Digital badges – rewards for learning?

Abstract

Digital badges are quickly becoming an appropriate, easy and efficient way for educators, community groups and other professional organisations, to exhibit and reward participants for skills obtained in professional development or formal and informal learning. This paper offers an account of digital badges, how they work and the underlying benefits for learners and educational institutions. It also evaluates the use of digital badges to engage and motivate learners. It is this engagement and motivation strategy that a short non-award course for high school students seeks to replicate through many different learning strategies, one of those being the use of digital badges. A digital badging model has been proposed, which shows the four stages educators go through in their decision to use digital badges. Finally, a double-loop learning process has been suggested that could help educators in the implementation of digital badges.