Why Are MOOCs Controversial, But Badges Are Not?

"Right now (September, 2013) badges are risible, albeit less and less so, and non-controversial, while discussion of MOOCs is ubiquitous and intensely controversial."

Evidence would be awesome.

"If badges ever become as controversial as MOOCs it will be a sign of their success, that they have come to matter consdierably [sic] more than they do now."

Why?

"To generate real faculty concern, I think badges would have to be part of a much broader kind of imposition than standing singly [sic], e.g., as part of mandated competency-based education, crafted for accountability purposes."

Are you saying change can only come top-down? Isn't the whole point of Open Badges that they enable people to bypass the traditional gatekeepers to learning?

<sigh>

If you think of badges and MOOCs in terms of Gartner's hype cycle, they are at very different phases, making it hard to compare them in the way you suggest. 

• Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.
• Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.
• Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
• Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.
• Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

This is a very thoughtful discussion and I'd like to address one thread of it.  Michael writes:  "What might make badges controversial? I can think of a few possibilities. One is that they actually "take off," and threaten to displace college and university degrees as labor market credentials, along the lines Kevin Carey has written. But, that is unlikely."

I want to take up the inverse of that:   What if university professors embraced badges in order to make their institutions design a form of credentialing (for acceptance, for graduation, for post-graduate entrance) that actually valued what we as professors value, not a terrible system that was designed for the Taylorist, Fordist industrial age---the multiple choice test that, we know, neither measures knowledge nor critical, creative thinking and does so in only a very narrow range of subject matter?

I wrote the "How We Measure" chapter of Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way we Live, Work and Learn (Viking Penguin 2011) in  2009-2010, before badges really existed in any coherent way and before the Finnish had schooled the whole world in the benefits of getting rid of standardized testing and class rankins and in valuing professionalization of teachers over standardized curriculum.   My "How We Measure" chapter is Deweyite, connectivist, and advocates real-time formative feedback and is full of research studies. 

To write that chapter, I also researched the history of standardized testing, including finding the papers of the inventor of the multiple choice test.   The ties between that form of testing (like standard deviation and IQ testing) and the relationship to eugenics and the scientism of measuring and ranking human achievement are clear in 1914.   Humans were ranked by "scientific" tests so that white race would rank superior to the non-white races (that included Jews and southern but not northern Italians in 1914 when the Kansas Silent Reading Test was invented.  That is a slight oversimplification but not much: Galton (inventor of deviation from the mean), H. H. Goddard (who made the Binet achievement test into a genetic-based IQ test), and Yerkes, head of the new American Psychological Association who used IQ testing to sort out who would lead and who would be cannon fodder in WWI:  all were professed, professional eugenicists.

  Frederick Kelly (inventor of the test as a doctoral student) himself was quite egalitarian.  He was appalled when it was used by those with eugenic or racist inclinations.   He was also appalled that it was used after the crisis of a teacher shortage no longer made a "test of lower order thinking"  for " the lower orders" a social necessity.  He went on to be President of the University of Idaho and tried to be Deweyian and was fired by faculty vote within two years:  he'd been made president so he could bring the new science of testing to the university and people felt betrayed.

Kelly was appalled again in 1925 when the Scholastic Aptitude Test adopted his multipe-choice test as the standard for getting into higher education.   It was a perversion of purpose and all research since then has shown how much this form of testing reduces the different complexities of the human mind to not just a lowest common denominator but one very narrow version of intellectual ability, narrowly conceived.  I do not know any college professor who thinks their university should celebrate SAT scores as the best way to recruit students.  They may exist but I don't know them.

The problem with my "How We Measure" chapter is it didn't provide any answers.  Against the 100 year history of standardizing standardizing testing, and requiring it as part of the 2002 No Child Left Behind national policy, we have theories.   Not a better way that is also fair and machine readable and standardizable and efficient.   Without that, we will never have a better way.  We will be tyrannizing youth over standardized testing that has a terrible origin that reinforces all kinds of social inequalities.

The more I explore badging, the more I am impressed by a system that, if done properly, requires an instituiton to come up with all the ways it values learning, ideas, achievement, knowledge, thinking, creativity---or whatever it is that it values.   A letter grade or a test score is opaque.  It "represents" the person's achievement with no other informatioin about that achievement but institutional imprimator (ETS, for example).  A badge is also a single representation of achievement but you click on it and its entire etiology is visible:  who gave it, for what reason, for what kind of accomplishment, achieved on this date,as certified by whom, what, where, why, when and how.    YOu can do the fast version and look at the badge or you can click on it and find all the "meta data"---so much better than the resume with its hyperboles and nuances, the recommendation letter that is fearful of litigation, or the test score that is opaque.

