Digital Badges for 21st-Century Learners

Digital badges are gaining popularity and could have strategic and beneficial consequences on the worldwide education sphere. They update student credentials and urge them to earn quite as many badges as possible. They make it easier for employers to spot qualified individuals by correlating badges to advertised job roles, as well as diversifying a student’s skill set by listing everything they’ve worked for.

Digital Badges’ growing popularity:

The objective of the Open Badges standard, which was formed in 2012, was simple: create a means for collecting achievement information and embedding it into portable graphic formats as digital badges. The use cases remained limited, and the business value was unclear.

However, the potential for businesses began to appear when IBM got in and chose to build its very own digital badge program. They had built a successful online program called “Big Data University,” which has now been renamed Cognitive Class, where they provided free education created by its finest engineers and data scientists. The IBM Digital Badge Program yielded impressive results in just a few weeks. Enrollment climbed by 129 percent, with a 226 percent increase in the percentage of students who finished courses.

Organizations like Smithsonian, Disney-Pixar, and NASA, as well as MIT, Yale, Purdue, and Carnegie Mellon, use badges to acknowledge and recognize learners’ or employees’ increased abilities, understanding, and successes in educational and professional development. Adoption considerations based upon a certain Diffusion of Innovation theory should really be addressed to boost the use of Digital Badges in businesses. With representations of Digital Badges and Micro-credentials, individuals and the community may see earners’ successes, qualifications, and efficiency.

The need for Digital Badges for Modern Learners:

Learners can use digital badges to show off often-overlooked transferrable micro-skills like problem-solving, learning, and professional growth in an open, visible, and widespread setting. As a result, digital badges might make it easier for individuals to authenticate not only professional training but also a set of sub-skills or micro-skills that might be missed or lost.  It is difficult to establish that a learner has exhibited learning to receive university credit. Institutions would be able to cross integrate accurately and establish credibility if they were given badges at the micro-level.

Engagement and motivational aspects are only one aspect of digital badging, and they will emerge evidently once the beneficial series of training is implemented and feedback is gathered. Awarding a badge for demonstrated and earned effort or expertise is another inducement to learn, and while it isn’t the main pull, it does offer a tiny amount of motivation to master the so-called required skills.