Open ed 13: Learner-Driven Liberation: Open Badges & New Knowledge Sharing

Emily Goligoski (Photo credit: jdlasica)

"In an age of anywhere, anytime learning, learners and educators who design Open Badges are re-inventing recognition. Credentials no longer need to be limited to transcripts or printed certificates; now they can be virtual, shareable and peer-issued. Advocates of open educational resources can use Mozilla's open technical standard to make symbols of skills and interests portable and interoperable. Our conversational panel will feature badge issuing educational organizations and employers interested in using badges to identify talent. Together, we'll examine real world examples of badges in the wild. Our panel will also explore: a) the ways in which badges can be used to demonstrate interests and competencies; and b) the methods by which individuals are using badges to access new educational and professional opportunities. The conversation will focus on current and future interpretations of skill and interest recognition for organizations, educators, and learners."

Emily Goligoski presented on open badges. I am interested in this because we would like to use a badge system in eLearning 101 - our online orientation. She works with the Mozilla Foundation as a researcher.

What would it look like to use badges for learning? Badges have been used in social networks and in Khan Academy but what would it look like for competency-based learning.

Mozilla is building a shared, universal standards. There came up with a metadata scheme that includes badege name, description, criteria, issuer, evidence, date issued, standards, etc. The badges can show employers what a learner can actually do above and beyond just a transcript. NPR is endorsing badges for Youth Radio for instance.

Digital badges can be used for prior learning and life-long learners.

A learner can earn badges from formal classes, MOOCs, volunteer programs, etc.
The badges are stored in a digital space called a "Badge Backpack" The learner can set display permissions.
There is a Wordpress backpack plugin and one coming for LinkedIn.
Potential employers can tell exactly what the learner can do.
They are making it easier to earn, issue, & display badges across the web.
 More and more companies are looking for these because the badges are endorsed and vouched for where as a resume is not.
Looking forward - from earn, issue, adn display to consumption and discovery of open badges. They are using these for employee training and professional development.
They can represent hard & soft skills, peer assessment, & stackable, life-long learning.

Why Integrate with Open Badges?
Increased learner engagement
Easy integration with prior learning
Alignment with paths & programs

They are rolling out "BadgeKit"
Buikd Issue, Assess, Analyze, Discover, Share, and Endorse - all the tools will be free and open source. You can pick and choose to use this with a number of outside assessment tool.  

OpenBadges has Community Member Profiles

There is also a weekly community phone call on Weds. mornings

http://ommunity.openbadges.org

Related articles

• State of the Union: Mozilla Badges (carlacasilli.wordpress.com)
• Badge-Based Professional Development: Purposes and Possibilities (hastac.org)
• Open Badges Hackery at Mozfest (weblog.lonelylion.com)
• Design Principles for Motivating Learning with Digital Badges (hastac.org)
• Better Futures for 2 Million Americans Through Open Badges (macfound.org)
• Do-It-Yourself Badges (hastac.org)

MOOCs: Lets Do The Timewarp Again!

I love all the arguments from the 1990s that were leveled at online teaching and learning that are now being leveled at MOOCs. I re-read all of my favorite straw-man hits from the 90s including the digital divide, lack of credibility, perception by the establishment, lack of interaction, etc. all remixed for the MOOC era.

Currently, educators and journalists struggle to write about MOOCs because the term MOOCs covers a broad category of online courses. When they are writing about MOOCs, they tend to only be thinking of the latest wave of entrepreneurial colleges like Corsera - they do not understand that MOOCs have been successfully working in places like the University of Manitoba and Canada's open university, Athabasca. Those are referred to as the "Connectivist MOOCs" or cMOOCs originally founded by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. And that folks like Jim Groom have been successfully running task-based MOOCs like DS 106 for years before MOOC became the latest scary innovation.

The current jeremiads are being written by journalists and educators who can't distinguish a collection of videos (such as Khan Academy) in YouTube from an online course, have little experience with online learning and no experience with MOOCs (or a single experience with a particular kind of MOOC with which they try to define the whole phenomena).

I am amazed at how few educators get the money issue. There is a lot of hand-wringing out there around questions like "why would the students pay for my class when they can go to MIT or Stanford for free?" The answer is usually something as smug as John Marks' conclusion "they are for self-improvement, we are for self-formation." There are students out there who need the information that MOOCs are providing because they may not live near a college or have the time and money for the "self-formation" experience that Marks is promising.

The criticisms against MOOCs generally fall along the same lines as the arguments they were using against online education - MOOCs are bad because students won't be able to socialize, make connections, join clubs and fraternal organizations, participate in sports, see the instructor talk, and they will be reading on computers instead of sipping sherry in a big leather chair reading a first edition of Keats. How could a MOOC replicate that? Never mind the fact that many students do not have the opportunity of socializing and making connections in college. Some students 20 hours a week and commuted to college.

This points to some fundamental misconceptions about online learning and why students take online classes. Typically, they are not taking them to replicate the "college experience" - they are taking them because they cannot get to the college experience. I have been excited about MOOCs as I have been about online eduction, open education resources, and open textbooks because they are opportunities open up education to more people who would otherwise not get it.

Related articles

• Digital Pedagogy and MOOCification (hastac.org)
• The unquestioned assumption of online education (tech.mit.edu)
• MOOCs and Other Four-Legged Chickens (cain.blogspot.com)
• MOOC, day 1: Utopias, Dystopias, and Digital Divides (criticalmargins.com)