Digital Badges and Micro-credentials: Digital Age Classroom Practices, Design Strategies, and Issues

Abstract

Digital Badges and Micro-credentials are documents that demonstrate individuals are engaged and productive members of a community. Additionally, earning Digital Badges and Micro-credentials may play a significant role in how individual earners increase self-achievement or view perceptions of self. Digital Badges and Micro-credentials show that earners have successfully attained set of goals. Earners have an opportunity to include Digital Badges on their resumes or to personally use Digital Badges to keep a running record of individual accomplishments through the accumulation of badges or credentials, similar to collecting Boy Scout badges. Digital badges or Micro-credentials afford opportunities for the use of alternative assessments which are designed to focus on extrinsic or intrinsic motivational strategies that promote individual or group earner success and learning outcomes. Earners engage in competency based, game based, or hierarchical learning that appeal to different learning styles and meet the needs of diverse learners. Digital Badges and Micro-credentials are valuable documentation for recognition of educational accomplishments or workplace efficiency. MIT, Yale, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, and organizations such as Smithsonian, Disney-Pixar, and NASA use badges for honoring and commending learners or employees improved skills, knowledge, and accomplishments in education and in workplace development. To increase the use of Digital Badges in organizations, adoption factors based on theory of Diffusion of Innovation should be addressed. Individuals and the community can view earners’ successes, accomplishments, and productivity through displays of Digital Badges and Micro-credentials.