“Free online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional colleges, that leads to jobs,” says Kevin Carey, author of the essay “The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere”.
The new digital credentials, or badges, can solve this problem. Badges indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why the credentials were earned. In addition, badges are not limited to what people learned in college, but everywhere else. In the meantime, traditional college degrees are inadequate tools for communicating information and presenting that data to employers.
Read the complete article here.
Update: The Mozilla Foundation’s Open Badges project has been leading the badges effort, although the project is dying and about to be abandoned, according to experts consulted by IBL News.
[Disclosure: IBL Studios presented in November 2014 the first badge system for edX and Open edX]
