Scaling up Open Badges

The Action Lab “Scaling up Open badges for Open Education” took place at the Open Education Global Conference in Cape Town, South Africa 10 years after the Cape Town Open Education Declaration!

Thank you to all participants in this Action Lab for your interest in Open Badges and your valuable contributions to the question: “How to scale up Open Badges for Open Education?”

I would like to share with you two contributions from the Action Lab which are think are particularly interesting.

The first contribution is by Jacques DANG from AUNEGE which is one two of the eight French Thematic Digital Universities (TDU) supported by the French Ministry of Education, Higher Education and Research: http://www.aunege.org and Jöran Muuß-Merholz who has been actively promoting Open Educational Resources in Germany (see for example: OERinfo). Both Jacques & Jöran discussed Open Badges from the perspective of the world of work and recruiting. Here are their thoughts (see their slides):

“Adoption of badges by the world of education is nice for the learner, but doesn’t guarantee that badges will be relevant for one’s professional career. Companies can have many uses for badges, including, but not limited to:

• For generic skills, narrowing down the target audience for recruitment from thousands to the few dozens you will actually evaluate.
• For very specific skills, identifying the experts who « are just below the radar » and are not world renowned, and therefore, extremely costly experts.

Some hurdles that will be solved:

• Storage of collection of badges: not currently standardized, nor interoperable, but important because a single individual badge usually has little value, taken out of the context of an individual’s learning/professionnal path
• Storage security: not different from other industry sectors, such as banking: there are challenges, but the market usually achieves a (dynamic, not static) balance between current risks and current costs
• Authentication of issuing authority: – idem –
  Ranking of issuing authority: – idem –
  Validation of issuing and update processes: will be solved through processes such as the blockchain

Some challenges – key research areas:

• Market adoption results in having billions or more of badges, that need to interact just as connected objects do in the realm of IoT. This results in challenges, such as:
• Human interaction is not scalable enough, the role of algorithms/IA becomes key, as they are for adaptive learning: this is a key area for research
• In combination with algorithms, auto-adaptive competency frameworks are also essential in order to provide the labor market with usable results: searching for a young graduate with basic Excel modelling skills, vs searching for an expert knowledgeable on the latest Basel III banking rules:
  this is also a key area for research
• Patience: the expected timeframe ranges from 5 to 10 years.”

Check out the slides by Jacques here:

2017-03-08-OE GLOBAL CAPE TOWN – OPEN BADGES discussion

The second example I will share in the new post soon! Stay tuned 🙂