Designing Effective Digital Badges

Applications for Learning

Joey R. Fanfarelli, Rudy McDaniel

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351394352
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Inclusive Education

Designing Effective Digital Badges is a hands-on guide to the principles, implementation, and assessment of digital badging systems. Informed by the fundamental concepts and research-based characteristics of effective badge design, this book uses real-world examples to convey the advantages and challenges of badging and showcase its application across a variety of contexts. Professionals in education, game development, mobile app development, and beyond will find strategies for practices such as credentialing, goal-setting, and motivation of their students.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: What Are Digital Badges, and Why Should We Care?

Overview

This chapter introduces Designing Effective Digital Badges by explaining why the study of digital badges is timely. We argue that they are important to understand and consider when thinking about how best to educate and train contemporary learners; learning that is happening in an environment filled with unprecedented opportunities, but also significant challenges. We review coverage of digital badging technologies in both research and mass media contexts and then explain why these objects have seen so much attention in the news and media (and, ultimately, why we chose to write a book about them). We discuss common definitions for digital badging and differentiate them from their analog ancestors and from micro-credentials, open badges, and achievements, terms often used interchangeably in the literature. Over the last decade, various researchers, practitioners, and journalists have discussed digital badges at various times in hopeful, hyperbolic, and critical ways, and we briefly discuss each of those perspectives in this Introduction. We close the chapter by providing a personal note from the authors about why we chose to write this book as well as with a concise summary of each of the ten subsequent chapters in the book.

Why Badges?

At the 2017 gathering of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology’s (AECT) annual conference, a number of educators and researchers crowded into an auditorium to hear from a panel organized by Dr. Kyle Peck, a researcher at Penn State University. This panel was presenting on digital badging and the format was somewhat unusual in that it also included a collaborative digital activity with the large audience. Dr. Peck and his assembled panelists walked the attendees through a collaborative Force Field Analysis activity, a technique from social science for examining the forces that influence a situation (Lewin, 1946). The idea behind this technique is to articulate the forces that are promoting movement toward a particular goal as well as those forces that are inhibiting movement toward that same goal. These are classified as helpful and hindering forces, respectively, and a collection of each can be useful for understanding the broader context surrounding a particular issue or idea. For example, if one wished to introduce a new technology into an elementary school classroom, this type of exercise reveals those factors that might assist the technology’s adoption (e.g., enthusiasm of students, willingness of instructor) as well as those that inhibit it (e.g., complexity of technology, politics of the school district).

In Peck’s exercise, attendees typed into a shared online spreadsheet what they considered to be the forces promoting digital badges (in the example spreadsheet, these were referred to as digital micro-credentials) and the forces inhibiting them. In the promoting column, the crowdsourced advantages included entries such as the need for more accurate credentials, the desire of employers for more precise measurements of employee skills and abilities, and the potential to enhance personalized pathways for learners. Attendees also noted that the devices were useful as disruptors to shake up the status quo, that they are useful for training programs, and that they meet the needs of a fundamental human desire for simplicity and clarity.

In the inhibiting forces column, the audience added entries expressing concerns over student privacy, a reluctance of faculty to change, a lack of attention from political support structures, a perceived threat to intrinsic motivation, and federal financial aid restrictions that mean students often cannot begin learning until the semester officially starts. Interesting here was the fact that these forces all came from different places – some from educational practice, some from attitudes and beliefs, and some from specific policies regarding items such as financial aid. Other rows in the inhibiting section of the spreadsheet pointed out a problematic factor with usage and adoption as a chicken-and-egg problem, in that employers are not likely to accept badges until they are widely issued by learning institutions and learning institutions are not likely to widely issue digital badges until employers seem to care about them. As usual, the often-uneasy relationship between industry and academia was noted as a potentially inhibiting force for digital badges.

