Digital badges are a great way to communicate the skills and competencies that learners attain regardless of where they are in their learning or career journey. They can be unique, branded, creative, and highly contextual; all things that when done well are crucial to achieving the end goal of making skills more visible and closing the opportunity gap.
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Canvas & Credly Webinar - 5/2/18
1. Digital Badges:
The Proof that Communicates
Skills
#WorkforceRelevant
Brenda Perea
Former Instructional Design
Project Manager
Colorado Community College System
@pereaink
Hope Kandel
Director of Partnerships
Credly
@hopekandel
Robert Gibson
Director of Learning Technologies
Emporia State University
@rgibson1
2. Thank you to Canvas
for including us in
Partner Day
7. The Values of Digital Badging
"WCET Leadership Summit: 21st Century Credentials: Learners + Institutions + Workforce" by Cali Morrison, WICHE
Cooperative for Educational Technologies is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
11. Colorado Community College System
Badge Program
• CCCS is in year 4 of Credly Adoption.
• Interested in documenting skills, abilities and
competencies not recognized in traditional transcripted
courses, certificates and degrees.
• Began with Technical Math for Industry, then rolled out
Advanced Manufacturing Machining, Engineering
Graphics, Faculty and Staff development and
Healthcare.
12. Emporia State University
Badge Program
•ESU is 2-3 years into Credly adoption.
•Interested in CBL and accomplishments not
otherwise captured in a transcript.
•Began with co-curricular implementation,
slowly introduced curricular implementation.
17. #WorkforceRelevant
What we discovered
•General lack of knowledge/awareness
regarding alternative credentials.
•Some faculty resisted their issuance.
•Faculty actually found the most utility in
increasing employer/college department ties
including use in their business advisory
committees.
Colorado Community College System
18. #WorkforceRelevant
What we discovered
•Some students didn’t take them seriously.
•Faculty actually found the most utility, using
their badge for professional development.
•Most students don’t use LinkedIn – a primary
vehicle for microcredentials.
Emporia State University
19. Question:
What’s next for your badge
program and where do you
think digital badges are
headed?
#WorkforceRelevant
20. Where we think our badge program is going:
• With the unbundled student entering into the HE
space, digital badges help accelerate the students
credential attainment, allow for multiple entry and exits
from a life-long and life-wide learning/career pathway.
• Public/private partnerships, especially in the corporate
training side of the house.
• Empowering earners and employers to be more
specific of on the job skills, abilities, and competencies
needed to perform on the job.
Colorado Community College System
#WorkforceRelevant
21. Where we think our badge program is going:
•Once CBL and microlearning becomes more
mainstream, these types of alternative
credentials will become more accepted and
recognized.
•Public/private partnerships.
•Enhanced job placement activities.
Emporia State University
#WorkforceRelevant
22. Question:
What advice or lessons learned
can you share with others
starting or expanding their own
digital credentialing initiatives?
#WorkforceRelevant
23. Lessons Learned
• If just starting, identify a campus champion who can successfully
implement a pilot program.
• Ensure that you have at least one top administrator as a badge
champion and at least one employer who is willing to accept digital
badge in identifying applicants.
• Make them rigorous, but applicable to specific industry or workforce skills
needed.
• Control the branding and image carefully, especially in a multi-college or
campus situation.
• Expand your ecosystem by presenting to employers, workforce
development boards, associations, city councils, county councils,
economic development boards, k-12 systems, 2 or 4-year feeder
schools.
• Encourage the use of micro credentials in annual performance reviews
and student advising sessions.
Colorado Community College System
#WorkforceRelevant
24. #WorkforceRelevant
Lessons Learned
• Control who is authorized to administer and award
badges. Begin with training programs
• Develop a criteria/standards template for the campus.
• Control the volume of microcredential awards (eg,
guard against ‘badge fatigue’)
• Promote successful examples. Units that dropped
lacked understanding of translation to student
success.
• Attach microcredentials to job placement.
Emporia State University
25. Brenda Perea
Former Instructional Design
Project Manager
Colorado Community College System
@pereaink
Hope Kandel
Director of Partnerships
Credly
@hopekandel
Robert Gibson
Director of Learning Technologies
Emporia State University
@rgibson1
Audience Questions
and
Thank you
#WorkforceRelevant
Editor's Notes
Patricia:
Welcome to today’s webinar. Thank you for joining us and taking a moment to complete the poll questions as you enter the meeting space. There are three questions to answer
Before we get things started we wanted to take care of a few things (house keeping)
I’d like to introduce our Panelists today: Brenda Perea (title) and Rob Gibson (title) and our facilitator Hope Candell (title)
A quick run through of the session agenda. We’ll start with a quick snapshot of where things stand with digital badges today, then we’ll dive into the discussion with Brenda and Rob and learn more about the digital badge programs at both Colorado Community College System and Emporia State University, and finally we’ll take some questions from the audience.
If you want to follow along with the conversation on twitter, use the hashtag Workforce Relevant Before I turn things over to Hope we just wanted to take a moment and thank Canvas for inviting us to their Partner Day. Glad to share and be a part of the learning!
The real language they are all moving towards is that of “verified competencies” – which many of us call “Credentials”.
Credly provides the platform that enables organization to issue, manage and use digital credentials – Enabling all players in the labor market to use a common currency.
Increase Equity & Access:
Measure students learning wherever it happens – on the job; in a classroom; through an online training program; through credits for prior learning. We are moving away from a degree- and pedigree-based system to a system of competencies. Everyone has competencies, and with digital credentials, they can be recognized and discovered. Further, digital credentials empower the earner by giving them the vocabulary to advocate on their own behalf.
Reduce Student Debt:
¾ fallacy – the all-or-nothing proposition of today’s higher education system: You can complete ¾ of the course work, take on ¾ (at least!) of the debt, gain ¾ of the relevant knowledge and skills, but if you don’t graduate because life happens to you, then you get 0% of the value (or worse, you’re tagged with the scarlet letter of “dropout”).
Demonstrate ROI:
The transparency of digital credentials means that education institutions need to be more explicit about what is being taught (description), how it’s being assessed (criteria) and what third parties endorse or accept the training (endorsements). The data associated with digital credentials means we can track outcomes.
Make Education Records Interoperable:
The digital, transparent nature of these credentials facilitates articulation and fosters processes to establish minimum standards. As endorsements come into play and the ROI is trackable, a true market evolves for quality training and standard definitions. This need not be a top-down process: the transparency does the work.
We hear a lot about the skills gap (stats about the gap)
Another issue is the communications gap – digital badges make skills more visible, verifiable, and evidence based
Our partner Wonderlic completed a survey and they discovered 60% of employers agreed that they would be more inclined to interview graduates that had job specific skills badges on their resumes and 86.6% agreed that local educators should provide their students with job specific badges that VERIFY Skills.
This all seems very straight forward. However, for HE these simple requests take time, manpower and a paradigm shift from “business as usual”
When HE starts to engage employers in the education to workforce pathway, they begin to connect skills to opportunity. Badge earners are empowered to show what they can do through a digital badge, employers can know what badge earners can do whether they are applicants or existing employees.
Industry driven digital badges provide a powerful and employer-friendly complement to grades and other information traditionally found on a college transcript.
Students have the advantage of seeing a clear pathway of progression which will help them gain employment and reskill and upskill as the workforce needs change and evolve giving them the opportunity to work and advance in their chosen pathway.
