Of Course Alfie Kohn Dislikes Open Digital Badges: Transcending a 40-Year Old Debate

By Daniel Hickey

Serge Ravet just posted the recordings of Alfie Kohn’s virtual keynote address at the July 2014 e-Portfolio, Open Badges, and Identity Conference (EPIC), along with my response and some audience Q & A. Not surprisingly, Alfie had many concerns with digital badges being used as "extrinsic rewards." This post provides some background on this this crucial issue for the growing open badges movement.  I conclude with eight arguments against Alfie’s position on badges.  These arguments will be elaborated in the final report of the Design Principles Documentation Project (late September) and then in a formal empirical paper with Cathy Tran and Katerina Schenke.

MIT Report Questions the Fitness of the Course as the Organizational Metaphor for Higher Learning

by Nate Otto, Project Coordinator for the Badges Design Principles Documentation Project

Today saw the release of a 213 page report (PDF) from a cross-disciplinary MIT task force investigating the future of MIT Education, which makes 16 recommendations, including to further a commitment to innovation in pedagogy. The Chronicle of Higher Education today picked up on a key component of that innovation, a recommendation to explore "modularity" in the delivery of online learning environments, which could extend to experimentation in the classroom as well: Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering 'Modules' Instead.  

The question underlying the MIT task force's recommendation is whether a "course" as an organizing metaphor for learning continues to be appropriate in a landscape that sees as low as 5% MOOC completion rates.

My Participation in the First Assessment BOOC at Indiana University: A Unique Learning Experience

 Marina was a student of mine in 2003-2004 at the University of Georgia.  She worked with me on a project that provided the core theories behind the participatory approaches to motivation and assessment that eventually formed the Participatory Learning and Assessment design research framework used to create the BOOC.  I asked her to write about her experiences.  Dan Hickey

Major Highlights of the 2013 Educational Assessment BOOC

by Tara Kelley and Dan Hickey

This post summarizes the high levels of engagement and learning that occurred in the Big Open Online Course (BOOC) on Educational Assessment in fall 2013.  The course will be offered again during summer 2014, starting May 13.  You can earn a certificate, digital badge, credit, or even just learn.  For more information and to register, visit here.

AERA 2014 Sessions on Digital Badges

by Christine Chow

Several of my colleagues in the world of open digital badges are heading to the AERA conference April 4-6 in Philadelphia. It looks like there’s a great program of sessions lined up, including some interesting research on digital badges. Here’s a rundown of the badges sessions at the conference.

The Gold Standard of Education

Nate Otto, the project coordinator for the Open Badges Design Principles Documentation Project posted a nicely detailed post about credit hours at Ottonomy.net.  It covers some important ground for RMA readers.  He quotes a 2012 report by Amy Laitinen that points out that while universities continue to be organized around credit hours, they routine refuse to refuse transfer credits from other institutions.  This is a complex issue and there are certainly related issues of keeping tuition flowing for large undergrad courses.  But is a great point.  Check it out!

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.

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.

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.

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.