What became apparent quickly in this exercise was that for every factor listed by an attendee in the promoting column, a factor in the inhibiting column soon followed. By the end of the first phase of this exercise, the group had identified an approximately equal number of promoting and inhibiting forces. Later phases of this Force Field Analysis exercise then walked participants through the process of assigning importance and modifiability scores to each identified item and then collaboratively prioritizing each item in each list. A strategic value for each item could then ultimately be calculated by multiplying importance by modifiability and would allow the master list to be ultimately down-sampled into a trimmed priority list and a final priority list of forces along with an accompanying action plan to address each item. The purpose of this final step is to identify those factors that are most appropriate to tackle if one’s goal is to reduce inhibiting forces, augment promoting forces, and ultimately smooth the road for introducing a new type of technological intervention to the educational landscape.

This Force Field Analysis was a great way for this community of educators and researchers to generate a list of the perceived advantages and disadvantages of digital badges, along with the various social and political contexts that they believed could promote or suppress their implementation and adoption. It is clear that this community possessed strong feelings about the potential of this technology, but that they also saw challenges to effectively using and adopting digital badges. Furthermore, many attendees noted during the discussion the potential impact digital badges could have on learning, if deployed thoughtfully and with appropriate supports from necessary infrastructure. Indeed, in one of Peck’s co-authored chapters, he acknowledged digital badges’ transformative potential as a “disruptive technology that will increase the transparency and quality of educational products, while transforming communication about what has been learned” (Peck, Bowen, Rimland, & Oberdick, 2016, p. 82). The data on the spreadsheet corroborated this vision, but also introduced a number of difficulties that needed addressing. However much in agreement many of the conferences delegates seemed with this long-term utopic vision for digital badges and micro-credentials, the AECT attendees also had numerous short-term concerns about the feasibility and operation of digital badges operating at scale.

We hope that this book can provide some guidance to digital badge enthusiasts and badging novices alike about how to strengthen their chances for successful outcomes with badges. With modern digital media technologies such as learning management systems, online portals, and videogame engines, building a digital badging system has become quite approachable. Many modern systems make implementing digital badges as easy as drag-and-drop. Building an effective digital badging system, however, requires careful thinking about desired outcomes, design, implementation, evaluation, usability, and many other factors that we will cover in this book.

Why Now?

Before delving too deeply down into the level of detail that might differentiate an effective system from a non-effective system, let us take a moment to discuss the sociopolitical contexts surrounding digital media technologies for teaching and learning in the early 2010s. This helps us understand why these objects generated so much excitement for many educators and technologists, and some measure of concern or even controversy from others. To set the tone for digital badges’ grand unveiling, we need to go back a little further in time from the 2017 AECT conference to some remarks made by Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, six years earlier (US Department of Education, 2011). These remarks characterize some of the dominant political and educational themes surrounding the launch of digital badging as a major movement in educational technology and the learning sciences.

Speaking at the onset of an event sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, Secretary Duncan described a need for collaborative partnership and educational reform to address educational challenges and help build and sustain a world-class educational system. Working within the Obama Administration, Duncan spoke of a “cradle-to-career vision for reform,” suggesting that the most ambitious educational system reforms should consider education not as a snapshot at a particular moment in one’s academic timeline, but rather as the progression of an educational experience. Such an experience runs from the earliest days of early childhood education all the way through college and into career training programs for workforce development. It should capture evidence of formal learning, such as what students do in classrooms and laboratories, but also evidence of informal learning from trips to museums, visits to science centers, scouting expeditions, and projects done at home. Further, a cradle-to-career vision would need to account for a closer relationship between academic experiences and professional internships, better closing the loop between what are often disjointed learning experiences.

There are a number of challenges with such an ambitious initiative. One fundamental challenge deals with understanding and tracking the types of learning that are happening at each of these stages. There are no standardized learning modules, for example, that are flexible enough to map the content of an entire university course’s content into a digital form that provides easy interfacing with the informal learning experiences described above. Further, it is difficult to know precisely where a student excels and where she struggles based on a single grade or a summative evaluation at the end of an overall experience. To fine-tune a cradle-to-career educational support system, we need more granularity. Further, our educational support structures must be robust enough to scaffold learning as it occurs longitudinally over time, not just as a snapshot at certain points through the K-12 or higher education experience. As Duncan explained, investing in education does not only mean investing in the physical buildings and instructional personnel that are present during each of these phases of education, but it also means thinking about educational technology and where this technology can assist us with these recognition and evaluation challenges. As it turns out, one of the technologies both Secretary Duncan and the MacArthur Foundation were excited about was digital badges.

