By: Andrew Barrett
Assessment of learning is important but it can be hard work for all involved. This post explores the question of how educators and learners can potentially get more bang for the effort they put into assessment through the use of the newly released Mozilla Open Badges infrastructure that is receiving considerable attention in education circles, the business world, and the popular press.
Consider the following likely familiar story of the process of assessment in a course. A student toils away on a particular test or assignment that gets submitted and subsequently graded by a diligent teaching assistant or instructor. The grade and feedback are shared with the learner, entered into a grade book, and eventually have an impact on the final grade of the learner in the course.
But what happens next?
Usually nothing. All the hard work of the student, the teaching assistant, and the instructor has gone towards creating something that is unlikely to be used or useful ever again. The artifacts associated with the learning experience, the grade, and the feedback may be locked away in an inactive course or the files of a particular learner.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that the limited use of the assessment information diminishes the learning experience or the potential impact on the learner. What I am suggesting is that the artifacts associated with the assessment have ongoing value that, more often than not, goes untapped.
When might assessment information be of interest outside the context in which the assessment originally took place?
- A Future Course: Evidence that a learner reached a specific level of achievement in an assessment activity in one course could be helpful to both the educator and the learner in the context of a future course. For example, knowing that a student in a biology course has successfully completed a particular lab experiment in an earlier course could help the course instructor select an appropriate lab experiment for the student to undertake in the current course that builds on what they have already learned. Both students and teachers can benefit from moving towards personalization of the learning environment.
- An Electronic Portfolio or Dossier: Putting together a rich and representative collection of artifacts that demonstrates a specific set of competencies is nothing new for faculty going up for tenure or those in various design-oriented professions. However, students in higher-education are increasingly using e-portfolios to document evidence gathered from multiple courses that they have made progress towards specific degree level expectations or professional standards (e.g., teaching, engineering, journalism)
- A Job Application: University students acquire skills and experience in their courses that are valued by employers. However, it’s often hard to communicate skills and experience acquired at university to potential employers and this difficulty can contribute to concerns about the role universities play in preparing Canada’s future workforce. The ability to point to specific accomplishments from a university course experience could help a student land a job and help bridge the divide (perceived or actual) between university learning and what employers are looking for.
Great, so why isn’t sharing assessment information common?
In order to share assessment information more widely, a suite of challenges must be addressed. Chief among them are issues related to privacy, security, and accessibility. Getting into the nitty-gritty of these issues is beyond the scope of this post but, the good news is, it seems that Mozilla has put together an “Open Badges” infrastructure that strikes the right balance between openness and privacy, customization and standardization, and complexity and simplicity. As a nonprofit organization with a strong commitment and history of championing both user privacy and education, Mozilla is uniquely positioned to lead the effort towards greater sharing of assessment information.
What are Open Badges?
Open Badges are sharable digital artifacts that serve as evidence that someone has learned something. Open Badges can be tied to additional information about what was learned, the context in which it was learned, and the nature of the supporting evidence. Open Badges are created and shared using an open online infrastructure that anyone can contribute to and benefit from. A key component of the infrastructure is another leading edge technology from Mozilla called Persona that provides a simple and secure way to sign into multiple sites on the web. Using Persona, badges are tied to an individual’s e-mail address in way that enables you to trust the information on the badge.
How do I try this out?
The first place to start is a quick and easy tutorial on badges where you will have the opportunity to earn your first badge. You (or your students) can start earning other badges at various other spots online and putting them into your individual badge backpacks. I’ve earned two badges so far that you can see by visiting a public portion of my badge backpack and my dissertation includes issuing badges that verify that an individual has learned how to recognize and avoid plagiarism.
Conclusion
Open Badges are still very new and it’s unclear how much they will catch on. Issuing badges of your own is still a bit tricky and requires some specific technical expertise. However, in my opinion, there are few educational technologies on the landscape right now that have the potential to have more impact on teaching and learning than Mozilla’s Open Badges, so stay tuned for future blog posts on this topic.