Work in Progress: Awarding Digital Badges for Demonstration of Student Skills

Abstract

Digital badging has been used extensively in industry for highlighting employee skill sets and is valued in the workforce. In recent years, digital badges have become a more prevalent assessment tool utilized in higher learning to show and verify credentials for specific skills. Criteria, assessment and evidence can all be embedded within these badges which can then be added to student’s resumes as a visual indicator of skill. This paper will discuss the use of digital badges for the award of skill development in an undergraduate class, Introduction to Project Management. The effect of assigning micro-credentials on the attitudes toward and motivations of students will be also be discussed. The software used in class is not typically a skill acquired by undergraduate engineering students and those skills are not evident from examining student transcripts. The ability to create effective team dynamics is highly valued by industry but again cannot be assessed from transcripts. Digital badges were developed and awarded to students who showed proficiency of those two skill sets: the adept use of project management software and the creation of effective team dynamics. In this project, a summative assessment was created for the software utilized in class and an evaluation process was developed to assess each project team’s ability to perform effectively as a team. Two digital badges were developed and awarded to those students who showed proficiency in each of the two skills assessed. The badges were developed using Badgr, which is a free open sourced achievement recognition and tracking system that can be used to issue and share badges . These badges were then embedded into the University’s learning management system. A survey was also developed to determine student attitudes toward the use of digital badging and to better understand if the potential for receiving a badge better motivated the students to learn the material.

Meeting Name

126th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Charged Up for the Next 125 Years, ASEE 2019 (2019: Jun. 15-19, Tampa, FL)

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

2153-5965

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2019 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jun 2019

Link to Full Text

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