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Problems with Personalized Learning – dy/dan
- Fast-forwarding, rewinding, and pausing instructional videos are often cited as advantages of personalized learning, not because this is necessarily good instruction, but because it’s what the technology permits
- And this isn’t good instruction. It isn’t even good direct instruction. When someone is explaining something to you and you don’t understand them, you don’t ask that person to “repeat exactly what you just said only slower.
- You might tell them what you understand of what they were saying. Then they might back up and take a different approach
- using different examples, metaphors, or illustrations, ideally responding using your partial understanding as a resource.
- I’m describing a very low bar for effective instruction. I’m describing techniques you likely employ in day-to-day conversation with friends and family without even thinking about them. I’m also describing a bar that 2017 personalized learning technology cannot clear.
- Whether you learn concepts from a step-by-step video, a rap, or a written tutorial, you are being presented with information. And a student’s first experience with new information shouldn’t be someone on a screen presenting it, no matter the style of presentation.
- Personalized learning is only as good as its technology, and in 2017 that technology isn’t good enough.
- Its gravity pulls towards videos of adults talking about math, followed by multiple choice exercises for practice, all of which is leavened by occasional projects.
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- And this isn’t good instruction. It isn’t even good direct instruction. When someone is explaining something to you and you don’t understand them, you don’t ask that person to “repeat exactly what you just said only slower.”
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The Power of Explaining to Others | Hapgood
- In the peer instruction methodology, students have to explain how things work to other students — and in the process they realize that they have no fricking clue what they are talking about
- What happens in peer instruction? You give students daily opportunities to realize they understand a fraction of what they think they do, and you get amazing learning gains
- When students have to explain things to others (rather than argue a point) they must address gaps in their own knowledge.
- Can you summarize all sides rather than just present yours? And if you can’t summarize all sides, how in the world would you know that you are right?
- I think some of the most promising work in the future is having students explore that explanation space, and coming face-to-face with their own ignorance, as we all must do.
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open badge Network - Proposal on Competency Alignment and Directory
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A semantic web architecture for integrating competence management and learning paths
- The purpose of this paper is to present a prototype ontology-based application that hasbeen developed for competency management and learning paths
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- CommOn (competency management through ontologies) is a framework which aims at developing operational knowledge-based systems dedicated to the management of competencies
- Such a competency-based system can be used for different purposes such as staff development and deployment, job analysis or economic evaluation
- Developed in the context of semantic Web technology, the CommOn framework allows one to build shareable ontologies and knowledge bases represented with semantic Web languages and to develop competency-based Web services dedicated to human resource management.
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Competency Alignment with semantic linked data – Open Badge Network
- technical interoperability of OpenBadges with unambiguous definitions of competencies based on semantic web meta-data (using the JSON-LD or RDFa linked data format).
- The overall goal is to allow systems to detect similarity of defined badges and graph-based dependencies of the competencies linked to the OpenBadges.
- Finally, it can be stated that basically none of the manifold existing competency frameworks by now is available in a machine-readable semantic-web format
- strong recommendation exists to increase the effort in future projects that framework definitions must as well provide their results in a semantic format like RDF or JSON-LD
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- a model for identifying and classifying Competencies and Learning Outcomes and, on the other hand, the computer applications of the information management model were developed, namely a relational Database and an Ontology.
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- The Reusable Definition of Competency or Educational Objective (RDCEO) specification provides a means to create common understandings of competencies that appear as part of a learning or career plan, as learning pre-requisites, or as learning outcomes.
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Extending Moodle functionalities with ontology-based competency management
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Extending Moodle Functionalities with Ontology-based Competency Management - ScienceDirect
- This paper proposes an ontology-based competency management application which is developed as a Moodle extension for supporting the development and assessment of competencies inside a course.
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Specification of Conceptualization - Introduction to ontologies and semantic web - tutorial
- ontology is important for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse
- ontological commitment is an agreement to use a vocabulary
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What is Ontology - Introduction to ontologies and semantic web - tutorial
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How to Master Microsoft Office OneNote
- Create a hierarchy of notes: Drag a note to the right in the list to make it a subpage of the note above it. You can collapse all the subpages with the arrow at the right of the top note to make scanning all your notes easier.
