Articles Chapters, and Reports about Open Badges

by Daniel Hickey

Thanks to Connie Yowell and Mimi Itow at the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative, I had the pleasure of being deeply involved with digital badges and micro-credentials starting in 2010.  While we no longer have any funding for this work, my colleagues and I are continuing to engage with the community.  I am thrilled to see the continued growth and the wide recognition that micro-credentials offer new career pathways to non-traditional learners.

I get occasional requests for copies of chapters, articles, and reports that we reproduced as well as some general "where do we begin" queries.  Given that we were funded to provide broad guidance from 2012-2017, we produced some things that beginners and advanced innovators have found quite useful. We continued to publish after MacArthur ended the DML initiative and funding ran out. Here is an annotated list of resources.  We hope you find them useful!

Getting Started.

If you are new to badges and microcredentials, this might be a good place to get some basic background:

• Hickey, D. T. , (2017). Badges.  In K. Peppler (Ed.) Encyclopedia of out-of-school learning: Volume 1 (pp. 460-463). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications.

Where Badges Work Better

We studied the 30 badge systems that MacArthur funded in 2012 to uncover the badge system design principles that might guide the efforts of innovators.  This included general principles and principles for recognizing, assessing, motivating, and studying learning. These findings were collected in a short report at EDUCAUSE and our longer report:

• Hickey, D. T., Willis, J. E., & Quick, J. D. (2015).  Where badges work better. EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Brief.
• Hickey, D. T., & Willis, J. E. (2017). Where open badges appear to work better: Findings from the Design Principles Documentation Project. [Unpublished report]. Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Indiana University

We also did a followup study two years later to determine which systems resulted in a "thriving" badge-based ecosystem.  Most of the constructivist "completion-badge" systems and associationist "competency-badge" systems failed to thrive, many never got past piloting and some never issued any badges.  Turned out that wildly optimistic plans for assessing competency or completion undermined the project.  In contrast, most of the sociocultural "participation-badge" systems were still thriving, in part because they relied on peer assessment and because they assessed social learning rather than individual completion or competency:

• Hickey, D. T., & Chartrand, G. T. (2020).  Recognizing competencies vs. completion vs. participation: Ideal roles for web-enabled digital badges. Education and Information Technologies, 25 (2), 943-956.

 Endorsement 2.0 and Badges in the Assessment BOOC

An important development is "endorsement" in the Open Badges 2.0 Standards.  It allows a "BadgeClass" to carry an endorsement (e.g., from an organization, after reviewing the standards) and for each "assertion" of that badge class to carry an endorsement (e.g., from a member of that organization, after reviewing the evidence in the badge).  Nate Otto and I summarized this feature and EDUCAUSE Review and predicted its s impact in the Chronicle:  

• Hickey, D. T., & Otto, N.  (2017, February 13).  “Endorsement 2.0” to take Open Badges and e-credentials to the next level.  EDUCAUSE Review, 1-24.
• Hickey, D. T., & Otto, N. (2017, April 8).  How open e-Credentials will change education like e-commerce changed retailing.  Chronicle of Higher Education.  Invited editorial in a special issue on technology.

This chapter describes Google-funded "Big Open Online Course" ("BOOC") which really pushed the limits of open badges, including one of the first examples of "peer endorsement" and "peer promotion." It also showed that our asynchronous model of participatory learning and assessment (PLA) could be used at scale to support highly interactive learning with almost no instructor engagement with open learners:

• Hickey, D. T. & Uttamchandani, S. L.  (2017).  Beyond hype, hyperbole, myths, and paradoxes: Scaling up participatory learning in a big open online course.  In L. Losh (Ed.) The MOOC moment: Experiments in scale and access in higher education (pp. 13-36). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

The Varied Functions of Open Badges

This chapter used the BOOC badges to illustrate how badges to illustrate the range of functions of open badges.  It shows how badges support the shift (a) from measuring achievement to capturing learning. (b) from credentialing graduates to recognizing learning, (c) from compelling achievement to motivating learning, and (d) from accrediting schools and programs to endorsing learning:

• Hickey, D. T., Uttamchandani, S. L., & Chartrand, G. T. (2020).  Competencies in context: New approaches to capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning.  In Bishop, M. J., Boling, E., Elen, J., & Svihla, V. (Eds.). Handbook of research in educational communications and technology (547-592). New York, NY: Springer.

This chapter used example badges from sustainable/sustainability education to similarly illustrate these four functions of digital badges.  The badges came from Ilona Buchem's  EU-funded Open Virtual Mobility project and the FAO e-Learning Academy from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization.  BTW, the e-Learning Academy features some of the best self-paced open courses I have ever seen.  the assessments are great and you really can't prank them.  If it says the course will take two hours it is really impossible to earn the badges without spending two hours learning (I tried!):

• Hickey, D. T., & Buchem, E. (in press). Advancing sustainable educational ecosystems with open digital credentials and badges. In S.  Jagannathan (Ed.)  Educational technologies for sustainable development: How upskilling data, analysis, and digital innovations foster lifelong learning. Routledge. 

Situative Motivational Principles for Open Badges

This 2017 chapter presents the situative model of assessment that was first published in Hickey (2003) in the context of open badges.  It is my response to people like Mitch Resnick who claim that open badges will undermine intrinsic motivation.  I agree with him that they will if you use them as meaningless tokens.  So don't do that Mitch!  Instead take advantage of the fact that badges contain meaningful information and can circulate in social networks and gain more meaning, which has consistently been shown to enhance free-choice engagement:

• Hickey, D. T., & Schenke, K.  (2019).  Open digital badges and reward structures.  In K. A. Renninger & S. E Hidi S.E. (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook on motivation and learning (pp, 209-237) Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press.     

Validity vs. Credibility

Early on in my journey with digital badges, Carla Casilli blew my mind when her early blogpost explained how the "open" nature of open badges forced us to rethink validity in assessment and testing.  The ability for a viewer to interrogate the evidence contained in a badge or micro-credential means that the credibility of that evidence is more important than the validity of that credential in a traditional sense.  So I was happy to write with her about this important issue: 

• Casilli, C, & Hickey, D. T. (2016).  Transcending conventional credentialing and assessment paradigms with information-rich digital badges.  The Information Society, 32 (2), 117-129.