Using Digital Badges to Transform Education

Digital badges are electronic images that reflect a level of attainment students have achieved in different types of learning environments and spaces. The significance of a digital badge is that it serves as validation that a student has reached a certain level of competence in area that will enable the student to use the skills in a variety of ways that would not be possible without the certification that the badge indicates.

Some examples of educational environments in which students could conceivably earn digital badges include summer institutes, weekend workshops, after-school programs, K-12 classrooms, and courses in institutions of higher education. In 2010, the Mozilla Foundation held an event in Barcelona, Spain during which the concept of digital badges was introduced (Ash, 2012).

A driver of the idea seems to be the informal learning that is occurring in non-institutional settings where highly motivated, self-driven (mostly) young people gather to share information and increase their skills -- the outcome is typically a level of expertise that cannot be achieved in more structured, step-wise environments. The model that most commonly comes to mind is the code writing / application building boot camp that is springing up in large cities across the country and around the world.

The dust has not yet settled on the controversy that surrounds the idea of digital badges. Those who are opposed believe the digital badge system will introduce the very sort of structure that repels the young people interested in participating in non-structured environments like the coding boot camps (Ash, 2012). Advocates of digital badges, however, disagree with that conclusion and, in fact, The McArthur Foundation has become an active supporter and driver of the digital badges movement (Ash, 2012).

The digital badges movement -- it has achieved that status -- is aligned with open university programs and other similar educational programs that do not require participation in an expensive, lock-step institutional programs (Grant, 2014).

The idea of digital badges circumvents the need to wait for institutions to catch up to what students of all ages are doing -- learning to write code and learning to develop applications outside of formal school systems; this is an artifact of the problem that this type of coursework has largely been relegated to IT and IS majors and minors, and in most cases, the options to focus on these areas are not even offered in the K-12 system, which is focused on the Common Core and other measures of academic achievement (Grant, 2014).

Advocates of digital badges argue that the skills acquired by students in these areas will eventually be needed and desired by all students, not just those students who formally declare majors or minors in information technology and information systems (Ash, 2012). The digital badge system would be managed by the very people who earning the badges. A system for displaying the badges would be available for displaying on websites, communications, and in association with products developed.

In the same way that people stop talking about their high school degrees once the earn a bachelors or a masters degree, badges that signify basic skills would be unlikely to continue to be displayed by the earner. Everything that others need to know about the badge.