Welcome to our group research project on digital badging! Above, you will find pages that each focus on digital badging in different educational settings. We will take a look at a student, Lucy Learner, and how badging could look from elementary school, through her career if implemented using the best practices at each stage. After following Lucy's Journey, be sure to provide your thoughts on the discussion page here!

What are digital badges?

Badging Terminology

Badges: traditional = Badge [baj]: a special or distinctive mark, token, or device worn as a sign of allegiance, membership, authority, achievement, etc. (Dictionary.com)

Digital Badges: New = online representation of a skill or achievement earned through the use of electronic or new media.

Open Badges: Verify skills, achievement, and learning outcomes through credible organizations and then enable sharing and display. Purpose:help solve the problem of recognizing and legitimizing learning and skill development that happens outside the classroom.

Open Badge Infrastructure (OBI): A formal web site specifically for the storage and verification of learning and Open Badges; current examples include Mozilla Open Badges (www.openbadges.org), Khan Academy, and edX through MIT and Harvard Universities.

Credential inflation: refers to the devaluation of educational or academic credentials over time and a corresponding decrease in the expected advantage given a degree holder in the job market. Credential inflation is thus similar to monetary inflation, and describes the declining value of earned certificates and degrees. Credential inflation has been recognized as an enduring trend over the past century in Western higher education. (http://en.wikipedia.org)

Gamification: use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage users in solving problems. Gamification is applied to improve user engagement, return on investment, data quality, timeliness, and learning. (http://en.wikipedia.org)

Meta-data: Data about data. In data processing, meta-data is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment. (Dictionary.com)

Computing: information that is held as a description of stored data. For example, meta-data would document data about data elements or attributes, (name, size, data type, etc) and data about records or data structures (length, fields, columns, etc) and data about data (where it is located, how it is associated, ownership, etc.). Meta-data may include descriptive information about the context, quality and condition, or characteristics of the data. (Dictionary.com)

MOOCs: Massive online open courses: Post-secondary/College level courses taught online through web sites other than traditional universities; e.g. Udacity and Udemy. Costs are free or small fee for official document verifying grade or score on testing.