Digital Badging Literature
Digital badges are ideally suited to support the goals of the Integrity Matters App. The key components of engaging students and ensuring their understanding of academic integrity core values, visibly displaying skill acquisition in a portable credential, and offering seamless recognition of competency as students transition from academia to the workplace, are all positively impacted by digital badges.
The lengthy history of using badges to signify achievement (Halavais, 2012) conjures images of Boy Scout uniforms (International Scouting Collectors Association, n.d.) and hierarchical designations within organizations. While the contemporary digital counterpart perpetuates the symbolism affirming accomplishment, it augments this visual credential with a multitude of additional elements. Micro credentials are short educational courses, often offered online that emphasize learner centered interactive activities. Badges offer acknowledgement of completion of micro credentialing popular in informal learning contexts and somewhat similar to “achievements” in video and computer games. Open badges are portable digital credentials, containing metadata that provides information regarding badge issuers and the criteria used to recognize the skills, achievements, and proficiencies of badge earners while verifying evidence of learning. Since they are based on accepted standards, earners can combine multiple badges from different issuers to display their credentials.
Digital badges are web-enabled forms (Gibson, Ostashewski, Flintoff, Grant & Knight, 2015; Grant, 2014) that use an electronic graphic to represent an individual’s specific abilities, granular skills, and different levels of engagement (Finkelstein, Knight, & Manning, 2013) in detail that far exceeds conventional certificates (Devedzic & Jovanovic, 2015; Elliot, Clayton & Iwata 2014; Mehta, Young & Stoller, 2013). Technological advancements have made it possible to embed meta-data offering the viewer extensive information pertaining to not only who and where the badge was granted, but the criteria and evidence used in its allocation. This has created an environment of explicit trust (Casilli & Hickey, 2016) where a graphic representation of a skill or claim links to evidence that can be transparently reviewed by stakeholders (Lesser, 2016).
Digital badges have the potential to become disruptive learning tools as educational institutions bring an alternative option to offer tools that facilitate affordable, accessible and personalised learning. Motivating the “reluctant” learner (Nolan, Preston & Finkelstein, 2012, p. 46) and acting as an incentive to participate in and improve academic activities (Glover, 2013) are two areas that have been explored in the badging literature recently. Although the predominant value of a digital badge may be seen as an instrument to denote accreditation (Abramovich, 2016) it is also the portability and ease of sharing recognition of achievement across digital environments, different platforms and organizations (Devedžic & Jovanovic, 2015) that offers unique opportunity. Open badges are capable of integrating into diverse compatible learning and portfolio systems (Farmer & West, 2016), allowing the collection of micro-credentials into open “backpacks” and linking the display of badges seamlessly across disciplines and settings (Finkelstein, Knight, & Manning, 2013). Individual learners are able to take agency (Devedzic & Jovanovic, 2015) in creating a holistic online profile of their abilities and learning journey (Liyanagunawardena, Scalzavara, & Williams, 2017) supported by a recognized platform and framework (Mozilla Foundation, 2016).
In addition to offering a visual representation of skills to a broader community, digital badges offer learners the opportunity to document and certify competency valued by industry and potential employers (Ahn et al., 2014). Digital badging “is quickly becoming the currency of choice for professional recognition” (Malin, 2016, p. 19) as industry is challenged to identify top job candidates (Raish & Rimland, 2016) by degree transcripts that offer limited detail and insight into individual skill sets (Carey, 2012), disparate professional development programs (Malin, 2016) and crucial workplace and industry skills that are assessed outside formal educational systems (Parker, 2015; Ruddy & Ponte, 2019).
The evolution of digital badging has been swift. From early associations with gamification (McIlvenny, 2015) to usefulness in engaging students (Ahn, Pellicone & Butler, 2014), motivating skill building (Abramovich, Schunn & Higashi, 2013), to the Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badges program establishment in 2011 (Grant, 2016) and the formation of additional systems, such as Udemy and the Khan Academy (Ahn, Pellicone & Butler, 2014; Randall, Harrison & West, 2013). Some academic institutions have begun to deploy badges within courses and for-credit academic programs. Once seen as a potential disruption to the higher education sector (Ruddy & Ponte, 2019), the emergence of universities as badge issuers through independent and proprietary systems like Credly and TrueCred (Ruddy & Ponte, 2019) has seen many prominent educational institutions (Ruddy & Ponte, 2019) enhance their learning eco-systems with this mobile credentialing system, including MIT, Purdue, Yale, and Carnegie Mellon (Abramovich, Schunn, & Higashi, 2013; Ash, 2012a; Ash, 2012b; Carey, 2012; Diaz, 2013; Rutherford, Freund, & Mewburn, 2015). Large scale MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) providers, such as Udemy and the Khan Academy (Ahn, Pellicone, & Butler, 2014; Randall, Harrison, & West, 2013), often use open automatic badge-issuing systems for recognition of accomplishments. Demonstration of specified learning outcomes is represented visually by a “badge”, a digital image displayed on a website accompanied by written information detailing the accomplishment and criteria for earning the badge. Learners indicate visual appearance of badges were of importance and that badges gained credibility with an official or institutional look and feel to them (Mewburn, Freund, & Rutherford, 2014). While digital badging is commonly seen as a visual symbol that signifies official approval (Abramovich, 2016), boundless potential is available to share across multiple digital platforms and settings (Devedžic & Jovanovic, 2015). In education, digital badges have become a recognized feature within learning management systems to demonstrate a visual representation of a learning journey. Shared across online platforms (i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn), they represent achievements and communicate success.
Natural progression has seen employers recognize the efficacy of digital badging in assessing competency of specific skills (Abramovich et al. 2013; West & Randall, 2016), while many workplace learning settings refer to micro credentials that can be displayed on professional networking sites as having the potential to promote lifelong learning (Carey & Stefaniak, 2018). The learner can curate the badges in their ePortfolio or share them anywhere online for social networking, employment, education or lifelong learning.
It is clear that digital badging is gaining significant traction (Hickey, 2017) and has potential value and impact that includes a range of possibilities (Finkelstein, Knight & Manning, 2013). It has been suggested “e-credentials will transform education in the next two decades much as e-commerce has changed retailing today” (Hickey, 2017, p. B19). Despite this, limited empirical research on the usability of digital badges has been completed (Abramovich et al., 2013; Gamrat et al., 2014; Hakulinen, Auvinen, & Korhonen, 2013; O’Connor and McQuigge, 2013; Raish & Rimland, 2016; Reid, Paster, & Abramovich, 2015). Wide-reaching interest in open badging (www.badgetheworld.org) has led to recent systematic literature reviews (Gibson et al., 2015; Liyanagunawardena & Scalzavara, 2017) that can inform decision-making whether to adopt open badges. Further study is required to determine what makes a well- developed badge program, considerations of badge rigor are needed (Carey & Stefaniak, 2018), and guidelines must be developed to include evaluation and verification components into badge design (Catalano & Doucet, 2013; Olneck, 2012).
