Course:ETEC565m/Badges
What are Open Badges?
A digital badge is an online representation of a mastered skill or completed task that can be used, more broadly, to illustrate the full depth and breadth of your abilities, both inside and outside the post-secondary course environment. When designed correctly, issued by a credible source and verified, open badges can be shared across digital platforms to give colleagues or employers a better sense of your skills and abilities, beyond your transcript. For example, badges can help to surface soft skills like communication or teamwork, which most employers consider important, but don’t have a way of verifying. It’s worthwhile to note that badging at the post-secondary level is very different than badging in K-12: The latter tends to be used to control negative and reward positive classroom behaviours. Post-secondary and professional badging has an entirely different mandate, which is to illustrate a more complete story of an individual’s achievements, skills and abilities and to tell this story seamlessly across all relevant learning and professional contexts.
Badging in ETEC 565M
Making a badging system work successfully is not an easy task. Many questions arise, such as: What do learners value and want in a system? What do employers value? How do we ensure the information contained in the badge (its metadata) is credible? How can we technically make the system work? Many institutions are currently working on these questions by proposing varying versions of badging systems: ranging from complex proprietary builds to integrating open source WP plugins into course blogs. UBC’s Open Badges site is a great resources that describes the ins and outs of badging experiments at UBC.
One such experiment is taking place in this course, ETEC 565M. It is one of only a handful of courses at UBC that’s piloting a badging system and is now on its third iteration. This year, we’re introducing a number of innovations, including:
- A more complete participation-based badging system that can be used to track your professional presence in the course and can be automatically tallied to create your A4 participation mark.
- Three skills-based badges and a system of peer nomination and assessment for these badges. The three badges are Thought Leadership, Technology Leadership and Teamwork.
- Tiered Reviewer and Author badges that acknowledge the degrees of effort you put into building your professional reputation through discussions, as both contributors of new content and arbiters of quality. These badges also count towards your participation grade.
A more in-depth discussion of each of these types of badges, including descriptions of badges and how to earn and assess for them, can be found within each section (links above) or on the list of all ETEC 522 Badges page. You can also click the image below to see a summary of all ETEC522_Badge_Types (PDF).
Experiment in progress
It’s really important to note, as we move through the course, that the ETEC 522 badging system is a work in progress. This iteration represents a significant change that we hope will be successful, but that is far from guaranteed – especially since there are some technical hurdles to overcome. We’ve done our best to make sure the system works, but there will be glitches and we deeply appreciate your patience and participation as we move through them. Part of this experiment is finding out what is important and valued by you as learners, what works, and what doesn’t work – and then using your feedback and our observations to design the next version of this system. With this in mind, we’re collecting some data on your interest in and impressions of badging now, at the beginning of the course. We’ll also collect data in December to find out what you thought about your badging experience in ETEC 522. Please now take a moment to complete our short survey.
Links within the About Badges section
- Participation badge
- Skills-based badges
- Reviewer and Author badges
- List of all ETEC 522 Badges
- ETEC522_Badge_Types (at-a-glance PDF infographic)
- Badges Survey #1