By Julia Falkowski, Balboa Park Online Collaborative
Learning takes place everywhere, throughout a lifetime—and museums are an important part of the informal learning ecosystem. But how do we make these learning experiences count? How can we convey to future schools and employers that lessons outside the classroom provide valuable skills? The concept of digital badging, being explored throughout the worlds of education and credentialing, seeks to answer these questions.
Most people are familiar with the concept of badging from the scouting world, in which Boy Scouts' and Girl Scouts' physical patches match up with accomplishments, projects completed, and lessons learned. Digital badges are awarded online, but like scout badges, they represent a fun, moderately competitive way to track progress. Organizations like LRNG and the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub are developing online systems to formalize and support communities dedicated to digital badging.
Badging programs have come and gone over the past few years, but examining the badging programs that have lasted and those that have not provide valuable lessons about what successful badging looks like. This paper looks at museums’ past and current involvement with the emerging world of connected learning and digital badging, through the examples of San Diego’s Art and Science of Vision and the Pittsburgh Galleries Project.
It compares the models of these, and other digital badging projects, highlighting successes and challenges, and placing them in the larger context of current educational philosophy. Museums pride themselves on being public resources, with plentiful primary source materials and educational content. Museums are also in a constant search for relevance. By finding ways to incorporate into, and help advance digital badging, museums can take a more active role in shaping and supporting the future of education.
Balboa Park Online Collaborative (BPOC) Technology nonprofit services organization, providing IT services, digital strategy, consulting, and experimental education projects in and outside San Diego’s Balboa Park
One of these projects I’m going to be talking to you about today in my presentation
BPOC got a grant to work on a digital badging pilot in the Park
Over the course of the project I went back and forth on totally getting what digital badging is and if it would be viable and lasting
Wanted to do write this paper and do this presentation to try and find out
Digital badging is not a new idea - not to the field and not to this conference; but despite round after round of excitement, its been slow to take off
This presentation is particularly interested in badging as a formal educational and credentialing tool
Go through a little history of digital badging in and outside the field, tell you what I learned from our badging project, and try to forecast the future of badging
Slide 2- Badge Overview
The idea of badging has been around for a while, notability in the scouting world
Closely connected to ideas of gamified learning and incentivizing behavior
Also relates to connected learning, which looks to acknowledge the learning that happens not just in school, but everywhere
Adults might be becoming more familiar with this idea as they’ve been popularized through apps like Untappd and DuoLingo
The 2010 involvement of the Mozilla and MacArthur Foundations is often cited as when badging began gaining credibility as an educational tool
With uncertainty around funding of public education and concern about skills mismatch happening in the US
Researched a number of digital badging programs from a number of industries, with a number of different purposes
Looked at badge programs that have lasted and those that have came and gone
From this I have pulled out four questions, the answers to which I believe can help show when a badging program will be successful
Drawing on your reputation?
Using existing partnerships?
Using existing content?
Have a need?
Have a particular interest in badging as an educational tools, researched people deploying it effectively in and outside the field
One of the biggest believers in badging as credential is IBM
Internal professional development through the Online Skills Gateway, way to frame online courses already being offered
Started in 2015 and by February 2016, they’d deployed 495,000 badges to 258,000 earners in 183 countries
In September 2017, they partnered with Northeastern University; badges earned through IBM’s portal could count as credits towards Masters Degrees
Look at the four criteria, they have a huge reputation, they are using partnerships with Universities, they used badging to meet a need, better leveraging the learning content and training materials they already had
Badging is not new to the museum field either
It has been explored before at a number of organizations to achieve varied goals
On this slide you have a couple examples: Museum Computer Network was issuing badges; keep members engaged through the year, as a way to prove the worth of its training and offerings; did not last
Even been explored at multiple Museums and the Web papers, which you can find in the MW archive
The other example on this slide: DMA Friends Program
New membership model that incentivized attendance and interaction with the institution through badging
DMA had a unique platform for this and around 2015 there was even a National Leadership Grant, involving a number of institutions - maybe even some of you were involved - Denver Museum of Art, LACMA, Minneapolis Institute of Art
Never much news beyond the 2015 presentation, but if you have more, let me know, keep the conversation going, and learning from each other’s thoughts and experiences
DMA Friends program ended with the end of 2017
One museum context in which a badging program has lasted and been successful is at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium
Had an existing partnership with the Illinois State Board of Education, allowing teachers to count Shedd professional dev offerings toward certification hours
Tied this programming into digital badging could be used for general interest, certification hours, or credit hours at the nearby National Louis University
While some of their badge offerings have been grant-funded or exhibition-based, their Great Lakes Science Badge has continued strong since 2013
Drawing on their reputation, partnerships and using badges as a way to scaffold existing learning content
Looking at these case studies helps show the successes and challenges of individual institutions; I want to look at the broader view of the successes and challenges to digital badging generally
One of the biggest challenges the idea faces is the idea of consistent credentialing