Is badging the answer?  I don't know.  But having a concrete alternative makes us deconstruct the whole history of the testing that rules the lives of youth and the organization (highly inequal) of our universities today.   For that alone, this alternative---tried along with a close reading of Finnish Lessons--is invaluable.

My adage is that we have to come up with a better way to measure that counts what we value---and values what we count.   We have a terrible, impoverished system now that feeds rather than erases inequality and has the even worse side-effect of passing itself off as "neutral" or "unbiased" when all research correlates standardized achievement scores, in the US, to income and to educational resources.  We need something better.   If you actually sit down to think about what your organization might want to value in order to award badges, you find that the levels of questions (all glossed over by current testing systems) is extremely deep and complex.  This is why I have my students design a badge system (on paper) and award one another badges--it is about the complex and nuanced evaluation of what one values.   This may or may not be the end result of badging.  I'm not naive about how systems go astray.  

The process could give academics what we say we want:  a thoughtful way of understanding all the different kinds of thinking that, together, make intellectual life.   At the same time, badging has the potential, on a technical level, to address the issues of standardization and mechanization that are necessary if we want this to be not just a good theory but to actually serve as "what comes next": a practical--and more thought-filled--replacement to the bankrupt system we have now.

I think defining "controversial" as "most disruptive" is an interesting way to compare the two, but by those standardsthe potential for badges to redefine when and where learning happens, empower learns to be in control of their credentially, is more disruptive than MOOCs, which can become one of the many activities that feed into this new potential for alternative credentially. I also think about the ability to co-opt it, to utilize it within an old framwork and delute or remove the disruptive potential. MOOCs are very easy to not do right, but when wrong they are still sustainable - they look like online discussion, resources and classroom managemenrt tools (all now acccepted) and due to the large numbers will always show success for some. Badges on the other hand, when co-opted, look like gold stars in kindergardens at best or a form of transcript with no audience at worst - neither of which will keep them in use as the learners have to select to participate.

In practical terms, my Museum (of Natural History) started three Courseara this Fall, and the work load was heavy but we had all the skills required in house and could see it as a natural extension of things we already do. Brining is badges, however, is a giant conceptual leap, as it forces us to think about credentially informal learning, which we rarely do, and forces a new bar for measuring educational objectives against actual achievement.

I think defining "controversial" as "most disruptive" is an interesting way to compare the two, but by those standardsthe potential for badges to redefine when and where learning happens, empower learns to be in control of their credentially, is more disruptive than MOOCs, which can become one of the many activities that feed into this new potential for alternative credentially. I also think about the ability to co-opt it, to utilize it within an old framwork and delute or remove the disruptive potential. MOOCs are very easy to not do right, but when wrong they are still sustainable - they look like online discussion, resources and classroom managemenrt tools (all now acccepted) and due to the large numbers will always show success for some. Badges on the other hand, when co-opted, look like gold stars in kindergardens at best or a form of transcript with no audience at worst - neither of which will keep them in use as the learners have to select to participate.

In practical terms, my Museum (of Natural History) started three Courseara this Fall, and the work load was heavy but we had all the skills required in house and could see it as a natural extension of things we already do. Brining is badges, however, is a giant conceptual leap, as it forces us to think about credentially informal learning, which we rarely do, and forces a new bar for measuring educational objectives against actual achievement.

In an ideal world, faculty would be part of institutions deciding what to value and what to count, and could award transparent credentials.  In fact, now students are often given awards and, if you go back to the original documents and citations, you can find out why.  Badges are not much different except, being digital, they carry that information with them as metadata.  Sheryl grant defined badges as "image files with stuff in them," the stuff being all the details of who, what, where, why, when, and how.   They are transparent and portable--a student who wins an award from a department could be awarded that badge and, in a digital resume, anyone could click on the badge and then find all the supporting documentation.  It's more "real" in that way than a resume.

Faculty could easily decide to issue them--and, believe me, the process of defining what content goes in the metadata is a value exercise everyone should go through.  That level of detail requires an exercise in introspection that current assessment systems gloss over.  Like all things we gloss over, we hide a lot of our assumptions and prejudices beneath the gloss.   There is nothing transparent about GREs, SATs, GPAs.  We reduce all the complexities of achievement to one representation that, in our hearts, we all know falls short of actually representing the complexitiy of our value judgment.  Badges don't solve all the problems but they make the representational aspect of credentialing, assessment, and even simple appreciation of what we value and what we do not something to be thought through, not assumed.

I use paper "mock up" versions in my classes.  In the appendix to our student-created Field Guide to 21st Century Literacies, you can find a template I used in one of my classes, supplied as a sample to inspire other versions:  http://www.hastac.org/field-notes-21st-century-literacies/field-notes-21...