Hollywood Airbrush Tanning Academy Issues Digital Badges

By Dan Hickey

My web crawler just picked up an intriguing new use of open badges as digital credentials for workplace competencies.  Hollywood Airbrush Tanning Academy partnered with Credly to offer digital badges for their graduates.  It was interested enough that I called Academy owner Simone Emmons to learn more. Sure enough, this example highlights some key points about alternative digital credentials.

IMS Global Seeks Members for Its Newest Initiative with Mozilla Foundation

By Gina Howard and James Willis 

On April 21, 2015, the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS/ IMS Global) announced the creation of the IMS Digital Credentialing Initiative. This new initiative will aim to accelerate the adoption, integration, and transferability of digital credentials and badges in schools, institutions, and corporations. With this new initiative, they are now seeking to form a group of IMS Digital Credentialing charter members.

Amanda Opperman on Competency-Based Badging

by Gina Howard and James Willis

In a recent meeting with Amanda Opperman, a blogger for Wonderlic, James Willis and Dan Hickey discussed the implications of awarding competency-based, open digital badges in the evolving workplace. Wonderlic is a private company that has been offering businesses and schools with a comprehensive library of assessments and surveys for each phase of the hiring and student selection process for the last 75 years. Wonderlic is beginning to explore the potential of competency-based, open digital badges associated with their assessments of vocational competencies, starting with criminal justice and health care.

MOUSE Badges: Learning from Successful Projects

by James Willis and Gina Howard

As we finalize the soon-to-be published Design Principles Documentation (DPD) findings, we would like to highlight one particularly successful project: MOUSE. Marc Lesser, Education Director at MOUSE, recently posted an insightful blog entry, Why We Badge: Five reasons we set out to design a digital badging system for learners at MOUSE five years ago. Highlighting some of Lesser's points, we also can discuss what the DPD team found to be true about the MOUSE badging system.

Impacting Teacher Leanring through PPD and TPCK

by Rebecca C. Itow

On Friday, I gave a talk on this paper at the SITE conference in Las Vegas on the relationship between Participatory Professional Development and Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK). Generally, I asserted that all of these innovations in technology are changing the ways learners interact with information, learning environments, their teachers, and each other. They are more connected – to everything – which means that we need to reenvision our understandings of what learning environments look like, how to design for them, and what counts as “engagement” and “learning” within them. However, this also means that we need to reenvision what professional development looks like and the ways in which it presents new information to teachers so that they can learn how to design for and teach  in these new environments. 

Read more here.
  

A Few Recent Badges Publications

by James Willis 

It's wonderful to see open digital badges research expanding rapidly. We have a brief list (with links) of recent papers that might be of interest to those studying badges. This is one effort our new project, Open Badges in Higher Education.

Open Badges at SXSWedu

by James Willis 

SXSWedu, one of the premiere educational technology conferences, will be held in a few weeks (March 9 - 12). With a very full schedule, we are happy to see several prominent panel discussions on open badges.

OERu, Open Education, and Digital Badges

by James Willis

Open Educational Resources (OERu) is a network of schools dedicated to the goals of educating anyone with internet access and a desire to learn. Bringing together institutions from around the world, OERu offers free educational opportunities and low-cost assessments for potential academic credit. A recent news release by the Open University promotes Badged Open Courses.

New Collaboration with Badge List

by James Willis and Daniel Hickey

In our continuing efforts to help facilitate open digital badges in higher education, we are looking forward to expanding our set of collaborators to include Badge List. We met with Benjamin Roome, one of the co-founders, to establish how we might coordinate our efforts.  Our initial goal is working towards an API to integrate with the learning management system, Canvas, in time for courses this summer

The OBHE Project is Seeking Collaborators

By Daniel Hickey
I am on my way to the Summit for Online Leadership and Strategy in San Antonio.  This event is hosted by UPCEA (University Professional and Continuing Education Association) and the American Council on Education.  Lawrence Ragan is chairing a panel discussion on open digital badges.  Mike Palmquist from Colorado State and Jason Fish from Purdue are on the panel and that should be a big draw as they are doing really interesting stuff.

I was happy to be invited because I think that the Summit will be a good place to find potential collaborators for the new Open Badges in Higher Education project.  As I elaborate below, my team is funded for two years to support people who are getting innovative badge systems operational in higher education.  We can offer quite a bit in terms of getting systems up and running, and documenting progress and projects in our open case library.