Mozilla's Open Badge Infrastructure offers a uniform, open-source process for documenting badges.

Nationwide, more and more employers say that they want to know what students have learned, what they have accomplished, and what they can do. One way to document and verify that information is digital badges, a solution gaining nationwide attention. And the ATE community is paying attention.

MATEC NetWorks has made public a one-hour webinar about Mozilla’s Open Badges Infrastrusture, which is a free, open source program for uniformly documenting digital badges of skills and accomplishments. The GeoTech Center and Broadening Advanced Technological Education Connections (BATEC) are exploring the use of digital badges, which they are currently calling micro-credentials, in their curricula.

In the MATEC NetWorks webinar Megan Cole-Karagory, and Strategy Lead at the Mozilla Foundation, explains how Mozilla’s non-proprietary badge system allows users to document academic credentials from colleges with skills attained online and from informal other sources. See slides from the webinar at Digital Badges: Open Badges 101.

Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure provides “hard coding of the metadata for future access and review,” she said.

The Mozilla Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation are among those advocating for digital badges as a format that more accurately meets individuals’ needs to document their competencies and employers’ needs for verification of individuals’ skills and knowledge. Digital Media and Learning Competition on Badges for Lifelong Learning are also supported by the MacArthur and Microsoft Foundations.

Michael Lesiecki, principal investigator of MATEC NetWorks, explained in an interview that badges have the potential to help adults provide evidence of skills they have learned throughout their lives. A major downside he mentioned is that badges’ proliferation could render them meaningless. But, Lesiecki pointed out, some colleges are factoring badges into their admission decisions and the badge infrastructure provides employers with a uniform process for substantiating the skills they asses when hiring and setting wages.

GeoTech Center Plans to Develop Badges

The GeoTech Center first explored the prospect of badges or micro-credentials with its 2009 study of geospatial programs at the California community colleges.

“The California project involved identifying what should be taught to meet the needs of geospatial workers,” Ann Johnson, associate director and co-principal investigator of the GeoTech Center, wrote in an email.

“The advisory committee for the project were users of the technology in business and government. Their feeling was that badges would be good BUT to be truly useful they would need to really test the individual’s skills rather than just be for a ‘attending a conference or reading an article’,” she explained.

The employers on the advisory committee told GeoTech’s leaders they want badges to be linked to skills like those delineated in the Geospatial Technology Competency Model that the GeoTech Center developed with the U.S. Department of Labor. The employers stressed the need for a mechanism to verify the badges.

Vincent A. DiNoto, Jr., director and co-principal GeoTech Center, says that the ubiquity of geospatial technologies in many fields and employers’ demand for technicians with geospatial science and technology skills are driving the center’s plan to include badges in its curricula.

During a recent Global Skills X-Change Conference presentation, DiNoto made the following points:

• Badges need to be based upon competencies that have been established and vetted by the industry, therefore the GTCM is a perfect tool to use as the foundation for the creation of these badges.
• There needs to be some form of assessment to prove that there is achievement and knowledge.
• There needs to be some way to record the badges earned and when they were earned.
• Badges should have expiration dates to encourage people to update their skills.
• Badges could be a component in an industrial certification that is based upon competencies, but should not be the sole determination of the certification.

During the panel discussion with two other educators, a person from Microsoft, and one from CompTIA, DiNoto made the case that a pathway based on competencies could shorten the time to completion of credentials and degrees. He suggested that students who have badges or micro-credentials for subsets of skills taught in a course could bypass those sections, eliminating redundancy.

Micro-credentials at Bunker Hill Community College, a BATEC partner

Bunker Hill Community College, as part of its collaboration with BATEC, is using a form of micro-credentialing in its computing information and technology programs. With BATEC’s guidance the urban college in Boston restructured these two programs to offer students a seamless, stackable progression of achievement.

The college is the first employer to recognize the micro-credentials in its hiring decisions for work-study jobs. Students that who can document their success on particular skills and at intervals that are shorter than semester-long courses qualify for employment while they pursue traditional degrees.

Madison College Tests Open Badges in Non-Credit Programs

Another community college on the leading edge of the badge trends is Madison College, formerly known as Madison Area Technical College. Its incorporation of badges into the assessments for its Dietary Manager program was featured in a recent webinar by Pearson and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The non-credit program was already linked to industry standards so was a good first choice for the college’s badging of incremental skills based on students’ performance on assignments. “Master badges” are awarded along with credits when students completed courses.

Kathleen Radinoff, dean of Continuing Education at Madison College, said she sees the badges as the college’s “guarantee” that skills have been learned. In her presentation she indicated that connecting with the college’s brand with the badges is more than marketing: it is a way for non-credit programs to break out of “silos” that have historically limited acknowledgement for what people learn in non-credit courses. She noted that 21 million US students take non-credit courses each year.

Madison College is currently talking with instructors of both credit and non-credit courses about incorporating badges into the assessments for their courses.

Based on her experience, she suggests educators who plan to add badges

• Look at their instructional strategy.
• Consider how badges will affect the fee structure for courses and the additional resources required to implement them.
• Acknowledge the faculty work involved in adopting badges.
• Plan marketing strategies to educate students and employers about the value of badges.

For more information see:

http://openbadges.org

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges.

http://www.2mbetterfutures.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Expanding-Workforce-and-Education-Opportunities-through-digital-badges.pdf