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

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.