Digital Badges for Liberal Arts Citizenship

• In Event: Democratizing Learning Through Digital Badges: Theoretical and Analytical Frameworks to Advance Design and Research

Abstract

Purpose
One Liberal Arts College within a large state university developed a digital badge program to recognize and connect learning across settings. These badges provide a more personalized and granular view of student experience than a traditional transcript by recognizing skills and activities such as global awareness and leadership. The study was conducted to inform the badge design for large-scale development and ascertain if the badges were aligned to the students’ own experiences and needs. This study investigates how digital badges can be designed to recognize diverse types of learning, support students’ reflection and aid them in making sense of their learning activities and trajectories through the lens of liberal arts values in the 21st-century.

Theoretical Framework
To understand how students make sense of their various learning pathways, this study uses Barber’s (2012) investigation on the integration of learning. Barber’s framework divides these processes into three main steps: establishing a connection, application across contexts, and synthesis of a new whole. To understand how students integrated liberal arts values and their identities as liberal arts citizens, this study looks to Gee’s identity framework (2000). Next, this study builds upon Rughnis’ definition of badges as pathways that demarcate the background of the learner and their future learning trajectories (2013). Using these conceptual frameworks the study seeks to understand the following questions in order to inform a large-scale badge initiative: How do students understand their learning across contexts and how can that inform the badge design? How can badges be used to track integration of learning according to Barber’s framework?

Data and Methods
This study employs a case study approach that examines liberal arts majors who earned one or more Liberal Arts Citizen badges. The badges were earned for activities outside the classroom along with the submission of a reflective blog, video or similar artifact. Data was collected through interviews with the badge designers, student focus groups, individual earners and their artifacts, which were submitted as part of the badge criteria.

Results
The study suggests that the badges’ description, activities, and reflection tools were in alignment with the values of the liberal arts community, and represented experiences that or mediated the students learning and identity. As currently designed, these badges signal achievement and are a means to recognize activities in which the students already engage. Badge earing acts as a reflective opportunity and spurs further dialogue. Finally, Liberal Arts Citizen badges recognize and support 21st century skills that are not easily captured by transcripts or encapsulated by particular coursework.

Significance
This study supports the concept of badges as boundary objects. Badges for Liberal Arts Citizenship looks to learners’ past experiences, asks them to reflect on the present, and offers learners a way to strategically plan for their future. This study furthers informs the discussion on how students make sense of their own learning and how colleges can use social technologies to support, recognize and measure various kinds of learning across multiple contexts.

Author

• Jaclyn Lauren Dudek, The Pennsylvania State University