There are certain metadata fields that are standards required in order to issue badges, but nothing beyond that to create standards among what is required of students, what is issued, and what value that has
On our early research on badging, the project team discovered the Inspirational Potato Badge and its my favorite example of how, beyond the basic metadata, badges can literally be anything
I think if badging as credentialing is going to grow, there needs to be a set of accepted credentialed badges that multiple types of organizations can be accredited to issue
One of the challenges of badging moving towards a place of accepted credential comes from the sheer number of organizations working towards the goal
This is the footer of the grant program we became involved with; MacArthur, University of California Research Institute, HASTAC, Duke University; and while a lot of programs list numerous organizations, but have them minimally involved, we were quickly contacted by a number of different organizations, unsure of who we were ultimately accountable to
Not that the traditional education landscape is any easier to navigate, but it is a whole new, constantly shifting environment to wrap one’s head around
And here’s just a few more of the organizational alphabet soup I’m going to throw at your before getting a little deeper into the case studies we encountered
The grant cohort we were part of was the Digital Media and Learning 6 competition; a series of grant cycles sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation to test badging and connected learning in the real world
This particular grant cycle was called playlists for learning and was meant to test a particular tool from the MacArthur spin-off, LRNG
The best overview of LRNG comes from the organization itself
[Play video] - 2 minutes
As you can see, its an idealistic idea, but one that may well have an important place for museums
BPOC found ourselves in a grant cohort to test LRNG along with organizations like the National Writing Project, Arizona State University, and Playground City, an Orlando after-school program, testing digital badging using this new tool
One of the projects we found a lot of affinity with, and learned a lot from was the Pittsburgh Galleries Project
Part of Avonworth School District’s Pathways to the Future program
Interested in badges as a way of career exploration, badges on transcripts
Looking to incorporate badges into Pittsburgh Galleries Project, an initiative that began in 2013, involves 6 museum partners, again, some of you might be represented here: The Andy Warhol Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the Mattress Factory, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, and the Toonseum of Pittsburgh
“With this project student teams work alongside museum and gallery professionals to, at first, learn about the behind-the-scenes world of art museums and galleries, and then to curate exhibits on the Avonworth High School campus with their partnering museums”
Introduces students to a career path they may not get to explore otherwise
Exhibition lighting, museum education and more; show the flexibility of lessons to be learned from the museum field
In their final blog post, they were excited about the future badging could have for them, but also wondering about a few key questions:
1) what currency do the badges hold? 2) how can the badges be leveraged with post-secondary institutions 3) how can equal access be given to all students to the online platform
27 museums, performing arts organizations, and cultural institutions, ranging from natural history, to youth symphony to fine art. Great opportunities for connected learning
Already had the idea of playlists as a way to structure visits and allow exploration of diverse Park experiences and collections objects
Turned to interested partners in the Park- Fleet Science Center, Museum of Photographic Arts, and San Diego Air & Space Museum, asked them for a theme they could all work with. The theme? The Art and Science of Sight -> The Art and Science of Vision
Used sound practice of user experience design, brought together school partners for design-thinking based focus groups; interested in what content users wanted
Our user feedback showed teens liked learning through videos and video games, so we produced both
Optical illusions and zoetropes, the evolution behind - and physics of - dropping things from planes
Brought in a graphic designer to create cool badges, wrote descriptions that tied the lessons into real-world scenarios
Had a high school intern the semester who was our official arbiter of design and language, telling us when things worked and seemed cool and when we were totally off-base - and “too NPR-like”
Here’s how one of our badges came out in LRNG
We brought our final products to students and got great feedback on the content in the controlled setting
Ultimately, we had some really cool content to share, and good content is good content regardless of the vessel
Self-direction is a key factor here, but none of these students were going to go home and try these experiences on their own
Not unless there are real incentives
Supposed to have incentives; hard to get partners to commit to offering those, in museum world where funding is tight
How is this financially sustainable
LRNG was in a free beta period when we started using it, but has since put up a paywall
With the time it takes to create and tend to content and submissions, which the backend of the platform; lot of cost
Question of whether our badging program will last? We knew little about badging and what makes a lasting badging program - created new content and created an artificial need, unfortunately, I don’t see our badging program lasting - at least in the immediate future
Keep an eye on the digital badge environment; look for partnerships with organizations doing this sort of work, potentially looking to for-profit employers, like IBM, who have the resources to offer incentives and perhaps incentives of their own, in their need for a skilled workforce
Digital badging has been in the lexicon for less than 10 years; the badging landscape is rapidly changing, with major developments - even since I started looking into it for this project and paper
While digital badging in the model of LRNG may not be lasting or something museums should adopt at this very moment, it at least has the power to get museums thinking differently about educational offerings and how they can work to meet educational needs
If you are considering a badging program I recommend:
Leveraging reputation
Leveraging partnerships
Not recreating the wheel with your content
Looking for where badging might help meet an existing need
Thank You, and by the power vested in me by the flexibility of what badging is and does, I award you all this Digital Badge I found online that makes you a digital badge expert