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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google Funds an Assessment Practices, Policies and Principles BOOC

by Dan Hickey

This post describe the Big Open Online Course on assessment that was recently funded by Google.

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

Introducing Digital Badges Within and Around Universities

Dan Hickey

Sheryl Grant from HASTAC recently posted a detailed summary of resources about uses of digital badges in higher education.^[1] It was a very timely post for me as I had been asked to draft just such a brief by an administrator at Indiana University where I work.  Sheryl is the director of social networking for the MacArthur/Gates Badges for Lifelong Learning initiative.  Her job leaves her uniquely knowledgeable about the explosive growth of digital badges in many settings, including colleges and universities.  In this post, I want to explore one of the issues that Sheryl raised about the ways badges are being introduced in higher education, particularly as it relates to Indiana’s Universities.

Initial Questions About Digital Badges and Learning

by Daniel Hickey

This post suggests some initial questions about learning that you might want to ask if you are considering using digital badges.  A version of this post is being prepared for the November 2012 edition of EvoLLLution magazine.  That article will consider how digital badges can be used to both enhance learning and recognize learning in ways that might help colleges and universities attract larger numbers of adult learners back to school.  This post poses these same questions in a more general context.

Incorporating Open Badges into a Hybrid Course Context

By Dan Hickey

I recently incorporated digital badges into the online aspects of my doctoral course on educational assessment (“Capturing Learning in Context”).  There are two aspects of this effort that readers might find useful.  The first aspect concerns the way students award simple “stamps” to highlight significant contributions or insights from classmates. I use those stamps to award three “one-star” badges each week; I will use the one-star badges to determine how to award three two-star badges at the end of the semester.  I will elaborate on this in a later post.  I also removed the section on using the Mozilla Open Badge backpack to another post as well. This post is already going to be pretty long! 

In this post I want to describe how I used ForAllBadges (from ForAllSystems, a small Chicago firm) to issue digital badges within a typical online course management system (CMS).  Anyone who wants to issue badges that comply with Mozilla’s Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) can easily sign up for a free account at http://www.forallbadges.com/.  The account can be used as a stand-alone site, or it can be accessed from within any CMS that lets you access outside websites.  I am using OnCourse, the Sakai-based open-source CMS that Indiana University helped develop.