Open Badges Report

Report on a 1-year pilot (2017-2018)

Report date: September, 2018

Pilot background

In June 2017, Western’s Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) submitted an expression of interest to eCampusOntario (eCO) to participate in a 12-month funded pilot of Open Badges. The expression of interest included five partners (including the CTL) from across Western who agreed to participate in the evaluation of: a) the badging platform supplied by eCO and b) the feasibility of awarding badges at Western. Using a taxonomy of badges developed by Dr. Christopher Long, teams proposed developing and awarding badges embedded in for-credit learning, faculty development and non-credit learning opportunities. The initial partners were staff and faculty from:

Online Graduate Diploma in Applied Health Sciences
Centre for Teaching and Learning
Ivey Business School
School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies
Continuing Studies

Western’s application was selected by eCO for funding in July, 2017.

Project timeline

Summer 2017

Western’s open badge application selected (July)

Fall 2017

Monthly design team meetings to explore the landscape of badges and to design badge offerings (September-October)
Associate Director, eLearning, CTL invited to present at the Ontario Open Badge Forum (November)
Office of the Registrar’s Communications Team joined as a partner to assist with the development of a draft Western Badges Style Guide (October)
Project status report submitted to eCO (December)

Winter 2018

Badges developed and checked for quality by pilot coordinators (January)
Badge graphics and style guide developed by the Office of the Registrar’s Communication Team (January-May)
Partners launch individual badging pilot (January-May)
Interim Report submitted to eCO (March)

Summer 2018

Subscription provided by eCO to badging platform expired (July)
Western purchases another 1 year subscription to badging program (August)
Panel organized for Fall Perspectives on Teaching conference (pdf) (August)
Final report submitted to eCO (August)

Digital badges background

What is a badge?

By Bryan Mathers (used under CC-BY-ND License)

Badges are a digital representation of an earner’s skill, learning achievement or experience. Each badge is associated with metadata which “provides information about what the badge represents and the evidence used to support it” (source) acting, ultimately, as evidence of a badge’s “worth”. Digital badges are created and awarded in an online digital badging platform. Once earned, earners can keep badges private or publicly display them (and the supporting metadata) online. Other terms for badges include “Open Badges”, “Digital Badges” and “Microcredential”.

In Higher Education, badges are positioned as a way of recognizing academic achievements at a different scale to courses and programs. They have been offered as a way to recognize skills developed across a program of study (e.g. Leadership; Collaboration) but could be used to recognize achievements developed at the course-level. Within the literature, badges are proposed as a way for employers to understand graduates’ competencies and to allow graduates a way to describe what they know and can do. Other institutions in Canada (e.g., University of Calgary) and globally (e.g., University of Milan-Bicocca, Northeastern University) have adopted badges as a way to recognize and display curricular and co-curricular learning.

Badging platform evaluated in pilot

As a part of the eCO pilot, we evaluated CanCred Factory.

Pilot outcomes

By the end of the pilot, one of the original teams withdrew, leaving four partners to develop and award badges. In total, nine badges were piloted by these four teams, and 202 badges were earned using the badging platform. In one pilot, 12/12 surveyed badge earners responded that they were happy to receive a digital badge for completing a professional development program. Furthermore, 11/12 surveyed badge earners felt that a digital badge adequately recognizes the professional development program they completed.

Next steps for the four badge pilot teams include:

Discontinuing awarding badges for its professional development programs.
Continuing to develop badges with a different badging platform vendor.
Continuing to assess the viability of badges, while notes that this is not a priority of the unit due to the additional workload of coordinating the development and awarding of badges.
Continuing to experiment with integrating badges into their professional development programming.

Units consulted

Western Libraries
Office of the Registrar
Western Technology Services
Human Resources
Office of the Vice Provost (Academic Programs)
Student Success Centre
Faculty of Engineering

Opportunities and threats

As a result of the pilot, the following opportunities were identified:

There is continued interest in a Badges platform across the institution.
Student enthusiasm for badges was noted during the pilot.
Are badges an opportunity for evidencing of WDOs? See, for example, Deakin Hallmarks.
Dr. Aaron Price (Engineering) has built a basic LTI-compliant plugin for Sakai & CanCred.
eCampusOntario has continued interest in driving adoption of badges.
Western would continue to be a Provincial leader in this domain.

The following threats were identified:

Fiscal sustainability: subscription to commercial badging platforms range in price from $5,000 CAD to over $10,000 USD annually, with the price growing based on the number of badges awarded annually.
Concerns were raised that Badges are too similar to Western’s current co-curricular transcript and Orbis platform.
There is the on-going question of whether employers (or anyone external to the University) recognize the value of badges.
Implications for Human Resources: is there available capacity in units to take on and manage the platform & process on an ongoing basis?
The sustainability of badge metadata is in question with CanCred, noting that a solution is to add a Badge Record Store to the platform at an extra cost.
Unanswered questions remain about how any commercial badge platforms can integrate with other Western enterprise software (e.g. PeopleSoft).

Lessons learned

Badges have a bottom-up appeal (different partners at the institution have ideas for implementing badges in their own program or context), but they also require clear institutional policy and governance structure in order to ensure quality. Interest out-paced policy, which threatened our badging initiative’s viability.
A badging platform needs to guarantee metadata sustainability and data ownership. It is disappointing that the badging platform evaluated requires an additional subscription fee for the institution to host its own data. Without ensuring the perpetuity of badge metadata, badges will not be adopted for curricular purposes.
Collaboration and partnership from across our campus was key to the success of the pilot. We learned different lessons about what works (and doesn’t work), and can make a better case for launching badges after knowing how it works with multiple partners.

Acknowledgements

The coordinating team at the CTL would like to say thank-you to our pilot partners, especially the staff members who worked with us throughout the evaluation year. We would also like to acknowledge the support of eCampusOntario throughout the process. A final thank-you to Western’s Office of the Registrar communications team for their input and for developing our graphic assets.

Additional resources & references

Badges FAQ from Mozilla.
Chris Gamrat, Brett Bixler, and Victoria Raish (2016). Instructional design considerations for digital badges. From: Digital Badges in Open Education. Routledge: New York. Available as electronic book from Western Libraries
Veronica Diaz, Jonathan Finkelstein & Susan Manning (2015). Developing a Higher Education Badging Initiative. Educause.
Richard West & Daniel Randall (2016). The Case for Rigor in Open Badges. From: Digital Badges in Open Education. Routledge: New York. Available as electronic book from Western Libraries