Digital Badges & Collapsing Complexity
Trying to collapse complexity is nothing new for education, but opening the gates for digital badges gives us another opportunity to talk about it.
One of the hallmarks of education, an icon that goes hand-in-hand with books, glasses, and apples. Grades take the time and complexity of a student’s effort, participation, knowledge and many other factors to represent it as a number. Then that number gets used outside of the course for determining whether students are on the dean’s list, impacting a student’s scholarship application for better or worse, and lots of other ways.
Grades have been around long enough that society is pretty comfortable with their use, even if questions like “What does a 77 in this course say about this student’s capability or experience?” might not get consistent or accurate answers. While grades can vary and the interpretation of the number might not represent the intent behind it, grades at UPEI carry some amount of context with them. When a student says that they got a 90 in their intro courses, there’s a context of what a commitment a university course is. But digital badges doesn’t have this context yet, and the conversations about what a digital badge means are still taking place. And there are barriers for that context as well, right now a lot of the conversation around badges at UPEI is framed as a means for recognizing non-credit learning.
Taking a look at Moodle, the most readily available platform for badging at UPEI, there’s a plethora of options for how to issue a badge. First and foremost is the decision whether the badge is issued automatically or by a course instructor. Badges can be tied to course completion or activity completion as well. While badges will be beneficial for signalling learning in Moodle there will also be utilitarian benefits as well. For example, coming with the rework of UPEI’s academic integrity tutorial will be a badge that instructors will be able to require students to have earned before being able to submit assignments.
One benefit for digital badges is that they are able to maintain some of that context and complexity. Every badge on Moodle requires a criteria section that will be displayed on the badge page and travel with the badge on other badge hosting platforms. Other platforms can let students attach evidence to the badge as well, letting those see the depth beyond the badge (such as seeing the project a student submitted to receive the badge in the first place). But knowing that badges can do this and do this well will require literacies from those designing badges, those earning them, and those viewing them.
Usually when I write a blogpost about a technology I do my best to write an explainer and have some answers. Today’s feels like all questions, but consider this an invitation to join me in asking these questions. I already have some research to pore over, but if you have any insight or recommendations, feel free to reach out!
-Jason
