Student, Interrupted: Can Digital Badging Improve Programmatic Agility and Help IS Students During Crises?

Abstract

We propose that a stackable badged micro-credential system could increase academic programmatic agility, in turn helping university students cope with personal crises (illness, accidents, family emergencies), and societal-level crises (pandemics, natural disasters, geopolitical events). We demonstrate how our proposed system would certify students’ mastery of several modules comprising a required graduate-level Strategic IS Management course. This proposed system will provide helpful structure (through a modular design and reliance on well-accepted faculty governance, including the traditional college registrar role), and temporal flexibility (enabling students to receive credit for course modules taken in different terms/semesters, and taught by the same or different instructors) and portability (given that micro-credentials provide valid evidence of specific skills or knowledge a student has acquired, regardless of learning modality or instructor). This stackable badged micro-credential system would help students during crises, by making it easy for them to temporarily drop out of a course when circumstances impede effective learning and making it easy for them to resume studies when they are ready and able to do so. We discuss technical challenges that university administrators may face in implementing micro-credentialing in IS classes, offer suggestions for pilot-testing the proposed system, and suggest possible future extensions of this idea.