Badge List is launching a project
that invites people to join our team by following a badge pathway. Rather than
going through the traditional hiring process, developers and trainers can join
Badge List by completing a pathway of badges that demonstrate relevant skills,
show a passion for education technology and digital credentialing, and build
trust between members of the team. We are partnering with universities and
online learning communities to give developers and trainers a clear path to a
successful job with Badge List.Here is more information on Badge List.
February 23, 2016 featuring Kathleen Radionoff and Lesley Voigt from Madison College
Georgetown's Grassroots Approach to Badging Non-Cognitive Skills
In the 2015-16
academic year, Georgetown University will pilot a digital badge to capture and
assess how students learn as they act as change agents outside the classroom.
The process of engaging students, faculty, staff and employer partners led to
the formation of a path to capture distinctive student social and emotional
skills through reflection, integrated feedback, and self-directed learning,
under the “Catalyst” micro-credential rubric. Join us to learn about our
process, influential factors, and what we expect and hope to encounter through
the pilot project.
October 13, 2015 call featuring Al Byers, National Science Teachers Association
NSTA Digital Badges: Inspiring
Online Professional Community Engagement and High Impact Learning
The National Science Teachers Association uses
digital badges to motivate and affirm participation in their online
professional Learning Center communities and to document growth in
self-directed and blended learning opportunities for individuals, institutions
of higher education, and school districts across the country. See examples
drawn from our 175,000 users, 80 colleges and universities, and 40,000 unique
visitors per month leveraging our portal for their personalized professional
learning needs.
Al Byers is the Associate Executive Director of
Services at the National Science Teachers Association. Since joining NSTA in
2002, he now sets the strategic oversight and executive management for an
outstanding team of 30 individuals and an annual $16M budget. Prior to joining
NSTA, Dr. Byers was an Aerospace Education Specialist for the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center, and a NASA Graduate Student Research Fellow for the NASA
Langley Research Center, where he completed his Ph.D. in Instructional Systems
Design from Virginia Tech in 2010 with a focus on sustainable large scale
learning solutions.
September 29, 2015 call featuring Nate Otto (Director of Badge Alliance)
Badgr is an open-source badge issuing,
management, and user achievement tracking platform published by Concenric Sky. It brings together the core
features of Open Badges for issuers and earners. For issuers, Badgr has an
easy-to-use control panel, offering badge definition and awarding. For badge
recipients, Badgr offers integrated badge management, organization, and sharing.
Every feature is available to integrate into your favorite applications through
the Badgr API.
In October, Badgr is
launching v1.0, featuring integration with the Canvas LMS for automatic badge
issuing for achievements along online course learning pathways. Badgr will be
available for instructors using Canvas.net.
Concentric Sky offers free
Badgr accounts on badgr.io and also
publishes Badgr on GitHub as open source software for developers to install and
run themselves.
Nate Otto is Director of Open
Badges at Concentric Sky. He is a software developer working with Open Badges
since 2012. In addition, Nate serves as the Interim Director of the Badge
Alliance, the global standards body and community hub for Open Badges. He
represents the perspective of pragmatic idealist developers to the badges
community.
September 15, 2015 call featuring Iain MacLaren and Blaneth McSharry, All Aboard (Ireland)
The
All Aboard project aims to identify the wide range of skills and knowledge that
students and staff in Irish Higher Education, will need to feel confident and
creative when learning, working and exploring the digital world. All Aboard is
rising to the challenge identified in the national Digital Roadmap of building ‘digital capacity,’ not just in terms
of infrastructure, but also in terms of people, their skills, their levels of
confidence and their ability to critique and challenge pre-conceptions. All
Aboard is piloting and implementing the use of Digital Badges as a means of
recognizing achievement and motivating learners and organisations.
This talk introduces GRASS (Grading Soft Skills) - an
EU-funded project that focuses on how Open Badges can be used to support,
motivate, grade and recognize development of one's soft skills over time in
formal educational settings. Open Badges are used in GRASS to recognize
students' achievements in developing and demonstrating different soft skills
(e.g., critical thinking, collaboration, skilled communication) at different
levels. The project has developed a novel pedagogical approach to support
continuous development and assessment of students' soft skills, and eight
partner institutions have incorporated this approach in their daily practices,
at multiple levels of education. Following a rigorous, systematic approach to
grading soft skills, the project has developed a rich, structured set of soft
skills metrics to collect from learners' activities as dynamic indicators of
the learners' ability to apply, develop and improve their soft skills. The
GRASS pedagogical approach and the sets of metrics drive the Open Badges
systems implemented in the partner institutions. The talk explains how this has
been done, presents the evaluation conducted so far in one of the partner
institutions, and shares the experiences and lessons learned.
August 18, 2015 call featuring Michael Macklin
Director of New Product Development (division of continuing education)
Colorado State University (CSU) Online, Fort Collins, CO
This presentation describes
the use of digital badges in non-credit, just-in-time, short courses that
target horticulture skills for the home gardener or green industry
professional. Learners are able to signup for
individual badges, bundles of badges, or the full program. The badge management
suite, CSULogic, was developed through an innovative public/private partnership
with RelevanceLogic, Inc. This software allows for automation of badge
delivery, integration with existing systems, and is agnostic to learning
management systems and student information systems,
allowing for deployment across sectors and industries outside of higher
education. Approximately one-third of learners are awarded badges by assessment
performance.
August 4, 2015 call featuring G. Alex Ambrose
Professor of Practice at the Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning
G. Alex Ambrose will discuss why digital badges need
ePortfolios and why ePortfolios need digital badges. “ePortfolios with
Evidenced-Based Badges” (E2B2) at Notre Dame, which won a 2015 Campus
Technology Innovator Award, is this first true integration of ePortfolios
(Digication) and digital badges (Credly) offers evidence of competencies gained
from co-curricular learning experiences on a collegiate campus. To date, 9
different badges have been created and issued to over 100 students. Using a few
use cases, Alex with share his research on digital badge design, perceptions,
and impact.
Chris Gamrat (Penn State University) discussed his research on
digital badges used for teacher professional development. This discussion
focused on the experiences of K-12 science teachers that used NASA’s Teacher
Learning Journeys digital badge system across two years. This research used a
ubiquitous learning framework to help to inform independent learning, badge
design, and technology-enhanced workplace learning.
July 7, 2015 call featuring Ilona Buchem
Professor for Digital Media & Diversity
Beuth University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany
Prof. Buchem can be reached via email: buchem@beuth-hochschule.de
Cultural localisation is the process of adapting the linguistic and cultural content of a design for a specific local culture.The
aim of this talk is to explore cultural localisation of open badges
from two perspectives. The first perspective is the cultural
localisation of skills with the help of open badges. The second
perspective is the cultural localisation of open badges as a system
itself.My
talk will include insights from a German qualification project for
migrant academics, in which badges have been applied to enhance
employability, as well as insights from the process of building an open
badges community in German-speaking countries.My
intention is to develop a framework for cultural localisation of open
badges and I would like to discuss some considerations for such a
framework.
I hope that many international participants are able to join this call!
