Stakeholders’ Perceptions of the Opportunities, Challenges, and Value of Digital Badges in Education

• In Event: Innovating Education Practice Through Digital Badges: Recent Research, Current Practices, and Future Directions

Abstract

Purpose
To understand stakeholders’ perceived opportunities, challenges, and values associated with digital badges for learning, we analyzed discourse in an online community in which designers, educators, programmers, and others share ideas guiding the creation of a set of standards for digital badges and badge systems. We present themes expressed in this discourse including both participants’ reasons for creating badging systems and stakeholders’ beliefs about the effects digital badges may have on learners’ motivation.

Theoretical Framework
In figured worlds (Holland et al., 1998) and communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991), individuals work together within frameworks of socially constructed rules and norms to construct shared meanings and shape each other’s practice. For over two years, participants in a large and globally distributed online community of practice have contributed their perspectives on digital badges and badge systems while members of the Mozilla Foundation developed the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure. During this time, participating educators, web-developers, researchers, and others have shared ideas for designing systems in which people can earn and share digital badges as evidence of many kinds of learning. Community members’ values and perceived opportunities and challenges shape the rules and norms of the figured world in which digital badges might become accepted credentials, and in which some learners are motivated to earn and display badges. The Open Badge community’s discourse provided an opportunity to explore stakeholders’ perceived opportunities, challenges, and values as presented during the formation of such worlds.

Data and Methods
The Mozilla Open Badges community space, a public Google Group, serves as a central forum for educators, web developers, instructional designers, researchers and stakeholders from higher education, K-12 schools, museums, libraries, and other organizations to discuss the design and implementation of digital badging systems. Our team systematically analyzed more than 500 topical threads posted in the forum over a two-year period spanning ideation, beta-testing, and the official release of the Open Badges Infrastructure.

We used a grounded theoretical approach (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) and drew on aspects of Value Sensitive Design (Friedman, Kahn, & Borning, 2006) to identify themes regarding opportunities and challenges as well as values guiding the community’s design and implementation decisions.

Results
Members of the Open Badges community view badges as alternatives or supplements to traditional forms of assessment and credentials, such as grades, transcripts, certificates, and diplomas. Badges are also seen as ways to motivate learning and to recognize self-directed learning occurring outside school. Challenges identified by members of the community were largely technical and associated with existing, external standards rather than the badges themselves. Stakeholders voiced strongly held but divergent beliefs about the potential effects of badges on learner motivation.

Significance
This research is a first step toward understanding the perspectives of key education stakeholders as well as the values that drive the design of badge systems. Further research is needed to investigate how these perspectives and values affect the design and implementation of badge systems, and how, ultimately, badges impact student learning and motivation.

Authors

• Sean Fullerton, University of Washington - Seattle

• Amanda Menking, University of Washington

• Christina Lee, University of Washington

• Katie Davis, University of Washington