Online students can earn digital badges for completing their course. But what about issuing badges to check student progress and cumulative skills learned? How can you verify and manage individual identities? Wouldn’t it be smart to keep the material open as evidence of a student’s outcome?
The challenges are being discussed between Indiana University (IU), George Washington University, edX and IBL Studios. All parties share a firm commitment to open education.
This collaborative effort to build and issue digital badges is based upon the findings at the Design Principles Documentation Project and is being undertaken by the Open Badges in Open edX and Beyond initiative. IU’s Center for Research on Learning and Technology will provide a twofold mode of support for digital badges to Dr. Lorena Barba’s MOOC: technology (facilitating coding in Open edX) and pedagogy (purposeful implementation, evidence, and assessment).
The team has set the goal of issuing digital badges by mid-November to students who complete built-in assessments with proficiency across the Open edX platform.
Indiana University’s scientists, Daniel Hickey and James Willis, describe the project in this blog post.
