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Digital badges are a mainstay of online education and are intended to demonstrate completion of some form of course or mastery of a particular skill. In most cases, digital badges were followed by digital learning, which is an online course that leads to an online certification in the form of a badge.
Unlike diplomas, digital badges are designed to be completely portable and easy to display. Like diplomas, badges were a sign of achievement of learning goals, symbols and surrogates of educational achievement. The logic was to display the diploma in an office where few people would see it. On the other hand, you could theoretically put a digital badge on your website or social media that anyone can see.
Digital education badges and qualifications make perfect sense, and as digital qualifications and badges gain acceptance and validity, their value and the relative ease with which they can be achieved means that more and more people will use short-term distance learning platforms. It flourished with the implicit hope that it would be drawn into.
Almost immediately, a plethora of platforms, courses, and badges were born, as companies, schools, professionals, and influencers began creating and distributing them. Companies have sprung up to help anyone create online courses about anything and, of course, issue badges.
It has become a big problem.
Because there were so many of them, there was no regulation or oversight to ensure quality or competency, there was no standardization or segmentation of badges, so people didn’t know what they meant. One badge can represent 4 minutes of video viewing, and another badge can represent 100 hours of expert-led one-on-one instruction and fieldwork. The observer will never know. As a result, digital learning badges have become confusing at best and useless at worst.
Over the years, many organizations and educational leaders have focused on this problem and tried various solutions. However, standardizing and enforcing the quality of digital learning badges remained difficult and their value remained questionable.
Digital badges remain highly confusing and of very limited value, according to a new report from UpSkill America, a project of the Aspen Institute.
In a new report, we interviewed more than a dozen “employer partners representing a variety of roles, organizations, and industries” to understand how they view digital credentials.
Among its findings, the report states that these employers are “struggled with the vast variety of digital credentials available,” and one person in the report said, “Digital credentials There’s no standard way to understand. People have digital qualifications, but there’s no way to say that this qualification equates to this skill, that this equates to this job.”
Another employer said, “You need to know the specific provider and understand its quality to assess qualifications.”
It feels like an employer distinguishing between Princeton University and the University of Phoenix. They know those providers and can make reasonable assumptions about job seekers holding qualifications from these places and programs.
But in the case of digital badges, there are too many and, even worse, there is no common standard for achieving the same level. At least Prinkton and Phoenix both offer bachelor’s degrees, and bachelor’s degrees are generally organized in a similar way. This is not the case with the digital version. Not only do you not know who is giving you the badge, you also don’t know what the badge is for.
If a badge is a communication device designed to convey meaning and the intended audience requires a decoder ring, then you are wrong.
Perhaps even worse, the report also states that “none of the employer representatives interviewed use digital credentials in any systematic way during the hiring process.” There is. This is also a big mistake for a qualification that is supposed to bring value in the career market. This is probably the biggest failure. Badges have no meaning to employers, and if they’re not used, they become just another piece of online vanity.
The report goes on to say, “Employers want validation that credentials are valuable and accurately represent competencies and skills. We want both to be clearly articulated in terms of the competencies and skills that it is designed to confer, and to demonstrate that the qualification holder has those skills and competencies.”
Additionally, one employer asked, “Does this qualification indicate what this person is capable of, that they are a practitioner of a particular methodology?” What I would like to delve into is that the current Because there’s so much mud in so many areas, so many new qualifications coming onto the market, and so much blurring about what they mean in talent acquisition, I’m all about topic awareness and mastery and execution. We need to know what can be done specifically at which level.
Same problem – too many badges, no real meaning, no standard definitions or competencies. In the digital space, there is no way for anyone to know these very basic things about badge holders. And that undermines their value in the workplace.
The report also notes that “like you, employers continue to rely heavily on their existing knowledge of provider reputations to inform how they view credentials, digital or otherwise.” He also says, “I am doing so.” It’s the Princeton/Phoenix problem again. Over time, employers will develop similar criteria, such as a credential provider’s admissions standards, academic and training rigor, tolerance for cheating, and whether someone with a particular badge can actually perform the job. Deepen your understanding of the elements.
As a career or educational qualification, this word badge has a very long way to go before it becomes worthy of the sentences that accompany degrees and diplomas. There’s no safe bet they’ll get there at all. Online learning remains an Achilles heel for non-traditional providers, especially of short courses.
