Knowledge and Skill-Based Digital Badges

A digital badge is a representation of an accomplishment, interest, or affiliation that is visual, available online, and contains metadata including links that help explain the context, meaning, process, and result of an activity. For example, a digital badge might represent (validate or credential) the peer and expert review of artifacts evidencing what someone knows and can do. The practice of creating, awarding, and displaying digital badges has emerged from the intersection of digital games practices, online reputation systems used in commerce (e.g., eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon) and media culture, and the historical custom of awarding recognition via physical status icons, such as ribbons, medals, and trophies. Achieving or receiving a digital badge can occur in a variety of ways ranging, for example, from the results of free choices on websites, participating in online engagements, reaching performance benchmarks, and responding to informal and formal assessments. Displaying badges on a personal webpage, electronic portfolio, or a social website is a way to establish and share a part of one’s identity and reputation—particularly what one knows and is able to do.

Digital badging also increasingly appears in promotion and engagement strategies to encourage desired online behaviors. For example in 2005, Microsoft introduced one of the first examples of an achievement system with the Xbox 360 Gamerscore, which had the effect of integrating individual games into an ecosystem, which led to new community practices based on individual roles and responses to the badges. Badges at the social media site Foursquare.com encourage users to check in frequently, to use the social network often, and to accumulate credit, recognition, and prestige. These uses of digital badges motivate desired behaviors and provide status and recognition in an online community, and they foster brand loyalty and customer retention, features that have not been lost on education futurists [Page 434]and those involved in the transformation of teaching and learning.

In education, knowledge and skills badging systems are emerging to (a) incentivize learners to engage in positive learning behaviors; (b) identify progress in learning and content trajectories; and (c) signify and credential engagement, learning, and achievement. For a badge to be recognized as a meaningful indicator of knowledge and skills, it must be a symbol of a valid educational assessment; the badge must therefore be linked with evidence of validated activities, experiences, and artifacts created during a designed learning engagement. The association with such evidence can be as simple as a hyperlink to a description, or in more sophisticated applications, an image or multimedia file displaying the badge is encoded with metadata. To support the meaningful use of digital badges in education, developers of digital badging systems embed metadata concerning relationships such as

Badges showing these connections can communicate and translate learning across the peer, interest, and learning contexts of one’s life.

The utility of an educational badging system is closely related to the learning engagement and assessment strategies of the issuing organization and relies on a combination of factors including the credibility of the organization and the recognition and acceptance of the badge by other users. This trust is best conveyed if the badge is a valid and reliable symbol of learning certified by an issuer, where both the issuer and the badge award process are accepted within an ecosystem of other people and institutions.

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