Week 9: Alternative assessment pathways with digital badges
Case study: Sussex Downs College ‘Employability Passport’
The Employability Passport comprises a set of sixteen badges acquired via completion of a variety of tasks which are intended to demonstrate possession of transferable skills in four areas deemed to be key to working life: communication, collaboration, critical thinking and work readiness. The Employability Passport was developed in conjunction with and is endorsed by local employers and is designed to be a student-led initiative: students select the badge they wish to work towards and take the initiative for completing the tasks, recording and uploading evidence onto the Open Badge Academy platform. Tutors review and verify the evidence of task-completion and award badges once the criteria have been met. The badges are open and can be therefore be shared on social media sites or in an e-portfolio linked to the student’s CV. The Employability Passport provides a way to capture employability skills at scale and gives students ‘an opportunity to showcase their skills and experiences to employers in a digital and verifiable way (Digitalme, 2017)’. The initiative has apparently attracted significant interest from local employers and there has been strong uptake among students.
Analysing the Employability Passport badges initiative according to Wenger’s models of learning governance (2009), it appears to mostly reflect a ‘stewardship’ approach. It is largely the product of decisions made at institutional level and its aim is to use badges to align its system of skills accreditation with the requirements of the 21st century workplace. It therefore involves ‘a concerted effort to move a social system in a given direction … a process of seeking agreement and alignment across a social system in order to achieve certain goals (Wenger, 2009:13)’. According to Wenger (2009:13), the function of stewarding governance is ‘to nurture the imagination of people so they can see themselves as participants in broader systems and align their actions accordingly’. The Employability Passport could be said to do this by encouraging college students to orient their studies towards developing skills and behaviours which are considered desirable by employers.
However, the initiative arguably also includes an element of ‘emergent’ learning governance, since the process of selecting badges to work towards and providing the evidence required is led by students, and therefore learning results to some extent from ‘the cumulative effect of local decisions negotiated in learning spaces and spread by participants (Wenger, 2009:13)’. Does the initiative qualify as a ‘monstrous moral hybrid’, in that case? I am going to suggest that it doesn’t, as a result of the way in which it was developed. Halavais (2012:369) contests that if stewarding and emergent approaches to learning governance are combined, ‘badges are likely to have little meaning outside of immediate contexts, and may easily lead to confusion or worse among students interested in them’. However, this doesn’t apply to the Employability Passport, for the reason that it was developed through a process of external consultation with employers and therefore holds a clearly identifiable meaning beyond the individual and local contexts of the students and the institution. Halavais (2012:369) also warns that when both forms of governance are combined within the same system, badges may ‘develop into a currency of their own … rewarding specific behavior extrinsically rather than building deeper passion for learning’. While this may be true, in the case of the Employability Passport, the possibility that students’ learning activities and effort to acquire specific skills are extrinsically motivated by the prospect of gaining employment could be deemed entirely appropriate and morally defensible.
After what seemed like hours of scouring the web for a suitable badges initiative to analyse, I finally chose the Employability Passport because it is seemed current, pioneering and positively-received by students and educational commentators alike. My research up to that point had given me the impression that the initial hype surrounding digital badges, which appeared to peak about 4-5 years ago, had since died down and that many initiatives were no longer active. I wonder if that is genuinely the case, and what the reasons might be if so. Perhaps some badges have suffered the ‘monstrous moral hybrid’ identity crisis foretold by Halavais (2012) and consequently failed to achieve sufficient credibility or transferability. For many of the badges I came across, it was not easy or even possible to discern what obtaining one actually involved or signified, which had the immediate effect of detracting from their credentialing credentials. Budding badge designers would pay to heed Halvais’ (2012:370) advice: ‘The value and resilience of a badge is frequently determined by how much was given up in order to receive it. In designing a badge system intended to motivate participants, remember that … the badges that remain the most respected and are the longest lasting are those that require significant sacrifice’. One strength of the Employability Passport lies in its rigorous, multi-tiered approach, whereby the most ‘respected’ badge – the passport itself – can only be earned as a result of sustained effort and dedication.
One shortcoming of the Employability Passport identified by Belshaw (2017) is the way in which it classifies ‘Digital Literacy’ as a unidimensional component accreditable by a single badge, which overlooks the ‘plethora of digital knowledge, skills, and behaviours that’s directly applicable to employability’. This underscores the importance of clearly articulating the elements of an assessment framework in order that all stakeholders, including learners, tutors and employers, can understand the specific criteria embedded within it, the evidence required to meet these criteria, and the rationale according to which the framework was developed (Belshaw, 2017). Overall however, the Employability Passport framework illustrates an effective use of badges which acts as an accessible pathway to achievement and enables learners to evidence discrete skills which may not otherwise be recognised (Gibson et al., 2015).
Applicability to other contexts
I could envisage a similar credentialing system being introduced within my current teaching context of adult language teaching, as well as in adult basic skills education, which is an area I’m considering moving into. Language students who attend classes in an academy could earn digital badges for demonstrating communicative competence in specific professional or academic scenarios or skills, such as job interviews or formal presentations. This would offer a more easily-attainable yet credible form of accreditation involving considerably less investment of time and money than official exams such as Cambridge English and IELTS. Similarly, in adult education, learners could work towards badges to evidence digital literacy skills development, for example, which may prove particularly effective in motivating learners with negative experiences of education and minimal educational qualifications who lack confidence in their learning ability as a result. The fact remains, however, that institutions may be reluctant or unable to implement such initiatives due to the scale of changes required in terms of curriculum structure, assessment frameworks and IT infrastructure. It’s likely that some employers would also be resistant to accepting badges as an alternative to traditional certification (Lockley et al., 2016).
I wonder if I’m now deserving of a special IDEL open badge…??! 😉
References:
Belshaw, D. (2017) ‘What does it mean to be ‘digitally employable’?’. Available at:
http://literaci.es/what-does-it-mean-to-be-digitally-employable
Digitalme (2017) ‘Sussex Downs College’. Available at: https://www.digitalme.co.uk/insights/clients/sussex-downs-college/
Gibson, D., Ostashewski, N., Flintoff, K., Grant, S. and Knight, E. (2015) Digital badges in education, Education and Information Technologies, 20(2), pp. 403-410.
Halavais, A. (2012) A Genealogy of Badges, Information,Communication & Society, 15(3), pp. 354-373.
Lockley, A., Derryberry, A. and West, D. (2016) ‘Drivers, Affordances and Challenges of Digital Badges’, in Ifenthaler, D., Bellin-Mularski, N., and Mah, D.K. (eds) Foundation of Digital Badges and Micro-Credentials, Springer: Cham, pp. 55-70.
Wenger, E. (2009) ‘Social learning capability: Four essays on innovation and learning in social systems’. Available at:
https://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/09-04-17-Social-learning-capability-v2.1.pdf
Other sources consulted:
https://sites.google.com/chrome.sussexdowns.ac.uk/openbadges/employability-passport
https://www.openbadgeacademy.com/sussexdownscollegedirectory
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