Badges

Frances Bell has started a Google Doc collecting historical information about cMOOCs. I’m reposting my contributions to the doc (about my own cMOOCs) here on opencontent.org so I can find them again in the future if the Google Doc ever goes away. Year: 2007 Where: USU, INST 7150, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link Course Design: Students included both formal students earning credit at USU and students from around the world participating for free Students who completed the course and requested a Certificate of Completion received a certificate Course syllabus was presented in a wiki which students could (and did) edit Readings and videos were on the public web Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly A course OPML file was used to aggregate all student writing for easy reading in RSS Readers The course wiki included a master list of participants, including names, institution (if any), email address, and blog address Clusters of students created affinity-based sub-groups with mailing lists, etc. Year: 2009 Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Open Education Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education Archive.org Link ...

This week I’m participating in a conversation about badges over on the Department of Education’s LINCS website. I believe badges are potentially a key piece of infrastructure necessary to support truly open, distributed learning, but I’m frequently disappointed by the level of thoughtfulness of the discourse around badges. There’s much to learn about badges by looking to the history of other technologies, as I’ve tried to point out in my answers to the first two question prompts. ...

It seems like many people struggle to understand how the Open Badge Infrastructure works. Here’s an analogy that I’ve recently found helpful. Say your friend buys you an Amazon or iTunes gift card for your birthday. When your friend buys the gift card, they are required to provide your email address, both so that (1) the store knows where to send the gift card and (2) the store can verify you’re you when you come to claim the gift card. After your friend completes the purchase, you receive an email containing a special code. To redeem the gift card, you go to a website, verify your identity, and enter the code. After you enter the code, a certain amount of credit appears in your account, which you can spend however you like. ...

With apologies to psychometricians who may read, let me set some vernacular context for additional thoughts (prompted originally by Dan Hickey’s, and then Alex Halavais’, writing) regarding my own thinking on badges and assessment. It is beyond argument that we cannot crack open a learner’s head, insert a magnifying glass, and make direct, error-free observations of what the learner “knows.” Since we can’t actually take a “direct” measure of what someone knows, we collect evidence that allows us to increase or decrease our beliefs about the likelihood that they know, or are able to do, something. ...

I believe we need to be very careful in the way we talk about badges. Badges are not assessments. A badge is something you receive after you successfully complete an assessment. The actual assessment could take the form of generic multiple-choice questions, a performance assessment, a portfolio evaluation, a construct-aligned bundle of context-dependent items, or whatever. If the person successfully completes this assessment, then they receive the credential. Badges are not assessments; badges are credentials - badges are things we award to people who pass assessments. ...

An article on Slashdot yesterday reads: Dave Lindorff writes in the LA Times that growing numbers of students are discovering their old school is actively blocking them from getting a job or going on to a higher degree by refusing to issue an official transcript. The schools won’t send the transcripts to potential employers or graduate admissions office if students are in default on student loans, or in many cases, even if they just fall one or two months behind. It’s no accident that they’re doing this. It turns out the federal government ’encourages’ them to use this draconian tactic, saying that the policy ‘has resulted in numerous loan repayments.’ It is a strange position for colleges to take, writes Lindorff, since the schools themselves are not owed any money — student loan funds come from private banks or the federal government, and in the case of so-called Stafford loans, schools are not on the hook in any way. They are simply acting as collection agencies, and in fact may get paid for their efforts at collection. ‘It’s worse than indentured servitude,’ says NYU Professor Andrew Ross, who helped organize the Occupy Student Debt movement last fall. ‘With indentured servitude, you had to pay in order to work, but then at least you got to work. When universities withhold these transcripts, students who have been indentured by loans are being denied even the ability to work or to finish their education so they can repay their indenture.’ ...

BadgeWidgetHack is a very basic, lightweight OBI-compliant badge displayer. The UI is not very sexy, but I figure that’s ok since you only have to use it once. After you walk through the wizard you receive some Javascript you can embed in your blog or elsewhere (see you can see it running at the bottom of the righthand sidebar on the front page of this blog, for example). The widget currently: ...

I had the good fortune of being invited to speak at the ETS Future of Assessment internal conference today. The slides are available at slideshare, but here are the three main points from my talk today. “Badges are not assessments.” OER provide a huge content infrastructure on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OER existed. The Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI) provides a standard, interoperable system for issuing, managing, and displaying credentials on which educational innovations can be built more quickly and less expensively than before OBI existed. However, no one is paying sufficient attention to the gap between learning anything anywhere (OER) and receiving a recognition (OBI) - this gap is called “assessment.” A badge is not an assessment anymore than a blue ribbon is a foot race. Someone has to pay attention to designing the assessments, experiences, and challenges people will complete in order to EARN badges. There is a huge opportunity for “open assessment infrastructure” in this chasm between OER and OBI. ...

So today I turned 40. Not bad, all things considered. And what did I do for my birthday? Why, I finished up the artwork for the Intro to Openness in Education course badges and finished the technical work necessary to award the badges through the Mozilla Open Badge Infrastructure’s new Issuer API. I now have some shiny new badges ready to award to folks who complete the appropriate requirements. I think these more granular, learning outcomes-based badges (or LOBs, which I wrote about in more detail the other day) provide students with more immediately actionable credentials than three credits on a transcript do. It’s nice to be able to award both the badges and the credits to the formally enrolled students - it’s the best of both worlds for them. And I think the informal learners will appreciate the badges, even without the credits. ...

As interest in badges continues to increase, it occurs to me that in their passion for gameification, innovation, and outright reinvention, many in the field are overlooking the place where badges make the most sense of all - the formal higher education institution. There are at least two high-level reasons why higher education is the perfect place for badging. First, universities are under ever-weightier mandates from accrediting agencies to (1) specify specific learning outcomes for courses and (2) gather and utilize data about student performance on these individual outcomes. Currently there is quite a bit of conversation - more frantic the closer your department is to an accreditation visit - about how to meet these external mandates. There are pedagogical, policy, political, social, and technical aspects to this question (among others). ...