By Sheryl Grant. By any measure, the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition--our fourth Digital Media and Learning Competition--has been our most ambitious and most potentially transformative initiative. Collectively, we took an idea as old as badging, layered it on top of learning, and plugged it into the Web. And by collective, I mean "standing on the shoulders of giants" kind of collective. It’s taken a lot of people, a lot of organizations, and a lot of giants to get here. And most importantly, it's taken Connie Yowell, Director of Education at the MacArthur Foundation, to be the bold thinker mapping the way for us. Read more...

By Dan Hickey. In previous posts at HASTAC and Remediating Assessment I argued that we need to look beyond the intended purposes of digital badges and consider the actual functions of badges.  This builds on what Jim Greeno has convinced me what happens when situative views of knowing and learning are applied to assessment. A later post elaborated on the summative, formative, and transformative functions of digital badges. That later post also promised a subsequent post on what we might call transcendent functions. I had written some about it in the original version but it was too long and I really could not wrap my head around it at the time. Read more...

By Cathy Davidson. In 2009, when I was researching and writing the "How We Measure" chapter of Now You See It, I could offer a critique of the current system of standardized, summative, end-of-grade testing, but had little to offer that addressed the key positive contributions of standardized testing:  its ability to be graded by machine (or by humans with a template) and provide the basis for comparisons of outcomes across disparate institutions. Originally pioneered in a doctoral dissertation at Kansas State Teacher's College by Frederick Kelly in 1914, the item-response test was adopted widely and almost immediately because of these two features.
Many esteemed critics over the years have pointed out that multiple-choice tests are a poor instrument for motivating learning, for  instilling an appreciation for complexity, or for accurately testing what one actually learned. They encourage “teaching to the test” and “learning to the test,” especially in our post-2002 No Child Left Behind world where public school teachers can be penalized and schools closed if kids don’t do well on such tests.  However, until another system addresses the key attributes of standardization and automation, school life will continue to be governed, preschool to professional school, by EOGs, SATs, ACTs, GREs, LSATs, M-CATs and the like. Read more...

By sleslie. No, not MOOCs. Badges. Ok, now that you’ve stopped laughing (I admit, even I have a hard time not dismissively thinking of the sleeves of my Cub Scout shirt when I hear the term) let me explain why badges, as they mature beyond where they are currently, have the potential to disrupt formal education in a way that none of the technology innovations we’ve seen in the last couple of decades have.
Over those two decades, essentially the duration of my working life so far, every time I have tried to explain the magnitude of the disruptions (and the amount of potentials) that the network presents to formal education institutions (especially post secondary ones) the trump card interlocuters ALWAYS bring out to minimize the potential threat is “Accreditation.” Regardless of how many people are learning with each other, for free, in communities online, or the skyrocketing costs of formal ed, or how poorly the 4 year residential model serves an increasingly unconventional student body, or how the educational practices in many higher ed classrooms have barely moved out of the 19th Century, when met with the prospect that the value of a University degree is under threat and that their “market” will get as disrupted as the newspaper business, or travel agencies, etc., the response is simply “yeah, but we’re the only one who can issue degrees that people trust.” But I believe badges hold the potential to disrupt this. Read more...

Selon Le Figaro étudiant, des expérimentations sont actuellement menées par de grandes universités américaines en vue de délivrer des badges numériques aux étudiants ayants suivi leurs cours en ligne.
Les universités américaines sont actuellement à la recherche d'un outil permettant de certifier les compétences acquises par des étudiants suivant en ligne des cours "à la carte". Les diplômes, qui reconnaissent l'accomplissement d'un cursus complet, s'avèrent en effet inadaptés à ces parcours trop hétéroclites.
Des badges virtuels pour des compétences concrètes
Certains établissements testent donc l'idée de délivrer des "badges". Ceux-ci prendraient la forme de logos représentant la discipline étudiée, dans lesquels seraient stockées des métadonnées contenant "toutes les informations relatives à la formation validée, de l’organisme formateur aux compétences acquises, en passant par les notes obtenues ou la nature de l’examen".