- Use tags freely within a page: Unlike other notes apps where you add tags for the entire note, OneNote lets you tag individual parts of the note. So, for example, you can mark a paragraph with a question mark tag for further researching, create a list of checkbox tags for things you have to do, and tag other parts of your notes with custom tags, such as people’s names or project names.
- Tags become even more useful when you use the “Find Tags” button in the Home tab to search across your notebook or notebooks for a specific tag. Click the “Create Summary Page” in the Tags Summary pane that opens when you’re searching for a tag, and OneNote will create a (refreshable) list of everything you’ve tagged in one page.
- Automatically create new pages, linked together in a master list: If you’re working on a project that you know will require several pages of notes, here’s a killer shortcut: Type two square left brackets followed by the title of the first note you want to make and then type two right square brackets at the end. OneNote will instantly create a new note with that title and a link to it in your current note. Repeat the brackets shortcut to add more new linked notes
- Send an email to OneNote by sending it to me@onenote.com. First you’ll have to set it up in your Microsoft account.
- Connect IFTTT to OneNote and automate sending favorites from Pocket, screenshots from your iPhone, starred Gmail messages, and more to OneNote.
- If you insert a screenshot or photo into a page, OneNote can be an awesome markup tool.
- Additionally, OneNote can calculate math for you.
- Keyboard Shortcuts
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A Moodle 2 version of the Moodle Tool Guide | Some Random Thoughts
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What Research Tells Us about Online Discussion
- meta-analysis of studies of online discussion over the past 15 years and has interesting findings about participation
- A few students dominate. Studies show that a few students tend to dominate discussion, just as a few people tend to dominate face-to-face discussions
- most students still talk more in an online discussion than in a face-to-face environment, lending evidence to the perception that online education tends to draw shy students out of their shells
- equal participation is not likely
- important to establish minimum requirements for participation, human nature means that some students will still dominate
- Requiring too many discussion posts from each student will lead to students posting just to meet the guideline
- consider the legitimate role of a “passive participant.”
- The online instructor should ask whether the purpose of discussion is to get everyone to talk or to generate good ideas.
- but as time goes on, students start talking to one another more and more
- This does not mean that online instructors should remove themselves entirely from discussion
- Students want the instructor to be present, at the very least to demonstrate that students’ points are valued
- Constructive interactions. A third theme is that the majority of discussion is collaborative and constructive
- Flaming is context-dependent
- responses to others were far more common in discussions than original postings
- But the finding draws into question the common requirement in online courses that all students make an original posting
- Consider the purpose of the original posting requirement.
- Maybe instead of requiring an original posting and one or two replies to others, just require one or two original thoughts.
- The fact that most responses were supportive also raises the question of whether students are too nice in discussion
- Some studies suggest that students are unwilling to challenge one another in discussion.
- so an online instructor might deliberately “stir the pot” with postings that invite disagreement as a way to facilitate robust interaction and engagement
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Center for Instructional Development and Educational Research (CIDER) | Virginia Tech
Journal in Higher Education
Saturday, March 25, 2017
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
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Alternative Credentials Research - PLA-2.0
- The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of how adult learning institutions address students who possess alternative credentials and seek to apply these experiences to a degree.
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Searchable Directory of Selected Journals in Online and Distance Learning | teachonline.ca
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- The findings indicate that researchers use ASNS mainly for consumption of information, slightly less for sharing of information, and very scantily for interaction with others. As for the gratifications that motivate users to visit ASNS, four main ones were found: self-promotion and ego-bolstering, acquisition of professional knowledge, belonging to a peer community, and interaction with peers.
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- The existence of properly classified content results in an enhanced distance learning experience in which appropriate materials can be retrieved efficiently; however, for this to happen, metadata needs to be present.
