Top 5 Practices for Digital Badges in Education
Are you planning to automate your system of issuing badges? If yes, then your experience can be like a great roller coaster if you do not gear up well before launching your badging program. So, what can you do to combat the challenges that you may face in your very first digital badging initiatives?
As luck would have it, there is a myriad of institutions that have created effective badging programs, so you can conveniently follow their footprints to achieve success in this industry. Here is a list of practices that you can adopt in order to develop and implement digital badges for professional development.
1. Transparency is the key
Maintaining the highest level of transparency for your digital badge is critical since you have to sustain its value and uphold the integrity of the issuing body. Anyone who is inspecting the badge must be able to see its true essence and relevance. It is important to clearly lay out the criterion of obtaining the digital badge and you have to ensure that the hard work put in the candidate is explicitly visible.
2. Competencies must be in full view of everyone
Though there could be a variety of reasons to issue a badge, it is advisable to distinctly display the level of competency accomplished by the candidate to earn digital badges for professional development. To tell the truth, the badges that approve the skills of an individual add significance to the expertise of the learner. And, it evolves them into superior candidates for high degree jobs as well as internships.
3. Don’t be redundant
The fact that proves the steep level of the resourcefulness of digital badges is their potential to exhibit the skills and knowledge with such detailed and precise techniques letter grades could never do. In case, you present a badge to a candidate for obtaining an A grade, you are not really attaching a new value to their profile. In simpler terms, the transliteration of the person is more than enough to prove that they got an A. Badges can prove to be special if you are able to convey why how they achieve an A by highlighting the competency that they accomplished.
4. Automate the issuance process
On many badging platforms, modern technology is yet to make its impact. In various places, you will find instructors provide people with unrefined forms for collecting evidence for assessment. As a result of which, teachers have to deal with a torrent of email attachments that just keep getting piled up. Instead, they must organize the artifacts into proper databases for storage in order to streamline the reviewing process.
5. Give Candidates a playbook
A playbook can be your candidate’s guiding light when they begin to beef up their electronic portfolios since they will get a clearer idea about creating resumes with pre-inserted badges. This way, people will learn how to pull out the value of the digital badges and showcase that value for career advancement.
