DML4 Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition
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The fourth Competition (2011-2013), Badges for Lifelong Learning, encouraged individuals and organizations to create badges — digital tools that identify and validate the rich array of skills, knowledge, accomplishments, and competencies for 21st-century learners. The Competition, held in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation, awarded grants ranging from $25,000 to $175,000 to 30 project teams.
Recent Content
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: American Graduate Let's Make it Happen
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Badges Work for Vets
What are the 3 most important things about building a badge system you would share with another organization just getting started?
- Early buy in and adoption from users; just because you build it does not guarantee they will come.
- 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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Robotics and STEM Badges Using NASA Content
The Robotics and Stem Badges Using NASA Content Group will use content from NASA, pedagogical expertise of Center for Educational Technologies, and technical & design prowess of Project Whitecard to provide STEM learning opportunities, spread awareness of STEM disciplines, and enable the expansion of new content through the creation of a unique collection of digital badges for learners of all ages.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Preparing Librarians to Meet the Needs of 21st Century Teens
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Who Built America Badges for History Education
Developed by the American Social History Project in partnership with Electric Funstuff and Education Development Center, Who Built America Badges for History Education is an online professional learning community where grade 7-12 U.S. History teachers can earn badges as they practice and master the skills of effective history teaching, with a focus on designing materials to help students master Common Core literacy skills.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Youth Digital Filmmaker Badge System
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Planet Stewards: Personalized Learning in 3D GameLab
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) teamed up with 3D GameLab at Boise State to create Planet Stewards, a personalized high school competency-based curricular experience. Using NOAA’s content and 3D GameLab’s game-based learning platform, students are engaged by choosing among web-based quests, and earning experience points, levels, and badges to demonstrate their achievements in weather, climate, coastal, ocean, and lake science, all aligned to National Science Standards.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Pathways to Global Competence: A Badge System for Students
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: LevelUp
LevelUp is a web-based system that enables learners of all ages to develop skills that align to their goals. Learners achieve this by mapping content, curriculum, and everyday learning experiences to their progression on an individualized competency map. LevelUp will enable anytime, anywhere learning to be mapped to many systems, including K-12 schools, colleges, extra-curricular activities, or job training.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Pathways for Lifelong Learning
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU)
The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. They will be building an adaptable, customizable, open source, fully documented platform that will allow people to create OBI-compliant badge systems. It will enable issuers to create and issue badges into the OBI and easily integrate it into their sites.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Moodle as Issuer, Mahara as Displayer
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Badgestack
BadgeStack is a standards-based system designed specifically for badge-empowered, social learning. Learning Times has built the BadgeStack system to be one of the most comprehensive plugins to the open source WordPress software. This effort works to extend and develop an easy-to-use, downloadable, Wordpress-based, robust open source badge-issuing platform.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Partners in Learning Network Badges
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: Sweet Water (AQUAPONS)
Sweet Water Foundation aims to expand and deepen the impact of aquaponics and urban agriculture as a learning method by creating a replicable model for urban agriculture education. An enhanced curriculum and digital learning platform will support the requirements of Common Core Learning, Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM), IMS Interoperability Standards, and Open Standards. This model will meet the growing needs of lifelong learners to help improve their professional, academic and personal endeavors.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: The SA&FS Learner Driven Badges Project
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: S2R Medals
Supporter To Reporter (S2R) is a real-life learning program that allows young people to take on the roles of sports journalists, media producers, and mentors. S2R Medals will recognize and reward the skills and achievements gained by young reporters who learn and demonstrate a rich array of competencies acquired through their participation in the program.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: NatureBadges: Open Source Nature & Science Badge System
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.
Wiki / Teaching & Learning Practices
Project Q&A With: The National Manufacturing Badge System
The National Manufacturing Badge System will recognize the wide range of skills, competencies, and achievements that students and workers need to be competitive in today’s Advanced Manufacturing workplace. The National Manufacturing Badge System will supplement formal learning requirements and pathways, providing individuals with an additional online platform to convey their knowledge and skills to employers.