Professional Documents
Culture Documents
in Education
A Complete Guide for Educators
Table of
Contents
Why Badges? 1
Digital badges: A Working Definition 1
Achievement and Competency Badges
Badging’s Purpose:
Transparency and Trust at Scale
is awarded with an achievement badge. badges are typically issued as the result of a performance
assessment. Competency badge issuance is triggered when
Henry completes a test at the end of the some machine or human evaluator completes an assessment —
course, receives a 96% grade and gets often a direct, authentic assessment — of evidence or artifacts
that demonstrate learning outcomes or skills. The issuance
awarded a competency badge. criteria found within a competency badge is directly linked to an
underlying rubric chosen and sometimes (but not necessarily)
authored by the badge’s issuer, and used by an evaluator to score
competency evidence. An issuer may determine a score threshold
at which a badge is to be awarded, and can make that threshold
transparent to the public. The rigor behind competency badges
makes them especially valuable as career currency.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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Competency Achievement
(Scoring Usually Rubric-Based) (“Scoring” Often Pass/Fail)
Attended (Pass/Fail) 3
Ethical Thinker 1 Course (3 Assignments) CPR Training Completed
Sessions
Badging’s Purpose:
Transparency and Trust at Scale
Traditional credentials offer an opaque view of a person’s
competence. Diplomas, for example, do not certify competencies
at the granular level of an employer’s job requirements. As
such, job candidates are asked to supplement their applications
with references and often must complete pre-employment
assessments. Similarly, college applicants must submit essays
and standardized test scores to accompany their high school
diplomas.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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Badges + Gamification for Fun Badges as Credentials Used to
Though the significance of digital badging in the world of
Certify Competency and Skills
education and professional workforce is clear now, the In 2011, the world of digital badging transformed yet again
commercial badging road was originally paved in the world of when the Mozilla Foundation announced the plan to create a
consumer gaming and retail. In fact, digital badges were originally virtual technical standard for issuing, collecting, and displaying
designed to enhance a growing trend in consumer experience qualifications earned online through the form of open badges.4
strategy known as gamification, coined by computer programmer Partnering with more than 300 nonprofit organizations and
Nick Pelling in 2003.² In a nutshell, gamification is the concept government agencies, and funded by the MacArthur Foundation,
of applying video game challenges and experience to real life The Mozilla Foundation sought to utilize these open badges
processes in an attempt to increase consumer engagement with to create “a world where your skills and competencies were
a product or business. With over 36% of the world’s population captured more granularly across many different contexts, were
using smartphones³ and the mobile applications they provide, collected and associated with your online identify and could be
it only made sense to turn the entire world into a massive role- displayed to key stakeholders to demonstrate your capacities.”5
playing game for consumers, with tips, tricks, and prizes being
rewarded as accomplishments for playing along. As outlined by Linda Siefert, Director of Assessment at the
University of North Carolina Wilmington, evidence-based
assessment — which is at the root of badging — has become
a key initiative promoted by many prominent educators, “In
the twentieth century, assessment relied on tests of explicit
knowledge or what we call content knowledge in education.
Gamification: The application of game-
Since content is now available quickly and inexpensively through
design elements and game principles electronic sources, simply knowing the correct answer no longer
in non-game contexts, typically used for defines expertise... To use the language of information and
technology researchers, our focus is changing from assessing
marketing purposes. codified knowledge to assessing tacit knowledge. This requires
more complex assessments that rely on authentic demonstrations
and detailed and well-vetted rubrics.”6
Badging in Education:
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The Mechanics
of Badging
Badge Authoring Public Badge Detail Page
More than just defining badge levels, badge authoring Digital badges lose their value if they don’t contain details that
encompasses all visual, syntactic and semantic construction communicate to the viewer: how it was earned; the competencies
of the badge. Badges may be created using local (desktop or and skills it represents; the validity of the issuer; the rubric used to
mobile) or web-based graphic design programs. These can award the badge; and if the badge is still valid or had expired.
include Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Vectr, to name
a few. There are also online services that offer “point-and-click”
badge creation along with access to badge design libraries,
including Canvas Credentials and ePortfolios, OpenBadges.me
and Canvas LMS.
Did you know? Designed by Microsoft in
Badge Issuance 2005, the Xbox 360’s Gamerscore system
As for issuance, badges must go through an issuer for distribution, is considered the first implementation of a
known as a badge issuer. These act as an official allocator of
digital achievement system.
badges to individuals as validated by your university faculty.
