Competencies in Context #5: Increasing the Value of Certificates from LinkedIn Learning

By Daniel Hickey and Chris Andrews

The previous post in this series explored LinkedIn endorsements and recommendations. Chris and Dan used those features to locate a potential consultant with particular skills and considered recent refinements to those features. We also explore the new LinkedIn Learning site made possible by the acquisition of Lynda.com. In this post, we explore how endorsements and recommendations might help LinkedIn earn back the roughly $300,000 that they paid for each of Lynda.com's 5000 courses. 

So maybe open badges can get you into Harvard (or Yale or Dartmouth) after all

By Daniel Hickey and James Willis

As summarized in Education Dive and reported in the Boston Globe, Harvard and 80 representatives from other Ivy League schools released a report arguing that admissions officers should give more attention to service-learning and volunteer activities. They recommended:

1. "Promoting more meaningful contributions to others, community service and engagement with the public good.
2. Assessing students' ethical engagement and contributions to others in ways that reflect varying types of family and community contributions across race, culture and class.
3. Redefining achievement in ways that both level the playing field for economically diverse students and reduce excessive achievement pressure."

Those of you who follow RMA can likely appreciate how much this means to us and where this post is going. Yup. Badges and assessment. That second recommendation is going to be a really tough one to implement. As we will elaborate in some length, open digital badges are intended to provide valid evidence of accomplishment outside of accredited contexts. Some new developments may allow them to serve precisely this function.

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.

Some Things about Assessment that Badge Developers Might Find Helpful

Erin Knight, Director of Learning at the Mozilla Foundation, was kind enough to introduce me to Greg Wilson, the founder of the non-profit Software Carpentry. Mozilla is supporting their efforts to teach basic computer skills to scientists to help them manage their data and be more productive. Greg and I discussed the challenges and opportunities in assessing the impact of their hybrid mix of face-to-face workshops and online courses. More about that later.

Greg is as passionate about education as he is about programming. We discussed Audrey Watters’ recent tweet regarding “things every techie should know about education.” But the subject of “education” seemed too vast for me right now. Watching the debate unfold around the DML badges competition suggested something more modest and tentative. I have been trying to figure out how existing research literature on assessment, accountability, and validity is (and is not) relevant to the funded and unfunded badge development proposals. In particular I want to explore whether distinctions that are widely held in the assessment community can help show some of the concerns that people have raised about badges (nicely captured at David Theo Goldberg’s “Threading the Needle…” DML post). Greg’s inspiration resulted in six pages, which I managed to trim (!) back to the following with a focus on badges. (An abbreviated version is posted at the HASTAC blog)