What are digital badges?
Digital badges are represent experiences and activities that help to elaborate on a learner’s education and skills. Badges provide a summary of experiences through a variety of stored metadata, such as the issuer, description and evaluation criteria for learning. The concept of digital badges had gained popularity since 2012 when Mozilla began working on the Open Badges effort. Since then, many organizations have started experimenting with the uses of digital badges. Badge use spans a variety of contexts and implementations. These implementations have goals that range from motivation and gamification to greater transparency and more closely aligned learning objectives and assessments.
Our efforts in the area
The Office of Learning Design is actively pursuing a greater understanding of the use of digital badges. Leading up our efforts, Chris Gamrat, is involved in several efforts around badges. Most recently, Gamrat co-authored an in press book chapter, “Instructional Design Considerations for Digital Badges,” with Brett Bixler and Victoria Raish. This chapter covers common instructional design considerations as well as several ideas specific to digital badges and possibilities available. The ideas center around the importance of careful reflection on the goals of the project with each following decision dependent on these goals. To develop high-quality badges, we recommend a thorough review of objectives for the learning experience, assessment of goals, and evidence that demonstrates an alignment between the objectives and the assessments.
Invitation for involvement
If you’d like to know more about digital badges or you’d like to discuss how badges might work in an IST context, contact Chris Gamrat at cgamrat@ist.psu.edu. Chris is available for discussion on digital badges in and outside of class, with other projects, or with research.