By Derek Newton
Reposted from Forbes, with permission
Digital badges are a mainstay of online education, intended to attest to the completion of some form of course or the mastery of a specific skill. In most cases, digital badges followed digital learning – an online course leading to an online certification in badge form.
Unlike diplomas, digital badges were designed to be entirely portable and easy to display. Like diplomas, badges were to be the manifestation of meeting a learning goal, a symbol and proxy for educational attainment. You’d hang a diploma in your office, where few people could see it, the logic was. Whereas, you can put a digital badge on your website or on social media where, in theory, anyone and everyone could see it.
Digital education badges and credentials made perfect sense, and they flourished with the implicit hope that, as digital credentials and badges gained acceptance and validity, their value and relative ease of attainment would draw more people into shorter, remote learning platforms.
Almost immediately, there were plenty of platforms, courses and badges, as companies, schools, experts, and influencers began making and distributing them. Companies sprang up to help anyone make an online course on anything and, naturally, issue a badge.
That has been a big problem.
Because there were so many, because there was no regulation or oversight to assure quality or competency, because there was no standardization or segmentation of badges, people had no idea what they meant. One badge could represent watching a four-minute video, while another could represent a hundred hours of expert-led, one-on-one instruction and fieldwork. An observer could never tell – and that made digital learning badges confusing at best, useless at worst.
For years, many organizations and educational leaders have fixated on the problem and tried various solutions. But standardizing and enforcing quality of digital learning badges has remained elusive and their value remained questionable.
Based on a new report from UpSkill America, a project of The Aspen Institute, digital badges are still highly confusing and of very limited value.
The new report interviewed a dozen “employer partners representing a variety of roles, organizations, and industries” to understand how they view digital credentials.
Among the findings, the report says that these employers “struggle with the huge variety of digital credentials available,” with one quoted in the report as saying, “We don’t have a standard way of understanding them. People have digital credentials, but we don’t have a way to say that this credential equates to this skill, equates to this job. We need a magic decoder ring.”
Another employer said, “You almost have to know the specific provider and have a sense of their quality to make an assessment of the credential.”
That feels like the kind of distinction employers make between Princeton and The University of Phoenix. They know those providers and can make sound assumptions about job seekers holding credentials from these places and programs.
But with digital badges, there are just too many and, worse, there is no shared standard for the same level of attainment. At least Princton and Phoenix both offer a bachelor’s degree, which is generally put together in similar ways. Not so with digital counterparts – not only do you not know who is giving the badge, but you have no insight into what it’s for.
If a badge is a communication device designed to convey meaning, and your intended audience needs a decoder ring, that’s a miss.
Perhaps worse, the report also says that, “none of the employer representatives interviewed are using digital credentials in the hiring process in any systemic way.” For a credential that is supposed to carry value in a career marketplace, that’s also a big miss. It’s perhaps the biggest miss because if badges don’t have meaning for employers and they’re not using them, badges become little more than online, vanity bling.
The report continues, “employers are looking for validation that credentials are valuable and accurate signals of competency and skill. They want both a clear articulation of what a credential means, specifically in terms of the competencies and skills that the credential is designed to confer, and proof that the credential holder has those skills and competencies.”
Expanding, one employer said, “what is this credential signaling that this person can do — are they a practitioner in a certain methodology. I am willing to dig in on this because I think that is the murky water right now in so many areas, there are so many new credentials coming into the market, and there is ambiguity in what they mean. In talent acquisition, I am looking to distinguish between awareness of a topic vs. mastery and doing. I need to know what level and specifics — what they can do.”
Same problem – too many badges with no idea what they actually mean, no standard definitions or competencies. There is no way, in the digital space, that anyone can know these pretty basic things about a badge-holder. And that is killing their workplace value.
The report also says, “like everyone, employers still rely heavily on their existing knowledge of a provider’s reputation to inform how they view credentials, digital or otherwise.” That’s the Princeton/Phoenix issue again. Over time, employers develop understanding of a credential provider’s admissions standards, academic or training rigor, their tolerance for cheating, and similar factors such as whether someone with a specific badge can actually do the job.
As career and education credentials, the word badge has a very long way to go to be worthy of being in a sentence with degree or diploma. It’s no safe bet at all that they will ever get there. It remains an Achillies Heel for online learning, especially for short-course, non-traditional providers.
