Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The Varied Functions of Digital Badges in the Educational Assessment BOOC


by Dan Hickey and Tara Kelley


This extended post details how open digital badges were incorporated into the Education Assessment Big Open Online Course.  In summary there were four types of badges:
  •  Assessment Expertise badges for completing peer-endorsed wikifolios and an exam in each of the sections of the course (Practices, Principles, and Policies)
  •  Assessment Expert badge for earning the three expertise badges and succeeding on the final exam
  • Leader versions of the Expertise and Expert badges for getting the most peer-promotions in the networking group
  • A Customized Assessment Expert badge for completing a term paper by assembling all of the insights gained across the 11 wikifolios assignments into a coherent professional paper.  This badge allows earners to indicate the state, domain, or context in which they have will have developed local expertise about assessment.
Along the way, this post explores (a) how open badges are different than grades and other static (i.e., non-networked, evidence-free) credentials, (b) how we incorporated evidence of learning directly into the badges, and (c) the role of badges in making claims about general, specific, and local expertise.

Previous posts describe the BOOC, the peer promotion and endorsement features, the role of the textbook, and how one student experienced the course and the badges.  Future posts will describe the code and interface used to issue them in Course Builder, the entire corpus of badges issued, how earners shared them, and what we learned by analyzing the evidence they contained, and the design principles for recognizing, assessing, motivating, and studying learning that the BOOC badges illustrate.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Excited about Earning my Assessment Practices Badge!


by Christine Chow

In this post, I describe my experiences as a student in the Big Open Online Course on Educational Assessment at Indiana University.  The twelve-week course is halfway finished, and I just earned a digital badge for completing the first section on Assessment Practices.  The instructor, Dan Hickey, asked me to write a firsthand account of my experience in the course so far.

Friday, October 25, 2013

What Do You Mean by 'Badges?'


I was exchanging some emails with an a esteemed educational researcher and administrator about our Big Open Online Course on Educational Assessment and open courses in general and mentioned badges.  In his reply he asked, "what do you mean by 'badges'?"  After an amazing day of progress working with digital badges yesterday, it was a nice reminder of just how new this concept is. So I figured I would reply with a basic explanation and provide some timely updates on one aspect of our badges work.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

xMOOC, cMOOC, DOCC or BOOC: What's in a name?

Tomorrow is the official start of the Videogames and Learning Coursera MOOC developed by Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler at University of Wisconsin Madison.  In this post I compare the pros and cons of Coursera's more expository "xMOOC" format with the connectivist "cMOOC" format  advanced by Siemans and Downes and show how the the more modest "big" format of IU's Big Open Online Course is turning out to be a useful interim context for design-based research of hybrid formats for future massive courses that can exploit the advantages of these very different formats while minimizing the negatives.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

In Theory and In Practice: Digital Badges in Education and the Challenges that Arise.

This post is an article by Roshni Verghese about badges that features an interview with Cliff Manning and Lucy Neale of DigitalMe .  The article describes the possibilities and challenges of incorporating digital badges into Supporter to Reporter (S2R), a program designed to introduce young sports enthusiasts in the UK to sports reporting.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Google Course Builder Merges with Open edX: Implications for Our Big Open Online Course on Educational Assessment

This post considers some specific implications of the recently announced merger between Google's Course Builder platform and the Open edX platform.   These implications are specific to the Big Open Online Course on Educational Assessment that we kicked off on September 9, 2013 using Course Builder and with support from Google (and the blessings and oversight of Indiana University).  This post highlights the successful first week of the course and speculates about the future of several BOOC instructional innovations given this merger. This post is also intended to provide the 400+ students who registered for the Assessment BOOC with some explanation of the features they are now working with and some indication of how things are going.

