TL;DR version: As we continue to share our thinking and work as we develop an open badging initiative this post shares the results of our literature review on open badging systems...and an argument for their use in our pre-service teacher program. Please review and comment on our work.

We’ve been busy here in the Education Department thinking about possibilities for integration of an open badging initiative with some of our programs. To help me really think about open badges and possible affordances and value of these credentials I enlisted the skills and expertise of a group of my graduate students. I wanted them to research open badging systems and begin to unpack whether or not they believed they would be useful in some of our programs. We already have grades, certifications, etc. Would this set of credentials be something of value to students. We’ve already shared some of this work here and here on this blog. In continuing to research this topic, they were to collaboratively research and write a literature review. In this post I would like to share the results of our literature review.

We are openly sharing the literature review saved in Google Docs. The document is set up to allow anyone to leave a comment in the text. As we receive comments we’ll respond to these suggestions and edit the document. Please keep in mind that this document is written in the context of inclusion of an open badging system to be used in our pre-service education program here at UNH. We are currently in the process of developing the series of badges that we argue for in this document. They will be open and embedded in the ORMS MOOC that I discussed previously.

Without further ado…here is our literature review.

Image CC by Krissy.Venosdale