Digital badges are web-enabled tokens of accomplishment that contain specific claims and evidence about learning and achievement along with detailed evidence supporting those claims. Badges traditionally consist of an image and relevant metadata (e.g., badge name, description, criteria, issuer, evidence, date issued, standards, and tags).
This column features findings from recent research examining the design principles for open digital badges that emerged across the 30 organizations awarded grants to develop badge content in the 2012 Badges for Lifelong Learning Initiative. The column focuses on the principles identified in the research (recognition, assessment, and motivation) on one student in the MOUSE outreach program. Results provide guidance for educators in and out of traditional learning contexts.
We uploaded a pre-publication draft of the column to allow for review, remix, and commentary. Please click here for the Google Doc, or review below.
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As a multimodal supplement to the column I assembled a group of experts and asked them four questions each about the column. You can review the videos below, and click through to learn more about each of the interviews.
Four Questions for Daniel Hickey and James Willis
Daniel Hickey is an Associate Professor and Program Head in Learning Sciences at Indiana University. You can read more at his blog, Re-mediating Assessment.James Willis is a research assistant at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology at Indiana University.
Four Questions for Marc Lesser
Marc Lesser is the Senior Director of Learning Design at MOUSE. Please review the following Storify piece Marc published about the MOUSE badging ecosystem.
Four Questions for Kyle Bowen
Kyle Bowen is the Director of Education Technology at Penn State. You can review more of his content at classhack.com.
Four Questions for Katerina Schenke
Katerina Schenke is a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, California. You can read more of her work at her website.
Please feel free to leave comments below…and share widely.
Image CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Ignotus
Great information. New to digital badges and in the process of bringing it to the attention of educational planners in my country
Hi John. I’m glad this helped out. Please let me know if you have more questions/comments. 🙂