- we propose a novel metadata generation system aimed at automatically tagging distance learning resources.
- Metadata is generated in order to achieve a better integration of the web resources with the social networks.
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A principled approach to the design ofcollaborative MOOC curricula
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What are the expectations of disabled learners whenparticipating in a MOOC?
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by Doug Belshaw
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The Potential and Value of using Badges for Adult Learners
- unique to digital badges include their ongoing connection to sources that can validate their issue
- some form of evidence of the achievements they denote
- an emerging, consistent standard regarding what constitutes a badge, making it possible for these digital representations of accomplishment to be portable and displayed side by side with badges received from a range of sources
- discoverable through a search method
- displayable in far more settings
- information needed to determine its validity, authenticity, source, and value
- This includes the recipient (who earned the achievement), the issuer (the individual or organization taking responsibility for issuing the badge), the badge’s criteria and description (what the recipient needed to do or demonstrate to earn the badge), evidence (an authentic representation or connection to the underlying work performed or contribution made to earn the badge), a date (precisely when the badge was awarded), its expiration (when, if ever, the credential bestowed is no longer valid), and a certificate or assertion (a connection to an official form of verification vouching for the validity of the award).
- achievements in both formal and informal settings not traditionally assessed or recognized
- Badges are also a way to look at achievement from a multidimensional, metadata-driven perspective; they easily mark progress that otherwise goes unacknowledged when there are more ways than ever for people to learn and share.
- a wider variety of activities and demonstrations of ability become the subjects of recognition
- The visual nature of badges also enhances the ability to see progress; they are motivational and engaging
- improve learner retention and reduce attrition by encouraging learners along the way and rewarding previous learning
- individualized pathways for learning
- Digital badges awarded by local learning service providers should be relevant to the needs of local employers
- An exciting result of the recent activity surrounding digital badges is that nontraditional partners and stakeholders in the education ecosystem have found a reason to sit down together to identify new ways to collaborate in a very tangible and practical way.
- An inherent value of badges is the flexibility they give learners to develop and demonstrate competencies and for educators to help them do so
- An adult education badge system should identify the types of skills, knowledge, and behaviors that can and should be measured. It should also determine how to assess those skills and provide options to recognize skills as stepping stones toward larger goals. Finally, it should create comparability across programs
- The ability of the badge system to seamlessly link badges from different systems makes it different from a certificate of completion posted online, and it requires a shared, open infrastructure.
- For an adult education badge system to work there must be a process for developing, issuing, managing, and storing the badges.
- Managing the digital badges earned entails storing them in “e-portfolios,” online tools that enable users to store the badges that they earn in a single digital, portable repository that accompanies them wherever they go
- Adult learners and other badge recipients will be able to control which badges to display to particular observers, presenting themselves much as they customize a résumé for different employment opportunities. More than a résumé, however, the digital badge portfolio will present an array of skills that offers a fuller picture of an individual’s identity.
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Want To Use Moodle As A Teacher? Check Out This Comprehensive Video Guide | Moodle News
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A Quick Tour of Moodle for Instructors | UMass Amherst Information Technology | UMass Amherst
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MOOCs in 2015: Breaking Down the Numbers | EdSurge News
- Rise of self-paced courses: MOOCs started out with a structure parallel to college classroom courses, with a start and end date, and specific deadlines for assignments. One issue with these courses is that students would not know when—or if—the class would be offered again. Currently, 55% of all courses listed on Class Central do not have an upcoming start date.
- Recently, MOOC providers have moved towards a self-paced model, meaning that courses are always open to signup and users can complete a course at their own pace. There are now more than 800 self-paced courses (20% of all MOOCs on Class Central), and the number is growing quickly. Coursera also introduced regularly scheduled sessions with soft deadlines. These sessions usually run once a month. If a student is not able to finish the course, they can always move to the next session without losing their place in the course.
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Need-to-Know MOOC News: MOOCs Find Their Niche & Business Model in 2016 | Online Learning Insights
- fee-based courses
- Specializations,
- Course Certificates
- But free is not sustainable. The concept of MOOCs is shifting to where the demand is—fee-based certificate courses and programs in skill-specific areas, and corporate learning.
