On May 11-12, 2016 The REAL Design Lab in the Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning at the University of Notre Dame hosted the AAEEBL 2016 Midwest Regional Conference with a theme about how digital portfolios and badges could work together. To see the conference details, program schedule, and published slides click here.

One of the big problems we have seen so far with early conference badging is that they turn out to be what Chris Clark calls “warm-body” badges. These badges don’t have any meaning or value besides “I have been there and got the t-shirt.”

The conference committee and badge design team had a goal to model good quality and practice with conference badging. In addition, we wanted to recognize and motivate presenters to “micro-publish” their presentations so we could share their work with a larger community that could not attend the conference. So we created the AAEEBL Midwest Regional Conference Presenter Badge.

Click here to see verified page on Credly.

To read the presenter reflections and view their slides you can either click on the evidence link in their digital badges above or see our badge directory of presentation materials here

To look under the hood and see how we pulled this off see the concept map below:

This hack of using LinkedIn Pulse (blog post) turned out be an effective platform for participants to share their public reflections, publish their slides (using Slideshare which was just bought out by LinkedIn) and also gave them a place to showcase their earned digital badge.

Over the last year, The University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching & Learning and the Office of Digital Learning issued and designed 5 different (Credly) Open Badges in 3 (edX) MOOCs to 233 learners around the globe.

To read a white paper on examining digital badge impact on learners’ profiles, performance, & perceptions see: “Notre Dame Issues 151 Digital Badges in an edX MOOC”

To view some slides about a study on the second MOOC Digital Badge see: “AAEEBL Conference Presentation on Role of Digital Badges in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)”

To hear a story from our third MOOC Digital Badge experience see: “What Alaa Taught us about Open Learning Evidence (in a MOOC with a Digital Portfolio & Badge)”

Twitter 140 character sum:
@NotreDame studies 5 different @Credly #Open Badges in 3 @edX #MOOCs issued to 233 global learners

Ambrose (2015) “Pairing Digital Portfolios & Badges to Recognize Informal Learning” The Badge Alliance’s Open Badges in Higher Ed, Webinar

G. Alex Ambrose will discuss why digital badges need ePortfolios and why ePortfolios need digital badges. “ePortfolios with Evidenced-Based Badges” (E2B2) at Notre Dame, which won a 2015 Campus Technology Innovator Award, is this first true integration of ePortfolios (Digication) and digital badges (Credly) offers evidence of competencies gained from co-curricular learning experiences on a collegiate campus. To date, 9 different badges have been created and issued to over 100 students. Using a few use cases, Alex with share his research on digital badge design, perceptions, and impact.

Slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8AIPHhRUVuYQkM0QWtFYzYtZU0/view
Audio Recording (8/4/2015): https://archive.org/details/BAHigherEdCall4August2015
Backchannel Notes: http://etherpad.badgealliance.org/HigherEducationWG2015-August4

 

Ambrose, G. Alex (2015) “ePortfolios @ Scale and Beyond with Badges & Analytics” Association of Authentic, Experiential Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) Annual Conference Closing Keynote, Boston, MA.

For the slide deck see:
https://www.academia.edu/14610048/AAEEBL_Keynote_ePortfolios_at_Scale_and_Beyond_with_Badges_and_Analytics_

For the Digital Handout & Backchannel see:
http://tinyurl.coDm/ePDBLA