DML4 Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition

What are the 3 most important things about building a badge system you would share with another organization just getting started?

1. Early buy in and adoption from users; just because you build it does not guarantee they will come. 
2. Make sure your technical partners internal to your organization (if possible); if your technical partners external to your organization make sure they are on board with your vision to design and implement a badging system.

Young Adult Library Services Association’s (YALSA) badges program will fill a knowledge gap in the profession. Recent studies from the MacArthur Foundation and others have called for a re-envisioning of libraries. YALSA's badges program will help librarians develop the skills and knowledge they need in order to meet the needs of 21st century teens.

The Youth Digital Filmmaker Badge system will equip students to produce short films. Students will develop the core skills of concept development, interviewing and storyboarding, scriptwriting, camera work, and editing. The Youth Digital Filmmaker Badge system will accelerate School District of Philadelphia (SDP) students towards developing technical and written abilities in service to earning English/Language Arts (ELA) core credit in the Philadelphia Project Mastery Initiative.

What are the 3 most important things about building a badge system you would share with another organization just getting started?

Our best advice to future badge system builders:

1.     Maintain a clear focus on the learning targets your badges are designed to represent,

2.     Learn from other members of the badge ecosystem, and

3.     Keep the learner’s experience at the heart of your design process.

The Providence After School Alliance's "Pathways for Lifelong Learning" badge system recognizes, motivates, validates, and connects learning interests and achievements of youth beginning in 6th grade, creating a seamless system of learning pathways that usher youth through middle school, high school, and onward to college, career and life.

Moodle is an open source online training and course management system. Mahara provides open source e-portfolios and proposed to focus on an open source infrastructure for broad-based usage. This partnership allowed Moodle to extend their current work, enabling badges and permitted Mahara to add badges to their Gradebook resulting in a deeply representative electronic portfolio. To achieve this, we will develop the long awaited repository API to demonstrate badge display in Moodle from an external repository source.

The Partners in Learning Network will support educators and school leaders’ active participation in the Partners in Learning Program by instituting a rewards and recognitions badge system. The abundance of knowledge, resources, and accessibility to information available today requires a different approach from the generic one-size fits all engagement models of the past.

UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute (ASI) is developing a model platform for validating experiential learning within formal institutional contexts at the undergraduate level. In creating a learner-driven, content-rich badge system, ASI will establish a new model for bridging learning in and out of the classroom, and enable learners to better communicate their skills and competencies to a broad audience.

NatureBadges: Open Source Nature & Science Badge System is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and LearningTimes. NatureBadges leverages the fact that NMNH is the second-most visited museum in the world to connect the onsite physical museum experience to digital tools for lifelong learning and engagement.