- mini-degrees based on MOOCs
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Why Ed Tech Will Fail to Transform Education (for Now) -e-Literate
- algorithm-based ed tech like learning analytics and adaptive learning will not sell well as long as educators do not have the mathematical and scientific literacies necessary to understand the rationale and limitations of the ways in which the software makes evaluation
- even revolutionary developments in educational technology will fail to have the dramatic impact
- how a technology needs to be embedded in a set of cultural and institutional supports in order to achieve widespread adoption, acceptance, and effective use.
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Analytics isn't a thing - Blackboard Blog
- Analytics doesn’t solve a problem. Analytics provides data and insight that can be leveraged to solve problems.
- You can clearly see the advancing trend of analytics from 2010 to 2016. In this year’s report, though, you need to understand that analytics isn’t called out as “a thing.” Instead, it’s embedded in many of the other points in the report
- In this Important Developments section, Adaptive Learning and Next-Gen LMS explicitly reference analytics as a part of those trends. IoT and AI are also intimately intertwined with analytics. Additionally, an earlier section of the report lists “measuring learning” as a mid-term key trend. This is 100% data dependent and has benefited from the growth of analytics. All of this helped to bridge that dissonance gap for me. Analytics isn’t called out in the Horizon Report because analytics isn’t a thing.
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3 Types of EdTech Baggage: Toolsets, Mindsets, Skillsets - DMLcentral
Saturday, March 11, 2017
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
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- We’re beginning to see people and organisations looking beyond individual badges towards connected credentials.
- There’s also renewed interest in badges as creating local ecosystems of value.
- For me, the key thing about the web is identity-at-a-distance.
- As an educator, I think the great thing about Open Badges is that they are packaged-up ‘chunks’ of identity that can be put together like Lego bricks to tell the story of who a person is, and what they can do.
- How do we demonstrate the holistic, yet multi-faceted nature of our identities in online spaces?
- I helped set up, but then withdrew from, a group of people looking at ways in which we could use blockchain technology with badges. The trouble is, as Audrey Watters so eloquently pointed out in The ideology of the blockchain, that the prevailing logic when both technologies are used together is be to double-down on high-stakes testing
- Progression pathways
- What we need is a platform (ideally, decentralised and built upon interoperable standards) that allows individuals to display the badges they have, the ones they want, and — through an online dashboard — a constellation map of paths they can follow to employment or levelling-up their skills
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Granular permissions
Something else which would help on the identity front is the separation of badge display from badge evidence store
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Long-term storage
We’re at the stage now where there are large enough vendors within the badges ecosystem to be ensure the long-term survival of digital credentials based on an open metadata standard. However, individual vendors come and go, and some ‘pivot’ towards and away from particular platforms.
- The best way to do this that I’ve come up with is for there to be a non-profit explicitly focused on ‘deep-freeze’ storage of digital credentials, based on a sustainable business model.
- Open Badges is an open metadata standard that connects everyone together.
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A Decentralized System for Education and Assessment | Open Educational Thinkering
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Peering Deep into Future of Educational Credentialing - DML Central
- When people talk about “the blockchain,” they’re almost always referring to the technology underpinning Bitcoin.
- The blockchain is literally a chain of blocks of code serving as a “public ledger” to record transactions within a distributed database
- In other words, you can prove that something took place at that point in time. Those not involved in the “transaction” would not be able to see what actually took place — unless you provided them with the key.
- Examples include extremely sensitive information such as voting patterns, HR records, and, even, nuclear launch codes
- One of the potential stumbling blocks when it comes to the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) can be verification. How do I make absolutely sure that the person with this badge is the same person who created the evidence claiming it?
- This would use a “proof of work” system.
- At the moment, the situation is still better than paper-based certificates but, such an approach would allow Open Badges to be used in extremely high-stakes situations
- multiple blockchains that aren’t so tied to cryptocurrencies.
