Category Archives: Digital Badges

Digital Badges

Badges Pave the way for more Advanced Instruction

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The Library Learning Services Digital Badges Team has used the Instruction Reboot time to critically examine our information literacy badges program, its role in foundational library instruction, and the efficacy of badges as a mode of teaching our students. We are not the only Penn State librarians working with digital badges, though. Colleagues in our subject libraries and at Penn State campuses around the state have implemented them in a variety of ways. Carmen Cole, Information Sciences and Business Librarian, shares here the ways digital badges have enriched her instruction for both resident and online IST students:

“In the 2018/2019 academic year, I piloted the use of our digital badges in IST 110: Information, People and Technology. My collaborator in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) was Dr. Christopher Gamrat (Chris), an expert in digital badging systems. Chris’s dissertation, completed at Penn State in 2017 through the Learning, Design, and Technology program, is entitled Digital Badging Systems as a Set of Cultural Tools for Personalized Professional Development. As an Instructional Designer in the College of IST, Chris also teaches for credit, both residentially and through World Campus.

To best suit the introductory-level curriculum of the IST 110 course, we chose the following badges for students to complete: Academic Integrity, Lionsearch: Getting Started, and APA Style Citations. In Fall 2018, for Chris’s residential IST 110S course, students completed the badges before attending the Libraries’ Open House. The intent was to expose students to the physical and virtual library during what was, for most enrolled in the fall seminar section, their first semester at Penn State. Integrated into the IST 110S curriculum is a series of talks given by visitors, including the liaison librarian. I am tasked with speaking about “academic integrity and library resources.” Although I have a set lesson plan for these sessions, assigning the badges prior to my visit allowed me to conduct more advanced instruction. The students were much better prepared to discuss academic integrity when presented with a series of scenarios tailored to IST. Also, Chris and I were able to create a paraphrase and citation activity based upon the skills students learned from the badges.

The students enrolled in Chris’s Spring 2019 World Campus IST 110 course were also required to complete the badges. I did not have the opportunity to perform instruction after assessing the Spring 2019 badges, but reading and commenting upon their open-ended responses was a good way for me to get to know World Campus students and make them more aware of my role in IST. In particular, there was a large military presence in the World Campus section, including students currently on active duty. Some of their responses to the open-ended questions, especially in the Academic Integrity badge, were strongly related to their service, something that helped me learn more about their unique circumstances and needs.

To gather general impressions of the badges and their effectiveness from the students, Chris and I modified an informal survey instrument provided to us by Dr. Victoria Raish (Torrie). Overwhelmingly, students in both sections considered the APA Style Citations badge to be the most useful and the Academic Integrity badge to be the least useful. The majority of students agreed that the badges influenced their work in IST 110 and other classes, and supported the use of the badges in future IST 110 classes. Assessing the badges allowed me to “know what I didn’t know” and engage more fully with each student when responding to their open-ended responses, something I never would have had time to do during a 50-minute, one-shot session. Also, it was interesting that many students, without being prompted to do so in the badges, connected their answers to the course content. I am fortunate to have an enthusiastic collaborator in the College of IST, and, with the support of Library Learning Services, aim to integrate the badges into additional IST 110 courses in the future.”

Many thanks to Carmen for sharing her experiences! 

Digital Badges

“They SHOOK MY HAND”

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This week’s blog post is focused on the digital badges program that we are integrating into courses as a way for students to learn information literacy skills. For the reboot, we are piloting the use of 2 badges in 12 sections of ENGL 015. However, other courses use the digital badges and one was CAS 201 (Communication Arts and Sciences, Rhetorical Theory), a large class that used them in Fall 2018. Jeff Knapp, our liaison librarian to CAS had the opportunity to provide a course-related session for this class in addition to the badge work students did asynchronously. In this course, students worked on two badges: Evaluating Web Credibility and Recognizing Bias. Here’s how Jeff described the synergy that came with students doing digital badge work that was aligned with his session:

“They were a really great group of 80 students. I asked them about the badges when I opened the lecture, and more than one person raised their hand (that was my first “What the…?” moment). They expressed surprise at what they learned from it and the introspection that it prompted.

Throughout the lecture, any time I posed a question, rhetorical or otherwise, I always had at least three people raise their hands.  And their questions were thoughtful.

And I’m not lying… after I was done, I had exactly FIVE students approach me to thank me for an “interesting lecture”… and they SHOOK MY HAND.

It was surreal, to say the least. 

Seriously— it was one of those handful of experiences you have of your whole career that I’ll remember.

Thanks for all your help with the badges— maybe this will become a regular gig!”

We love this testimonial to how digital badges can take information literacy instruction to the next level! We hope to have many more of these in the future. If you’re interested, please feel free to be in touch.

 

Announcement, Digital Badges

Digital Badges Sub Team Introduction and Goals

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As Anne Behler mentioned, Library Learning Services at Penn State is engaging in an instruction reboot. There are three main areas to this reboot. Each of these areas has a team supporting it. The digital badges team consists of Amanda Larson, Anne Behler, Emily Rimland, and Torrie Raish.

To provide some context for those who are unfamiliar with our information literacy digital badges, we have a website describing them. Our digital badges have been very successful and we reached the point were demand for the badges outpaced our supply in terms of resources and time. This instruction reboot is a perfect time for us to explore our digital badging program and look at concepts such as scale, sustainability, and capacity.

In particular, we are prioritizing the following tasks:

  • Identify key populations and classes for implementation;
  • Review content and identify outdated content as well as opportunities for new badges;
  • Establish collaborative plan across Penn State libraries;
  • Create a consistent approach and experience for instructors who are interested in using the badges;
  • Determine our threshold in terms of human and time resources;
  • Consider need for additional website presence;
  • Analyze research conducted around the digital badges;
  • Create a sign-up online form for people interesting in using the digital badges; and,
  • Establish a training system for use of the digital badges.

We have issued over 3,000 badges over the course of the past two years and get to participate with students in a flexible learning environment. The digital badges can be used in a completely online learning space or they can be used to flip the classroom in a residential instructional model.

Digital badges are a form of microcredential that recognizes learning in a variety of formats and amounts. Our digital badges consist of a mix of manually evaluated and automatically evaluated student submissions. The overall learning theory driving the badges is Connectivism. The digital badges always start with an articulation of prior knowledge and always end with a reflection or application of the student’s learning.

We have already learned some key best practices from using digital badges in formal coursework.

  1. Over the course of a semester, the badges are most successful when students earn one to four.
  2. It takes around three hours for one librarian to evaluate one badge for a class of 25 to 30 students.
  3. Students benefit from visual tutorials or descriptions on how to earn the digital badges as most are unfamiliar with this concept.
  4. To prevent student confusion as to when they will receive feedback, communicate expected evaluation times to them.
  5. Clarify expectations with instructors and spend time reviewing how the badges will be presented and earned in the course.

There are multiple digital badging systems that can be used in the creation and issuing of digital badges. At Penn State, we use badgesapp.psu.edu. This system complies with all Open Badging technical specifications and allows students to share their badges beyond Penn State.

We are very excited to have this opportunity to critically examine and review our digital badging system. The support and adoption rates we have experienced so far have exceeded our expectations and we look forward to more areas of unexpected success in the future!

Signing off for now,

Badging Reboot Team

Torrie, Emily, Anne, and Amanda L.