What are Digital Badges?
A digital badge is a form of a digital credential representing a skill, learning achievement, or experience. Digital badges can represent competencies and involvements recognized in online or offline life. Each digital badge is associated with an image and some metadata. Digital badges assist with promoting, tracking, and organizing achievements by capturing and communicating credentials (Hamson-Utley, 2016).
Why Use Digital Badges?
Badges help communicate about competencies, achievements, and skills that an individual has earned or achieved. As a digital credential, they can be shared in a variety of web-spaces or on social media platforms.
In higher education, badging is implemented to meet a variety of needs such as:
- Helping students better understand the learning outcomes and skill-sets they gained through course work, programs, or in co-curricular activities
- Helping departments to think critically about their programmatic goals
- Encouraging and acknowledging professional development opportunities for staff and faculty
These credentials may be tied directly to the learning outcomes of a single class, or across core competencies of an academic program, or can exist outside of the curriculum entirely.
Badge Levels & Descriptions
The Teaching Transformation and Development Academy (TTaDA) will be issuing badges in three levels; Participation, Application, Sharing. Please see below for descriptions of badges.
Level ❶ - Foundation
Examples: Associate, Beginner, Foundations, Fundamentals, Level 1
Level ❷ - Intermediate
Examples: Professional, Intermediate, Proficient, Level 2
Level ❸ - Advanced
Examples: Specialist, Master, Mentor, Expert, Level 3
Research & Resources
About Acclaim
The Acclaim platform provides a framework through which UND can create badges, define evidence and criteria, and then issue badges/digital credentials to the earner. Acclaim also acts as a medium through which earners can explore credentials, finding ones that meet their needs, and through which earners may display them on websites, resumes, and social media platforms.
Issuing Badges
There are two ways to issue badges via Credly’s Acclaim:
❶ Issuers can manually send out individual badges via an email from Acclaim, after the earner has successfully completed the criteria specified for the badge.
❷ A list of earners may be sent their badges as a group by uploading a .csv file with required information. This method might be utilized in the case of a Foundational badge, where event attendees provided their name and email as proof of attendance. After the event, the designated issuer can email all of the attendees a badge.
Displaying Badges
Once someone earns a badge they can share it with potential employers, social media platforms and more. For more detailed information on sharing badges, please visit the links below:
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