- Ethereum which describes itself as “a platform for decentralized applications.
- Ethereum allows for a situation in the not-so-distant future where smart contracts will allowentirely autonomous corporations to exist.
- With terms of service instantiated in code, such organisations will work on behalf of us to perform tasks that cause problems when subject to human error. These could include automatic issuing and verifying services around trusted credentials.
- If my evidence to earn a badge (or whatever we end up calling such credentials) is part of the blockchain, then I have data upon which to draw that is distributed, public, and objective
- Compare that with our current ad-hoc system of certificates languishing in drawers that struggle to be represented online. Verification moves beyond questions such as “does this look legitimate?”to verified, trusted credentials.
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An Open Can of Tin Badges - Tin Can API
- a crossover between Open Badges and Tin Can (xAPI)
- problem solved by this first version of the recipe: transferring earned badges between systems.
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Download and upload of the badge image.
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Integration with the Mozilla Open BackPack.
Without Tin Can, Open Badges provides two mechanisms for transferring badges:
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- The first option is a poor user experience and a time sink, particularly if there are a lot of learners importing a lot of badges from the same source.
- The second option requires the learner to register and then store their data on Mozilla’s BackPack.
- there’s no way to associate identities within the BackPack
- so earning badges with a mixture of work and personal email addresses is problematic.
- The baked badge image (an Open Badge image containing embedded metadata) is attached to the statement and all of the badge metadata is included within the statement, allowing for easy access without having to un-bake the badge.
- The statements are then retrieved and the badges are displayed both as a list of earned badges and within an activity stream. There’s no need to connect to the Mozilla Backpack or a database; the full record of the badge is stored within the LRS
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Peering Deep into Future of Educational Credentialing [DMLcentral] | Open Educational Thinkering
- an approach would allow Open Badges to be used in extremely high-stakes situations. The blockchain would prove a connection between the evidence and the badge. More details could be unlocked if the earner chooses to share his or her key.
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Open Badges, BlockCerts, and high-stakes credentialing | Open Educational Thinkering
- For many people, that ‘next big thing’ is blockchain.
- it’s enough to
- say that blockchain is a ‘supply-side’ technology, that allows vendors, platforms, and intermediaries a way of verifying ownership or that ‘something’ happened at a particular time.
- MIT have recently launched BlockCerts, which I discussed on this blog recently as being friends of Open Badges. That’s the great thing about open specifications: they play nicely with one another
- the thing that blockchain-based credentials are good for is i
- high stakes situations
- At a time when major employers are saying that they’re more interested in what people can do rather than their high-stakes credentials, it seems strange that we’re doubling down on the digital equivalent of degree certificates.
- Would I use and recommend BlockCerts in my work with clients? Absolutely!
- But only if what was required involved either zero trust between the parties involved in the ecosystem, or high-stakes credentials. For everything else, the verifiable, evidence-based claims of the Open Badges metadata standard work just fine
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Learning Analytics Research for LMS Course Design: Two Studies | EDUCAUSE
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Findings from two research studies at scale reveal the implications of learning analytics research for designing courses in learning management systems.
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Data-driven interventions shine light on our institutional conceptions of learning, who our students are, and our responsibility — or perhaps our willingness — to support students.
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By focusing the lens of analytics on course design, we may be able to define success in a way that is more intuitive and compelling to faculty and thus facilitates a more scalable approach toward course redesign for improved student success.
- When viewing student LMS activity and whether faculty enabled the grade center as an interaction effect — where the effect of one independent
- Grade center use often reflects a course design practice of using auto-graded quizzes, either for formative practice or summative assessment, which an LMS does well. This could support the "testing effect" that learning science research has shown to be one of the best ways for students to learn, by forcing them to recall and apply knowledge, preferably in frequent "low stakes" settings vs. infrequent "high stakes" settings like midterms and finals, that might encourage a cram and purge vs. a learn, recall and apply approach
- The opportunity for early feedback helps students make corrections and improve their self-regulation
- We investigated the top tools used among all courses in the sample
- student inactivity using the LMS was a strong predictor of grade
- both studies clearly indicate that the use of the LMS, and more importantly specific tools within the LMS, are significantly related to student achievement and thus have implications for course design. These studies clearly demonstrate that the inclusion of grade information in LMS courses, as well as student access to those grades, is related to improvements in student achievement
- the use of these tools necessitates deeper underlying changes to pedagogical practices by faculty (namely, changes in assessment techniques) and study habits by students (namely, changes in self-regulated learning).