Duncan’s words kicked off the fourth iteration of the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning (DML) Competition. Earlier competitions, which distributed funding ranging from $5,000 to $250,000 to help support pilot projects with technology and learning, focused on themes such as innovation and knowledge-networking (DML #1), participatory learning (DML #2), and learning labs for the 21st century (DML #3). This particular challenge focused on the theme of digital badging, which Duncan characterized as systems using digital devices that could “help engage students in learning, and broaden the avenues for learners of all ages to acquire and demonstrate – as well as document and display – their skills.” He spoke about the potential for digital badges to “speed the shift from credentials that simply measure seat time, to ones that more accurately measure competency.” He further noted the usefulness of digital badges for both informal and formal classroom spaces, in the physical academic classrooms of K-12 and university environments and in sciences, museums, adult education systems, the military, the community, and everywhere in between. Duncan also spoke to the potential usefulness of digital badges for workforce reintegration, and introduced a “Badges for Heroes Challenge” that provided a $25,000 prize “for the best badge concept and prototype that serves veterans seeking good-paying jobs in today’s economy.” The ambition of the digital badging competition was grand and the scope was broad. MacArthur ended up receiving hundreds of grant proposals from many different types of industry, academic, and nonprofit organizations, all with different ideas for how badges might be used to improve learning.

Ultimately, the MacArthur DML badging competition awarded funding to 30 different projects in two primary categories: (1) badges for lifelong learning, and (2) teaching mastery and feedback (with additional support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Grant award amounts ranged from $25,000 to $175,000. Each of these projects proposed different outcomes and purposes for their badging systems: some wished to enable more individualized learning and skills development, some focused on social learning, and others looked to motivate learning in non-academic settings such as after school programs and museums (DML Research Hub, 2012). Winners included many institutions other than traditional universities and colleges, including Disney-Pixar, NASA, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Peer 2 Peer University, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Carey, 2012a). The hope was that by infusing some of these aspiring projects with both funding and institutional support, researchers could begin to evaluate the conditions in which badging systems could thrive. The projects would also be doing some good for the world at the same time, perhaps by motivating reluctant learners, providing information in a more palatable form to create more user-friendly experiences, or helping out-of-work but skilled practitioners begin new careers.

We will discuss each of these characteristics in detail throughout this book – digital badges as motivational devices, digital badges as informational tools, and digital badges as credentialing devices for performance and skill. We also consider digital badges for other purposes, and we will even speculate about hypothetical uses for the digital badges of the future. For the MacArthur Foundation and a number of government agencies and organizations, however, addressing exigencies within our modern educational landscape was a pressing concern. For such organizations to team up, acknowledge, and fund the potential of a specific educational technology in both formal and informal learning scenarios was significant. This partnership and the launch of this fourth DML competition helped to catalyze a decade of research on digital badging that has since given us much new data to consider with regard to their utility and effectiveness for teaching and learning.

Early Hopes and Concerns

Duncan’s remarks were followed by a whirlwind media tour for digital badges, with a number of articles and editorials introducing them more broadly to academics and the general public alike. Kevin Carey, who serves as vice president for education policy and knowledge management at New America, a non-partisan think tank, wrote a series of editorials and articles about badging for non-technical audiences. In an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Carey wrote of “a future full of badges,” noting the nonprofit organization Mozilla’s role in jumpstarting badge-related research and development, notably through the Lifelong Learning Competition Arne Duncan had recently headlined (Carey, 2012a). Major characteristics of this technology, according to Carey, included support from powerful technology partners such as Mozilla, an open-source methodology to design and implementation, and a radical shift in philosophy in thinking about how we credential learning in education.

This shift ...