A system for badges for life-long learning, based on previously-established Department Learning Goals, driven by student applications, and implemented in Drupal, could encourage students to align their own learning with the Goals. In addition, it could provide a much-needed impetus for building improved assessment of learning.
The Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has fostered revolutionary pedagogy and pioneered team-based learning approaches in lab and in lecture. With funding from Howard Hughes, we built innovative introductory and upper-level biology laboratory courses. With support from the Pew-funded Program in Course Redesign, we developed on-line resources to support in-class small-group problem solving. With funding from NSF, we've developed cutting-edge model-based problem solving activities for use with clickers.
About ten years ago, the Biology Department adopted a forward-looking set of Learning Goals that has been influential in the redesign of existing classes and the design of new ones. Acknowledging that, while the curriculum defines the depth and breadth of disciplinary knowledge, the Learning Goals can establish a vision for the skills and perspectives that every Biology course should foster and develop in students. The Learning Goals in many ways encapsulate scientific literacy and an appreciation for life-long learning from a biological perspective.
While the Learning Goals have been influential, both in terms of curriculum and course design, the Department has not established assessments to monitor and evaluate student progress toward the goals in any centrally-reportable way. That's not to say that the assessments don't happen at all: they're simply embedded in courses with no mechanism for sharing them or their results. Finding ways to share the outcomes of assessments would help the department substantially, both by providing information about the Department's mission to help guide further efforts, but also to enable the department to communicate our mission to outside constituencies. It has been difficult, however, to build the necessary consensus among the faculty to accomplish the work. I believe a system based on badges could solve this dilemma.
I propose a slightly subversive mechanism to turn the problem on its head by enabling students to request badges through submission of an artifact from a course or experience (a project, paper, photograph, video, examination, etc) and writing a brief statement that explains why it merits receipt of the badge. By creating a student-driven system, the incentives for faculty could be inverted: the student requests will drive the system and provide the information about where the learning goals are already being assessed.
Badges will be aligned with the major learning goals and perspectives with four levels that students could potentially achieve for each badge (one for each year of study). Ideally, the instructor of the course and another faculty member would be required to certify that the work submitted represented progress above and beyond the level the student had previously achieved. In very large courses (some Department courses have more than a thousand students), this could be unrealistic, however, and course TAs might be needed to manage the requests.
By encouraging students to achieve the Leaning Goals directly, they will develop increased familiarity with the Goals and begin looking at their assignments and activities with an eye for how they could potentially meet Goal and earn badges. This will undoubtedly give students greater appreciation for how the Learning Goals articulate with class goals and with the Goals the faculty have for students in the major.
There are several places where the student badges could be used to confer privileges and opportunities to students. The website itself will offer a feed where new student badges are posted (at the discretion of the student). Another place where the badges could be leveraged is the Biology Undergraduate Research Apprenticeships application program where students already apply online and their badges could appear when their application is viewed. Changes to the Honors College will also necessitate the Department managing an admissions process for Honors students and the badges could appear when this determination is made.
Minimally, this system would provide a wealth of information to the Department regarding where the Learning Goals are being practiced and implemented effectively. One potential outcome of this system would be that faculty might begin redesigning their courses and assessments to facilitate student badge applications: faculty might feel some pressure to redesign their assessments if their classes yield few or no applications for badges.
I believe this can all be built with tools already available and in use in the Biology Department: We have extensive experience using Drupal and we've already started using the user_badges Drupal module (for Science Scouts badges). This module does not currently support the Mozilla Open Badges initiative, but I have already begun trying to organize a group to put in a subsequent proposal to extend the user_badges module to support it and it seems like a good platform to start with. Students would submit the material on-line and, via the workflow module, the faculty members would be notified to evaluate the submission, and assign the badge.
If other departments or entities on campus were interested in pursuing similar badges, it would be easy to replicate or centralize the infrastructure for the badge system. The General Education group and the new Integrative Experience program have similar kinds of learning goals that badges could be developed for.
For nearly ten years, I've been trying to convince the Biology Department to embark on a process to assess the Learning Goals we developed and adopted without success. If a system of badges could get students to start identifying where we're already doing these assessments and provide the mechanism for sharing the information centrally, it would be a transformative step in moving the department forward. But the biggest winners would be students taking greater control of aligning their education with the Department Goals.
Submitted as a proposal to the Digital Media Learning Badges for Life-long Learning Competition with Tom Hoogendyk & Coherent Bytes listed as a collaborator.
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