Badge issuers may simply issue a badge, or go as far as to insert a
badge into a recipient’s folio.
Badging in Education:
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What’s in
it for You?
Institutions without a digital badging initiative will be left behind
and their students will suffer as a result because their classmates
at competing schools will have digital credentials they can
take with them and use to display their competencies and
achievements. A badging program may look different at each
institution which depends on your objectives. No matter what your
role is, you should be planning how to adopt the new technology
in order to benefit both students and faculty.
A Focus on Student Success Oftentimes, earning paths are utilized by industry leaders and
college partners when referencing evidence for competency
Badging creates a scalable way to engage students by inspiring
among applicants, as is the case with the science-based
them to achieve through positive reinforcement for these
assessment hub, Competency X, which uses badges to verify the
achievements. The badging yields compounding returns: As
skills of their rising scholars for future careers and placement in
students accrue badges, they become more invested in the
higher education.
learning and earning badge process. An example that brings
this to life: In 2014, a Chicago City of Learning initiative set out Funding to support the planning and automation of badging
to establish the world’s first citywide digital badging program. earning pathways has come from various sources. In an attempt
During just one season, more than 100,000 badges were earned to find and inspire the most novel uses of new media in support of
by Chicago students. As reported by the Chicago Department connected learning, the Digital Media & Learning Competition has
of Family and Support Services, this initiative created real world awarded over $13 million to more than 100 projects.⁸
results with “a record breaking 22,000 youth” starting their first
“jobs at thousands of worksites throughout the city.”⁷ Portable Assessment Results
Badges can extend the value of accreditation-driven assessment
Tracking Earning Pathways by making assessment results portable for students interested in
sharing proof of their competencies with the world. This is a benefit
A way of tracking a person’s learning journey, or badge earning
to students and to institutions who might use badge circulation
path, pathways vary in duration and complexity based on the
data to close the loop on the relevancy of competencies given to
number of milestones and requirements. For example, the types
students through curriculum.
of requirements for earning a single badge could range from
attending an event to getting 80% on a course assignment to Here’s an example of how badging and assessment can work
completing a community service project. together: Institutional, program, or course learning outcomes are
defined and later measured using rubrics. A program administrator
In complex cases, an earning path could be constructed as a linear,
can use software that connects to an institution’s existing assessment
contiguous series of assignments, courses or milestones, known
process, automatically issuing badges to students (or faculty) when
as a sequential learning path. In more basic cases, earning paths
an ePortfolio artifact is assessed and scored above a certain point
could work as non-sequential paths, discontinuous increments that
threshold. Let’s look at examples of badges in a student’s ePortfolio:
may be “stacked” to add up to equal a larger / macro credential.
Badging in Education:
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Badges issued in connection with course-level assessment
certify unique knowledge and skills attained in a nursing course.
Badges issued across courses could point to a program-level
outcomes, useful for both the institution and the student. As
explained by Heidi E. Parker of Purdue University, “Badges
provide the opportunity to assess skills that we do not normally
assess in more traditional forms of content-based assessment like
summative exams and reports.” Parker continues, “In addition,
there is an increasing number of institutions that are revising their
core curriculum to incorporate learning outcomes such as creative
and critical thinking, global citizenship, leadership, teamwork, and
ethical reasoning (to name a few).”⁹
Normalization of
Assessment Criteria
Another benefit of competency-based badging as a standard is
Career Readiness
the normalization of data as formed by the matching mechanisms
of the competency marketplace. For example, by leveraging Though badges obviously benefit the student as an active learner,
the standard rubrics of institutions such as the Association of it is also important to keep in mind the efficacy of badging as
American Colleges & Universities or the National Association a learning tool for career readiness and eventual recruitment
of Colleges & Employers, assessment measurement criteria within the growing standard of competency-based hiring. “Digital
becomes standardized on a massive scale, and thus normalized badges also enable genuine job applicants to benefit from
for all participating institutions. instant credibility and avoid losing out on career opportunities
to unqualified fraudsters,” says Brandye Barrington, Sr. Program
There are several benefits of normalized assessment criteria used
Manager at Oracle.
