Online badges
Before this week, I was not familiar with badges being used for online education and after the reading we have done and looking into the badge for ‘Taking your Teaching Online’ on the Open Learn Courses from the Open University, I have not warmed to the idea. As a runner, I have an account on Strava, where I can upload my runs, keep track of my stats, show my support to fellow runners and vice versa and complete badges. Before the pandemic, I would regularly take part in races, which would dictate my training and challenge me to go the extra mile, so to speak. Since it has been harder to take part in races for a year now, I have started using Strava’s badges to help me stay motivated. The process is very simple; I sign up for a challenge at the start of the month usually something like ‘complete 100 km this month’, or ‘complete a 10 km run this month’ and if I succeed I receive a badge, which is displayed in my profile on Strava. I think this is a good example of how a badge can work to help someone with motivation. (Gibson et al. 2015)
The educational badge, I think, is more problematic because of the nature of education and the need for it to be recognised by others. Running is something I do for myself, I have no need to supply proof to anyone. If you undertake education, though, it is usually done with a specific goal in mind; to further your career, although there are of course people who study for pleasure, but I do think these are in the minority. If you want to use a badge to further your career then, it will need to be recognised as a credential (Ahn et al. 2014), you will need to be able to show it to future employers and there would need to be a structure that it sits within. At the moment, there is no worldwide structure or recognition for badges, so if you would have a badge on your online CV, the recruiter would have to know the badge and what it entails and / or the institution that the badge came from. This might be suitable for some types of recruitment; via LinkedIn for instance, where certain badges can be displayed on your profile, but I think this is not (yet) feasible for the majority of recruitment that takes place.
It is very telling that the articles we are reading about badges are more than 5 years old, which is a long time for anything in the technological world. I think it is fair to say that educational badges looked like something that could be successful at the time, but has not reached its potential in the years since then. Unless there is a radical change in how badges and education are structured, I can’t imagine that badges will have any real value in terms of value to further a career. Learning a new skill will still be valuable of course, but not in a recognised, structured way.
Ahn, J., Pellicone, A., and Butler, B.S. (2014), Open badges for education: what are the implications at the intersection of open systems and badging? Research in Learning Technology, 22(1)
Gibson, D., Ostashewski, N., Flintoff, K., Grant, S., & Knight, E. (2015). Digital badges in education. Education and Information Technologies, 20(2), pp. 403-410.
Yes, it does feel like badges have reached an impasse of various sorts – in terms of their credibility and validity especially. Although I like you example of the Strava badges (I used to like the Fitbit badge system for much the same reason). The idea of using blockchain like technology in badges does, I think, address a minor problem rather than the main one of what does a badge really evidence. The Linkedin badges you mention are for course completions so really only indicate areas of interest of the individual concerned. Interestingly as well, the emerging microcredential standards seem to be being structured around 10 credit units, ie, 100 hours of learner effort which is way more than the sorts of effort required for most badges (except the running ones!). this is a good critical and reflective post and does reinforce my view that it is time to reconsider badges in this course.