Continued Exploration and Development of Digital Badges

TL;DR version: An update in my continued exploration and development of a digital badging system. At this point...it's good news. Scroll to the bottom to review the relaunch of the badges.

It has been awhile, but throughout this blog I’ve had a thread that documents my trials and tribulations as I build, and rebuild my open badging system. I originally started this process by conducting a literature review with a group of my graduate students and then we built and launched our set of badges. We documented everything in the process from the framing used, and down to the design evolution of the badges. The end result is a system of digital badges developed to accompany the ORMS MOOC. You can watch/listen to me describe the system here.

All of this was going well until my badges were deleted. 🙁

I learned a great lesson about hosting and infrastructure, and “a domain of one’s own” that day. Nevertheless, for the purposes of this post let’s just say that the badging community was excellent. A lot of people came out of the woodwork to support and connect with me. I can’t say enough about the badging community available here.

Looking for a new home. Since this last post, I’ve been investigating new opportunities to host my badges in various spaces. I built and issued badges from P2PU and loved the system. In developing and relaunching the badges for the ORMS MOOC, I wanted to go back and offer them again at badges.mozilla. I know…this is where they were deleted the first time. I wanted to offer them again at badges.mozilla because they have been at the forefront of the badging initiative. I also wanted to include it there because the ORMS model and MOOC focus on developing the web literacies of teachers and their students.

While attending and lurking on the badges community calls, I learned that there was a relaunch planned for an offshoot of the badging platform from Mozilla. I also learned that my badges may have been deleted earlier because I did not have a “vouched” Mozillians Profile. You can view (and hopefully vouch) my profile here.

Going back to Mozilla. After revising my Mozillians Profile and having it vouched by Doug Belshaw I started rebuilding my ORMS badges. I’m still looking for more people to vouch my profile so I don’t lose the profile and then…my badges again. 🙂 We just launched the ORMS MOOC again, and I have plans to offer it yearly as part of my New Literacies course. I’ll be sharing more soon about the process of teaching my students how to teach and facilitate a MOOC.

If you’re interested in joining/checking out the MOOC, you can review it here.

You can also review the badges for the ORMS MOOC down below…and possibly earn one yourself. There are a series of five badges…each badge representing work submitted for each module.

After you complete all five of the badges, you can earn the Mentor badge. The Mentor badge indicates that you are a leader in the community..and pretty much know what’s happening. As a mentor, you can bring future learners through the MOOC and award badges.