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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pushing Badges from ForAllBadges to a Backpack and Beyond

By Dan Hickey and Andi Rehak

In a separate post, Dan explained he used ForAllBadges to issue OBI-complaint badges within the Oncourse course management system.  This post explains how these badges earners can "push" their badges out of the class and into their open badges backpack and beyond to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

This post is intended to be a very concise explanation for using backpacks when using the ForAllBadges platform.  In particular it highlights the fact that badge earners must have an open badges backpack before they can push their badges to it.

For more general guidelines, check out Mozilla's wiki on badges, information for badge issuers and the open badges FAQs. P2PU's Open Badges 101 sprint and  Mozilla Open Badges google group are also very helpful. If the terms like "issuer" and "earner" are confusing, check out Carla Casilli's blog on the open badges lexicon

Intended Purposes Versus Actual Functions of Digital Badges

By Daniel Hickey
On September 4^th and 5^th, there was a meeting at the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, VA.  Al Byers of NSTA and Kyle Peck of Penn State organized the meeting to discuss the online NSTA Learning Center for science educator professional development.  I was only able to make it to the second day of the meeting where Kyle discussed the pilot work with the site and his use of digital badges from the Teacher Learning Journeys project.  In the afternoon, Sunny Lee and Erin Knight (Mozilla Foundation) and Brian Mulligan (Sligo Institute of Technology, Ireland) and I did a panel on digital badges that Kyle moderated.. 

One of the questions about badges that came up seems like a crucial issue as we grapple with different ways of characterizing and describing badges.  This post aims to add the category of badge functions to other badge taxonomies like the one by Carla Casilli. Because these issues are complex, this post ended up being rather long.  You may wish to jump directly to the summary at the bottom.  You may also wish to read a condensed version at the HASTAC website.

Digital Badges and Games for Impact

By Daniel  Hickey

It has been almost a year since the 2011 kickoff meeting of the MacArthur Foundation’s Badges for Lifelong Learning Initiative.  What a fascinating year.  It finished off with some really interesting meetings with some of the most innovative minds in education and learning.  I have learned a lot about how digital badges and other new technologies might help assess, motivate, recognize, and evaluate learning.  In the next few posts, I want to share some of the things I learned and discuss some of the issues that have come up.  In this post, I want to consider the potential of digital badges for re-igniting educational videogaming, and reiterate the central affordance of digital badges.  I also want to tell everybody to go see The Art of Videogames at the Smithsonian before it goes on tour.

White House OSTP Meeting on Games for Impact

Constance Steinkuehler and OSTP Leaders at Games for Impact Meeting

On July 26^th, I attended a meeting where the groundwork was being laid for a multi-university consortium that would focus on Games for Impact.  The meeting was organized by Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin, who is on loan as a senior analyst at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.  It was a fascinating meeting involving 20 university faculty, 40 other collaborators, and perhaps a dozen program officers for DOE, NSF, and elsewhere.   Digital badges were only tangentially related to the meeting, as the educational gaming community faces numerous challenges at this time.  The obvious question for me is how digital badges might help address these challenges, and if so, how that might proceed.

The Role of Artifact Reflections in Participatory Assessment

By Rebecca Itow and Dan Hickey

On June 7, 2012, we hosted Bloomington’s first Hackjam in conjunction with the Monroe County Public Library. In our initial recount of the day’s events, we mentioned that we used artifact reflection and digital badges as ways of gauging, evaluating, and rewarding progress in each activity. In this post, we will explain how and why we chose to use reflection and badges as forms of assessment. To read more about the theory of badges as Transformative Assessment, read our June 10 blog post. 

Assess Reflections Rather than Artifacts

We have been struggling for several years to refine practices for assessing artifacts that students create.  It seems pretty clear that badges are going to highlight a problem that teachers and proponents of portfolio assessment deal with all the time: rubrics.  If you attach consequences to the quality of student artifacts, there is a natural tendency to demand detailed rubrics and individualized feedback as to whether the artifact matches what is demanded by the rubric.  Most learning environments are more concerned with the learning embodied by the artifact than by the artifact itself.  So focusing so much on the artifact and the rubric can be quite problematic. 

Responding to Michael Cole’s Question about Badges

By Dan Hickey

Michael Cole

I was involved in an exchange on XMCA, the listserv established by Michael Cole’s Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition and the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity.  I mentioned digital badges in the post, and Mike wrote back to ask:

You know there appear to be several people who appear from time to time on xmca involved in the Mac Arthur initiatives where badges are all the rage. For anyone interested in multi-modal representational practices, it is certainly interesting as a subject of CHAT analysis.

Question:  if you are right in your assumption that the BADGE movement will start a trend what do you think that the trend promises or portends more broadly?

I have taken some time to respond, in part because I wanted to get caught up on the latest work by Cole and his students regarding their successes and challenges around the Fifth Dimension after-school computer clubhouses.  The Fifth Dimension is precisely the kind of educational innovation that should be easier to create, sustain, and study when digital badges are widely used.