"Badges" Earned Online Pose Challenge to Traditional College Diplomas

• Published in: The Education digest 2012-10, Vol.78 (2), p.48
• Main Author: Young, Jeffrey R
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic Achievement; Certification; Classrooms; Colleges & universities; Communities of Practice; Credentials; Earnings; Educational Attainment; Educational Certificates; Educational technology; Employers; Grants; Information Science Education; Internet; Job Applicants; Labor Market; Learning; Mathematics Instruction; Online Courses; Online Vendors; Open Education; Peer Teaching; Resistance (Psychology); Science education; Science Instruction; Service learning; Skills; Soft Skills; Standardized Tests; Student Motivation; Students; Traditionalism; Web Sites
• ISSN: 0013-127X; 1949-0275

The spread of a seemingly playful alternative to traditional diplomas, inspired by Boy Scout achievement patches and video-game power-ups, suggests that the standard certification system no longer works in today's fast-changing job market. Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting "badges" to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain--intentionally so--to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills not formally recognized in a traditional classroom. The biggest push for badges is coming from industry and education reformers. Mozilla, the group that develops the Firefox web browser, is designing a framework to let anyone with a webpage--colleges, companies, or individuals--issue education badges designed to prevent forgeries and give potential employers details about the distinctions at the click of a mouse. Hundreds of educational institutions have flocked to a $2-million grant program, run in coordination with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, seeking financial support to experiment with the educational-badge platform. Employers might prefer a world of badges to the current system. Diplomas contain little detail about what one has learned, whereas badges better reflect a person's qualifications. Some observers see a darker side, charging that badges turn all learning into a commodity and cheapen the difficult challenge of mastering something new. Rather than dive into an assignment out of curiosity, students might focus on an endless pursuit of badges, argues Alex Reid, an associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. "The presence of a badge could actually be a detriment to an otherwise genuine learning experience," he wrote on his blog. But in an interview, he agreed that in today's tough job market, people are searching for alternatives that better reflect their qualifications.