Designing a Departmental Badging System to Enhance Program Assessment for the Benefit of Students

New forms of feedback and alternative credentialing are among the most innovative and beneficial developments in learning technology. Badging is one promising technology for responding to increased expectations from accreditation bodies, politicians, and the public to demonstrate student learning and progress toward degrees, as well as transparency of program effectiveness toward learning. Badging is a cutting edge educational tool, which faculty and administrators will need to understand soon. Our project at Ohio State University is a pilot for the deployment of badges. It combines: a manageable-sized department, whose faculty have expressed support for the pilot; advanced administrative preparation to align the system of badges with existing assessments and a project lead who combines a key departmental administrative role with technological expertise. The work of selecting courses in the major and mapping key assignments to departmental learning objectives has been completed and forms the basis for the Program Assessment of our two majors. In addition, designing and awarding badges based upon course assignments is currently underway in two courses taught by Dr. Rhodus. His final project presentation for HCS 4560 and ePortfolio assignment for HCS 5601 are used to evaluate the Communication and Life-long Learning goals. Through this work, a suitable online system for awarding and managing badges has been identified, and lessons have been learned about enhancing the motivational impact of badges. This leaves us with the next job of creating the department-wide badging system. Using open source software from Mozilla, we will set up an online system that supports key badging functions: creating, awarding, and displaying badges. In the first year, we will create approximately 40 different badges for our two majors. These badges will range from freshman to capstone courses and cover lab experiments to electronic portfolios.

•