- learning analytics provides us with a powerful technology and set of methods that we can use to evaluate the impact of these techniques, achieved through commonly available technologies, at a scale and scope dramatically improved from other tools that we have available.
- The analytics also provide evidence for deep pedagogical transformations enabled through technology.
- We can choose to follow the peaks and valleys of the analytics hype cycle, or use this opportunity to reflect more critically on the progress we've made, what we've learned in the process, and opportunities for where to go next.
- refining predictive analytics to inform more empirical studies of interventions that improve student success, we propose using quantitative evidence of impact at a bird's-eye view of any technology system to inform and drive a deeper qualitative investigation
- "If you want to change a culture, shine light on success."
- By focusing the lens of analytics on course design — not just student performance — we may be able to define success in a way that is more intuitive and compelling to faculty and thus facilitates more scalable transformation of teaching and learning
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- These are partnerships between education institutions and industry and professional associations that stack industry certifications within education programs
- certification-embedded education programs
- they’re awarded through assessment and validation that the learner has indeed achieved specific learning outcomes or attained a defined level of knowledge or skill relative to a given industry standard.
- Competency-based
- Here are 10 key takeaways from the survey’s 149 respondents, 80 percent of whom represented community and technical colleges with the remaining representing four-year institutions, employer groups and others:
- At four-year institutions, partnerships to embed credentials are most prevalent in management and business, healthcare, public safety, and information technology programs. At two-year institutions, partnerships are most prevalent in manufacturing and advanced manufacturing, welding, information technology, and healthcare.
- credit-bearing certificate and associate and applied associate degree programs in community and technical colleges
- The main driver of this practice is to enable educational institutions to respond to employer demands
- Respondents from community and technical colleges and employer associations consider embedding industry certifications to be especially relevant to their programs and partnerships; four-year institutions are less likely to see the practice as relevant
- The term most commonly associated with embedding industry and professional certifications within education is “stackable.” “Competency-based” and “embedded” are also used.
- Embedded certifications are being delivered as both a required and optional component of education courses.
- Vendor-neutral certifications include certifications such as the CompTIA suite of certifications in information technology that are not tied to a specific company. The practice of embedding vendor-specific certifications is more prevalent in community and technical colleges than four-year institutions.
- the cost of taking industry certification exams is borne by the student.
- Students can complete both academic credential and industry and professional-recognized certification;
- Colleges’ and universities’ curricula remain up-to-date with industry standards; and
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Saturday, March 4, 2017
Weekly Sporto bookmarks (weekly)
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Five Years of Progress in Open Credentials – Read, Write, Participate – Medium
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The Open Badges for Education Extensions (OBEE) Initiative – Open Badges – Medium
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European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning
- Using the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, this study aimed at examining learners’ interaction and their perceptions of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence in an open online course offered for professional development in three Swedish universities.
- Results also yielded significant relationships between teaching presence and cognitive presence, as well as social presence and cognitive presence.
- The findings suggest that deploying a set of online tools combined with appropriate pedagogical approaches in designing open online courses could foster learner interaction especially learner-content interaction and cognitive presence.
- Alongside massive open online courses (MOOCs) small-scaled open online courses are becoming more widespread in many disciplines in higher education and continuing institutions around the world.
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- we adduce a framework for automated identification of learning styles in MOOC.
