Digital Badge – An Achievement System to Increase Motivation
Over the past few years, the emergence of digital badges has marked a turning point in both higher education and the general world. Digital badge hold great promise to be these tools, which are something that professionals and educators have long desired. These solutions should be flexible, and strong, and improve teaching and learning as well as reward good behavior. They can also draw attention to certain skills that aren’t captured by tests like leadership, cooperation, communication, or analytical or creative thinking.
In addition to motivating students, digital badges can help students define their goals and objectives:
Without properly addressing the learners’ learning objectives and targets, it is impossible to expect them to comprehend. Using digital badges, you don’t have to just rely on exams and other conventional assessment methods. It’s vital to keep in mind that digital badges aren’t truly the end goal that students are aiming for when using digital badges in addition to or instead of other marking methods like grades or percentages. Instead of discouraging students from continuing on a learning journey, obtaining micro-credentials along the way to a more prestigious accreditation, receiving digital badges encourages them to do so.
Digital badges can be connected to anything, such as student participation, academic success, commitment, good behavior, and more. Identifying each student’s strengths and assisting them in learning in environments that are more familiar to them, can significantly improve classrooms and workplaces and encourage students.
Digital badges are a result of a growing formal education system in a virtual world that is expanding. In addition to allowing students to look back on and recognize their accomplishments, they can act as a foundation for learning in a variety of situations.
Considering Social Psychology:
Our educational system’s fundamental organizational element, learning, also serves as an excellent representation of several prevalent social-psychological ideas and occurrences. To offer the optimal answer, social psychology enables teachers to recognize the various skills of their students.
The requirements for earning badges are a test for users to reach. Setting goals is well-known to be a source of motivation, and exploratory design has shown that the most compelling objectives are those that are only slightly out of reach and the ones that are barely within grasp.
Additionally, users learn about their own highly meaningful areas of work and can develop a Gestalt awareness of the user community by looking at a list of potential badges. A group of people can be brought together by shared experiences by using badges to express a range of common activities. By creating a sense of likeness between a person and the group, earning badges can boost positive group identification and foster a sense of togetherness.
Three Elements That Drive Online Behavioral Change by Reward Badges:
Certified Training Programs:
Important abilities that are taught in the classroom are soon becoming obsolete as our workplaces change at a breakneck speed. Because of this, a wide range of abilities and skills are in great demand, making it urgent for employees to reskill and upskill. A system of training, mentoring, and reskilling produces an improvement in the employee experience, and generates a major impact on employee commitment, and all of these things work together to lower churn. By awarding digital certificates through accredited training programs, employers can help their employees feel recognized and believe that they are making an investment in their professional development.
Gamification:
The use of gamification in the workplace is among the most inventive and cutting-edge ways to boost worker performance and productivity. A effective strategy for helping staff members quantify their learning, identify areas for improvement, gamify the competition, and evaluate it is to use point-based quizzes and contests along with creating a leaderboard. Employers may want to provide Goal-Tracking Progress Indicators to help staff members understand how close they are to leveling up and boost their motivation and dedication to succeed.
- Challenges of Gamification:
Individual learners who want to master a single skill cannot use gamification by allowing leaderboards or scoreboards; they must instead be part of a group. Depending on the format and scope of the program, it can be difficult to customize gamification. Quizzes should be included to improve learned skills in order to address the issue that mini-games frequently serve as a diversion and come off as unprofessional.
Apart from that, it is crucial for organizations to issue a standard quality professional badge and not a pictorial badge for the users to share and display on digital platforms for professional development. Since pictorial badges don’t seem much professional it may minimize the impact of the digital badge acquired.
Digital Badges for Professional Development:
Digital badges are a portable method of achievement recognition that can be easily created and displayed by any organization, program, or platform. Moreover, companies that give digital badges increase the impact they could have by creating potential communities and offering recognizable learning opportunities.
According to recent surveys, badges are being accepted by employers more frequently as a means of evaluating potential workers. According to some analysts, the ability of universities to align educational programming with business needs and the ongoing work of credential standards will be two aspects that will decide the direction of this area in the future.
Digital badges in certain ways align with the most recent advancements in continuing education. Now that smartphones and Internet connectivity are so common, there are more opportunities to observe, record, and promote achievements and anniversaries. In contrast to normal academic records, badges provide learning evidence.
For instance, badges can be used to keep track of learning that occurs outside of the classroom, such as expertise acquired through internships, volunteer work, and other extracurricular pursuits. The shareability of digital badges is crucial for professional development as a result since it has an impact on one’s own brand recognition and portfolio development.