Monday, September 2, 2013

On MOOCs, BOOCs, and DOCCs: Innovation in Open Courses

This post examines the features of Anne Balsamo's DOCC (distributed open collaborative course) in light of current issues in open courses.  This extended post discusses the pros and cons of a distributed approach to curriculum in light of the BOOC (big open online course) on educational assessment that Indiana University is offering in Fall 2013

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Purdue Veterinary Medicine Digital Badges Aim to Excite Youth and Expand Their Knowledge



by Rebecca Itow

Purdue Veterinary Medicine has designed a digital badge system to challenge Kindergarten through high school students to earn digital badges as they learn about veterinary medicine. The PVM Digital Badge system is open to any K-12 student. Youth engage with veterinary medical content online or at PVM events, and then take a short (usually multiple choice) quiz for the chance to earn their badge. This looks the start of a second wave of new projects using digital badge beyond the DML Badges for Lifelong Learning. I am particularly curious about their assessment practices in light of what I learned studying the assessment practices across the 30 DML awardees.  Plus with its campus-wide Passport badging system, Purdue really seems out in front of other universities when it comes to digital badges.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Research Design Principles for Studying Learning with Digital Badges


Web-enabled digital badges are quickly transforming the way that learning is recognized in schools and in informal learning contexts. But there are few examples or models for studying digital badges. This post introduces six design principles for studying learning with digital badges that are emerging in the Design Principles Documentation Project. These principles distinguish between summative, formative, and “transformative” research, and between using conventional forms of evidence and using the evidence contained in digital badges.

This is cross-posted at HASTAC.  Commenting is more likely there but you are required to log in to leave comments at HASTAC.  Comments are moderated here but you do not need to log in.

PS.  There are dozens of comments across several threads at that post.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Design Principles for Motivating Learning with Digital Badges

This post is cross-posted at HASTAC
Katerina Schenke, Cathy Tran, & Daniel Hickey

This post introduces the emerging design principles for motivating learning with digital badges. This is the third of four posts that will introduce the Design Principles Documentation Project’s emerging design principles around recognizing, assessing, motivating and studying learning.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Design Principles for Assessing Learning with Digital Badges

This post is cross-posted at HASTAC
by Rebecca. C. Itow and Daniel T. Hickey

This post introduces the emerging design principles for assessing learning with digital badges. This is the second of four posts that will introduce the Design Principles Documentation Project’s (introduced in a previous post) emerging design principles around recognizing, assessing, motivating and evaluating learning.

At their core, digital badges recognize some kind of learning. But if one is going to recognize learning, there is usually some kind of assessment of that learning so that claims about learning can be substantiated by evidence. Over the course of the last year, we have tracked the way that assessment practices have unfolded across the 30 DML Badges for Lifelong Learning competition winners. We have categorized these practices into ten more general principles for assessing learning with digital badges. These principles are not presented as “best practices.” Rather, these principles are meant to represent appropriate practices that seemed to work for particular projects as they designed and refined their badge systems.

Monday, May 20, 2013

Digital Badge Design Principles for Recognizing Learning

Cross-posted at HASTAC

by Andi Rehak and Daniel Hickey


This post introduces the design principles for recognizing learning that are emerging  from the Design Principles Documentation Project (DPD).  A previous post summarized how the DPD project derived these principles. This is the first of four posts, to be followed by posts outlining the principles for using badges to assess, motivate, and study learning.

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Badges Design Principles Database Project: Update on New Principles


by Daniel Hickey

This post is cross-posted at HASTAC. 
This post is a brief update about the design principles that have emerged in our analyses and interviews of the 30 DML badges awardees. We will begin posting the initial set of design principles for using digital badges to support learning. Specifically we will put up consecutive posts about the principles we have found for using digital badges to recognize, assess, motivate, and research learning. The first blog on recognizing learning with digital badges is up at HASTAC and Remediating Assessment. The second blog on assessing learning is posted at HASTAC and Remediating Assessment.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Online Open Courses Raise Eleven Issues for Higher Education

by Daniel Hickey
            I introduce eleven issues that I am going to have to address with my university in order to teach a free open online course on educational assessment.  I then explore the first issue, Intellectual Property, and how that issue intersects with instructional innovation in open courses.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Digital Badges Meeting at the NSF Headquarters Hosted by NYSCI


by Katerina Schenke
This post describes a meeting at the National Science Foundation where sixty leaders in education and research from around the country gathered to discuss digital badges and education.  Three of use presented the initial set of design principles from the Design Principles Documentation Project.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Initial Explorations in Digital Badges and Motivation

By Cathy Tran
This post introduces two of the newest members of the badges Design Principles Documentation Project and describes our efforts to examine the motivational practices and principles that we are uncovering across the 30 project funded to develop digital badges by the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning initiative