cardiopulmonary resuscitation or network management, may demand brief, intense involvement. Qualifications would be aligned with integrated goals, tasks, learning experiences, criteria, and tests. (Baker, 2007, p. 313)

James Gee, professor of literacy studies at Arizona State University, was thinking about a similar system in 2007 when he first pitched the idea of digital badges as alternative credentials based on how video games use them to mark progress and show self-determined pathways (Moodie, 2011). In 2011, the two streams of thought merged when the MacArthur Foundation funded Mozilla to design a massively decentralized infrastructure based on standard technical specification that would connect learning across different spheres through the open badge infrastructure (OBI), much as Baker, Green, Gee, and others envisioned.

Badge-Friendly Policies

It is arguable whether digital badges would have gained the traction they have were it not for economic and policy conditions that make the timing ripe for an innovative system of alternative credentials. Badges dovetail nicely with the elimination of seat-time requirements, for example, and the potential to design more flexible learning pathways or scaffolds has made digital badges particularly relevant to competency-based learning. In 2011, Secretary Arne Duncan of the U.S. Department of Education announced, “Badges can help speed the shift from credentials that simply measure seat time, to ones that more accurately measure competency” (U.S. Department of Education, 2011, n.p.). The U.S. Department of Education (n.d.) defines competency-based learning as “a structure that creates flexibility, and allows students to progress as they demonstrate mastery of academic content, regardless of time, place, or pace of learning” (n.p.). Competency-based learning is further described as a “learning revolution” that upends the traditional paradigm of credit hours or seat-time in favor of the “bundling and unbundling” of skills and knowledge (Voorhees, 2001). The National Postsecondary Education Cooperative (U.S. Department of Education, 2002) has undertaken the job of describing skills, abilities, and knowledge necessary to perform specific tasks. Furthermore, badges fit neatly with the efforts of the National Skills Standards Board, created under the Goals 2000: Educate America Act of 1994, a coalition that seeks to catalyze a national system of skill standards, assessment, and certification. Combined, these policy initiatives could have far-reaching implications if the open badges infrastructure can create a trusted medium of exchange that ties it all together.

The key word is trusted. Competency-based learning brings with it a set of challenges that have no easy solutions. The concept of validity has significant meaning in a competency framework (Voorhees, 2001) and badges that represent validity may succeed or fail on this alone. The measure of a competency must have face validity and reflect the true meaning of that competency, or at least be reasonably associated with that competency within a given context—not a simple task. Competencies are also expected to have predictive validity such as the ability to gain admission to college or the ability to perform specific skills associated with a job. Reputation is built on valid, verified, and quality judgments, not just for badge earners, but also for the badges themselves and the medium of exchange within which they are expected to have currency.

Unbundling Education

For an innovation that is less than five years old, open digital badges have been saddled with steep expectations. Badges caught the imagination of the media even before fully functioning use cases were deployed and evaluated, particularly for their potential role in higher education. For many middle-class American families, college education has become an economic burden in a climate where student loan debt is close to one trillion dollars, surpassing both credit card and auto debt combined (Brown, Haughwout, Lee, Mabutas, & van der Klaauw, 2012). As government revenues for post-secondary education continue to decrease, the cost of attending college has increased 2.6 times since 1980 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011). For academic years 2005–2006 to 2010–2011, 85 percent of students required some form of financial aid (90 percent for students attending for-profit universities), not including loans made directly to parents (Brown et al., 2012). Over half of all college undergraduate students take six years to complete their degree, and those who drop out lack a degree to help pay down their debt. For those who do graduate, employment is not always guaranteed.

Parallel to this economic reality, anyone with an Internet connection has access to free, open educational content, personalized learning systems, and MOOCs, or what some refer to as the “great unbundling of higher education” (Economist, 2012, n.p.). Economists predict that university business models may adapt to subscription-style revenues and greater acceptance of credits earned elsewhere. Others propose that accredited institutions of higher education could supplement existing systems with alternative credentials that increase the return on investment for all students, improving the economic impact on those who graduate and providing some degree of value to those who do not. Whether open digital badges will provide a degree of cohesion and sense-making to this buffet-style approach to traditional and non-traditional learning is as yet unknown.

Many Goals of Badges

In open digital badge systems where learning is the primary goal, the three main purposes of badge systems are to map progress and foster discovery, signal reputation beyond the community where it was earned, and incentivize learners to engage in pro-social behaviors (Gibson, Ostashewski, Flintoff, Grant, & Knight, 2013). If the early state of research on badges for learning is any indication, a majority of systems are using badges to motivate pro-social behavior, whether it is to encourage students to create and be expressive (Barata, Gama, & Jorge, 2013); recognize time management and carefulness (Haaranen, Ihantola, Hakulinen, & Korhonen, 2014, p. 33); take an exam within a certain timeframe and respond to student work with especially helpful feedback (McDaniel, Lindgren, & Friskics, 2012); solve exercises with only one attempt, returning exercises early, and completing an exercise round with full points (Hakulinen & Auvinen, 2014); or author and answer questions (Denny, 2013). One system awarded positive badges to students who commented on blogs, and negative badges to those who did not (Verbert et al., 2013). In another study, badges were a proxy for rank instead of representations of certain skills, and were displayed along with progress bars and storylines to foster healthy competition and exploration toward more specific goals, such as increased lecture attendance, class participation, content understanding, problem-solving skills, and general engagement (O’Donovan, Gain, & Marais, 2013). Another pilot used badges as an abstraction of learning analytics data through a data visualization dashboard designed to improve collaboration and increase awareness of personal activity (Charleer, Klerkx, Odriozola, Luis, & Duval, 2013). Very few of these pilots issued open digital badges, although those that did seemed to have limited value outside the classroom. In pilots where students could share badges with peers, it was unclear if they felt any reason to do so (Davis & Singh, 2015).

Few of these pilots integrated badges into the course’s formal gradi...