4.3. Open Digital Badges

Hickey (2012b) outlines four major functions for Open Digital Badges: recognising learning, assessing learning, motivating learning and evaluating learning.

(1) Recognising learning - this is the primary function of badges as they can capture various skills and achievements and provide a detailed picture of learners’ skills, experience, achievements and qualities;

(2) Assessing learning - according to Hickey (2012a) assessing learning is one of four major functions for Open Digital Badges. Badges can help: (1) drive innovation around new types of assessments; (2) provide more personalised assessments for learners and (3) move beyond out of date or irrelevant testing practices. However, there are multiple assessment options for earning a badge and ensuring that the needs of each learner are met including course organisers, peers, or learners themselves. Nearly every application of Open Digital Badges includes some form of assessment: for example, summative, formative, transformative, instructor-, peer-, and self-assessment (Hickey 2012a, 2012b);

(3) Motivating learning - much of the concern and applause for badges centres around the idea of motivation. Some authors believe that badges are motivating students because of its playful nature. However, there are concerns about the well-documented negative consequences of extrinsic incentive on intrinsic motivation and free choice engagement. Therefore, some authors argue that we should not use badges to motivate learning. However, Hickey (2012b, para. 7) notes, that if we use badges to recognise and assess learning, they are likely to impact motivation.

(4) Evaluating learning - badges have enormous potential for helping teachers, schools, and programs evaluate and explore learning. Each badge has eight bits of information (“metadata”) which will be recorded and easily accessible as a database (Virkus, 2019).

Video 3: Get Started with Digital Badges! [10:48]