across multiple institutions:
Credit transfer: Students can easily transfer credits between Institutional Branding
institutions when they have evidence of the competency
required to obtain the credit and the corresponding digital In The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, a study
badge. was published that traced the adoption of innovations in
higher education. The study found it took 26 years for
Learning success and pathway analysis: Educators can share innovations to become a median standard among institutions,
data between their institutions using the same rubrics and with computing innovations being adopted twice as fast as
assess larger datasets in order to make decisions that improve curricular innovations. Compare those two decades and a half of
a student’s learning success. standardization with the rapid growth of badging in the six years
since its educational implementation. Not only does campus-
Employers reviewing candidates: Hiring managers will be
wide digital badging mark an institution as a part of a forward-
able to understand what each badge means, the competency
thinking movement, but it also helps to signal to the market that
required to earn the badge, and quickly see the artifact
your students are skilled and accomplished.
or pathway attached to the badge. Currently, badges are
mostly ad-hoc and not meant for helping learners share their
competencies with employers.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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How Do Badges
Circulate in the
Larger Academic
and Professional
Ecosystem?
Now, it’s one thing to issue a badge, but that doesn’t mean anything
if no one can see it. This is where the significance of sharing
comes to play — and if there’s anything the internet has made
unprecedentedly easy, it’s sharing. As a result, a primary agent in
housing and sharing badges, along with the evidence and artifacts
linked to them, is the fast growing technology of the ePortfolio. Examples of
ePortfolios are repositories for evidence (work samples, artifacts,
Digital Badging
Initiatives in
projects) and certifications that link to an individual’s competencies
and achievements. The growing usage of badges in ePortfolios
have proven to play an effective role within the competency
marketplace, specifically in its ability to promote discoverability for
competency and desired skill-sets among the marketplace actors. Education
With the digital tool, competencies are made discoverable via
badges when badge meta-data is indexed. Competencies are also
Southern California’s Del Lago
discoverable when competency badges are embedded in other
sources, such as resumes and social media profiles.
Academy and Competency X
Southern California’s Del Lago Academy is one example of an
institution leading the way in promoting a strong digital badging
initiative, primarily through their Competency X program.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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Why +
Canvas
Canvas
Student Success
On the benefits of digital badging with the Del Lago Academy, Studio?
Competency X learning assessment system, the program stated
that the digital tools allowed “prospective employers to assess
the credibility of the micro-credential,” adding that “our industry
partners loved the idea of being able to watch a quick video
that shows the learner demonstrating a concrete skill.” Along
with improved accessibility in credentialing, Competency X also
stated that badging allowed “learners to reflect on what led
to success with current and past practices. If a learner wants
to re-learn a particular skill set, all they have to do is click on
their badge to view the tips and strategies that helped them
previously reach success.”10
digital badges,” which helped “illuminate the interconnections drawn from the Lewis & Clark experience.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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Let’s dive into 5
areas where Canvas
Credentials prepares
the whole student
for post-graduation
success.
1 Showcases Students’ Hard and Soft Skills
Canvas Credentials automatically issues badges at milestones
throughout a student’s academic journey. Whether it be critical
thinking in mathematics or public speaking in communications —
badges are tangible evidence for students’ hard and soft skills.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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Badging Best
Practices:
What Works and
What Doesn’t
such as when badge evidence needs to be evaluated by multiple
reviewers or reported on in aggregate.
Badging in Education:
A Complete Guide
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Endnotes:
1. What Are Open Badges? 2017. https://badge.wiki/wiki/What_ 7. Mayor Emmanuel Kicks Off the Chicago Summer of Learning
Are_Open_Badges%3F and Earning, 2014 City of Chicago. https://www.chicago.gov/
city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press_releases/2014/jun/
www.growthengineering.co.uk/definition-of-gamification/ and-earni.html
number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide/
9. Digital Badges as Effective Assessment Tools, 2014. Purdue
openbadges.org/about/ documents/Parker_Assessment_in_Practice.pdf
5. About Open Badges. Open Badges Organization https:// 10. Digital Badges. Competency X. https://www.competencyx.
openbadges.org/about/ com/badges.html
6. Linda Siefer, Assessing General Education Learning 11. Digital Badges. Competency X. https://www.competencyx.
publications-research/periodicals/assessing-general-
education-learning-outcomes 12. Badging is the New Assessment with Lewis & Clark
College https://www.instructure.com/portfolium/badging-is-
the-new-assessment
Badging in Education:
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Powering the
World’s Smartest
Classrooms.
Instructure is an education technology company dedicated to helping
everyone learn together. We amplify the power of teaching and elevate the
learning process, leading to improved student outcomes. Today, Instructure
supports more than 30 million educators and learners at more than 6,000
organizations around the world.