Getting Started with Digital Badging in Maker Spaces, Classrooms (or Anywhere)

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Digital badging employs virtual representations of achievement to acknowledge mastery. Unlike the traditional badges some of us earned in Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, badges are managed via a digital badging tool.
There are of course exceptions to this — some Maker Spaces give laser etched and cut badges in addition to the digital version. Digital badging can be considered a form of Gamification in learning environments. The benefits of employing digital badging for learners are numerous.

The goal of this article is to help folks interested in using digital badging in Maker Spaces, classrooms, design studios — or any other environment where humans are learning. We’ll go over getting started, managing and issuing badges, and some key takeaways when working with digital badges.

Digital Badges and Their Role in Assessment

Effective assessment can be difficult in any discipline. Effective assessment in new fields and/or fields that combine disparate age groups, learning styles, skill sets, and emerging technologies can be even more difficult — if not impossible — for educators. Like many teachers, I noticed that exit slips, reflection sheets, self-evaluation, and the abstract measure of progress provided by the letter grade on report cards work for many students — but not for all. I wanted a tool that would recognize learning that was tough to assess, learning that happened between report cards, and learning styles that might not be easy to assess effectively using traditional methods. Digital Badges also offer an incentive to students for whom traditional assessment may not be a motivator. I’d heard about companies like Mozilla using Digital Badging for their adult learners, so I began to research how I might use Digital Badging in my classroom.

I started with badging in four areas:

• Minecraft for Education
• 3D Modeling and Printing
• Digital Design and Laser cutting/etching
• Textile Arts

Getting Started

To get started with Digital Badging:

Identify the area(s) you’d like to create badges for. Badges can recognize a single level of mastery or multiple levels of mastery.

Create a description and rubric for the badging area and levels (if applicable). The description details the goals or purpose of the badge. The rubric should clearly and specifically state the skills, literacies, or tasks each badge earner must accomplish in order to earn a badge.

For example, here’s the rubric for the Textile Arts Level 1 badge:

• Identify key parts of a sewing machine and their function
• Thread sewing machine (3 times)
• Load bobbin
• Raise and lower the presser foot
• Sew straight line

Design a visual representation of the badge. This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, as long as the end result is a digital image that can be uploaded to your badging tool:

• Hand-drawn on paper and scanned.
• Designed in a digital tool such as Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, etc.
• Any tool you’re comfortable with! If you’re proficient with a professional design tool, great. If not, I’ve seen effective badges that were designed using something basic, like PowerPoint or Microsoft Paint.

In the end, the most important thing is that the badge is visually appealing and represents the skills the earner will master.

Choose a badging tool. There are a bunch out there to choose from, but I really like Badgr. It’s free, open-source, and easy to use. We’ll go into detail about using Badgr in the next section.

Managing and Issuing Badges with Badgr

2. Create an issuer on Badgr. An issuer is the entity that will be defining, managing, and issuing badges. This can be you, your lab, a school, or any other entity that makes sense. The Create Issuer panel on Badgr is very straightforward. Simply choose an (optional) image that represents the badge issuing entity, give the entity a name, enter the URL of the entity, and then a short description. One of the nice things about this feature is that you can have multiple issuers — this is convenient for situations in which you’d like to have multiple entities managing and issuing independent badges under one Badgr account.

3. Create badges in Badgr. This is just as straightforward as creating an issuer. You’ll need an image file of your badge in either PNG or SVG format, the criteria (rubric), and an optional URL.

4. In order to issue badges, each perspective badge earner will need to create a free account on Badgr. This will enable you to issue badges to earners via the email address they used to create their individual Badgr accounts. Badge earners also use Badgr as a place to collect and share badges they’ve earned from Badgr or any Open Badges issuer.

5. Start issuing! Once students or teachers demonstrate the skills detailed in the badge rubric, I immediately issue a badge to them. Badge earners receive a notification email with each badge they earn, and their badges will appear in their Badgr accounts. You can either issue badges individually, or in bulk by uploading a CSV (comma-separated value) file with multiple email addresses. Badgr provides a convenient description of the proper format for this CSV file in the badge issue panel.

Some Final Thoughts

Many students and teachers are excited to get started earning badges. Earning levels 1 and 2 are empowering, but level 3 implies mastery. For example, Digital Design and Lasercutting Level S3 acknowledges a level of achievement such that they can use the laser cutter independently. It also places the honor and responsibility on them to work with and mentor students who are earning levels 1, 2, or 3 in that particular badge area.

Some key takeaways from my experiences using Digital Badging:

• Badge earners deserve public recognition. Not only does this reward their hard work, but it also designates them as a potential mentor for anyone at a lower level of mastery. This could come in the form of a simple publicly displayed list of each person who’s earned a badge, or possibly from a physical representation of the digital badge (perhaps displayed on the wall as a paper certificate, or sewn on an apron or smock).
• While digital badges are great at recognizing learning and mastery that happens independently of traditional assessment, it would be ideal to use digital badging as part of the overall assessment of each student (e.g. badges and report cards could be related — not separate — aspects of student assessment).
• More complicated areas of mastery could be a combination of several badging areas/levels. For example, in order to use the laser cutter to cut fabric for a garment, students would need the prerequisite of at least level 1 in Textile Arts and level 1 in Digital Design and Laser Cutting. Another example would be if a student would like to build a robot, they would need to have earned badges in Computer Science and Physical Computing.
• As an added incentive for adult learners, earning badges could be an aspect of consideration for promotion, compensation, or additional leadership opportunities. Digital badging for adults encourage the attitude of the perpetual learner, but mastery means the commitment additional time outside of normal work hours to develop new skills.

Originally published at http://www.depthandlight.com on January 21, 2019.