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MIT Launches Blockcerts Certification Using Bitcoin - Bitcoin News
- Blockcerts is a MIT Media Lab project utilizing the Bitcoin blockchain for digital notarization. Developers said the platform also allows a decentralized credentialing system. The open source application can be used for “academic, professional, and workforce credentialing.” Blockcerts maintains its foundations as an open software application that allows any individual to take control of their credentials with an immutable method.
- This certification process shows the importance of a distributed ledger with immutable permanence. Blockchain certification using Blockcerts is tamper-proof and cannot be updated or edited. However, certification issuers can revoke certain records “by spending the revocation address that they generated for a particular recipient.”
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| IMS Global Learning Consortium
- The Open Badges working group will be guided by strategies developed by the Open Badges executive board comprised of IMS members who are key stakeholders in the ecosystem: badge issuing and display platform suppliers, educational institutions from K-20, and non-traditional educational opportunity-providers. Public community contributions, an important part of Open Badges development, will continue to have a voice through the Open Badges community counci
- the IMS eT project which makes use of the Open Badges standard as key component of its technical underpinning to represent a CBE-capable academic transcript; and the Badge Extensions for Education which augments the existing Open Badges metadata with important accreditation and assessment information, to help employers and others better understand what was required to earn a badge
- advancing understanding and adoption of Open Badges in the education sector through demonstration projects and pilots.
- The charter of the task force is to identify, define, and develop the framework, common language, and supporting interoperability specifications necessary to clearly transmit the meaning and value of post-secondary digital credentials to the employment community.
- how the addition of “Issuer Accreditation” and “Assessment” extensions to the Open Badges specification might help communicate the rigor with which badge earners’ activities were scrutinized before a decision was made by the badge issuer to award the badge
- reference to a single or multiple accreditation bodies that certifies the badge issuer.
- While work is underway with Credly and Badgr to implement a prototype of these recommended badge extensions, in parallel the task force is working on a research project, to work with employers on understanding more about the potential value of badges to communicate badge earners’ skills as well as identifying where there are gaps that IMS extensions might fill.
- with its Competency-Based Education working group. Together with members of the Competency-Based Education Network (CBEN), we are designing a CBE-aware ecosystem that leverages the technical groundwork of Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI).
- The IMS Competency-Based Education LTI standards will provide integration services that support the unique characteristics of CBE, enhancing the capabilities of the existing education enterprises designed around courses and credit hours.
- The goal of the project is to quickly identify essential data attributes that are shared among the diversity of programs and to develop requirements for expanding on LTI.
- Manage Competencies
- CBE eTranscript Publishing - develop a prototype for a comprehensive student record, and pilot eT, a digitally signed, web-based CBE transcript which can be viewed and securely shared by the learner with employers and others.
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Open Badges 2.0 – Open Badges – Medium
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A new group has been set up manage these opportunities and risks called the IMS Global Badges Group.
This group meets for the first time in Orlando this week. We’ll be agreeing the change process and charter and reviewing proposals for v2.0 of the standard . It’s part of a initiative including a community engagement group which is open to any organisation to join.
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- Learning Machine is a 10-year-old software company serving post-secondary education providers, students and employers with solutions for enrollment management, portfolio review and applicant tracking.
- Learning Machine's commercial offering will be available in both enterprise form, which can be used within employer CRM or HR systems; or, in the form of essentially non-customizable software-as-a-service (SaaS) form. Its open standard toolkit includes the Open Badges specification for creation and digital display of symbolic devices that include descriptions of skills attained or other achievements, with links to the organization awarding each badge.
- Jagers believes the impact will reach beyond education: "I believe credentialing is going to be a 'killer app' [that leverages blockchain] because it perfectly matches what the blockchain does," and can be applied to serve a wide range of services within and beyond edtech.
- New York City-based Credly describes its company as a digital badges and credentials service provider. In June, Credly announced that Toronto-based Destiny Solutions, which supports non-traditional post-secondary institutions' recruitment and engagement with students, would integrate the Credly offering.
- Both Ellucian and the Clearinghouse are headquartered in Northern Virginia.
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| IMS Global Learning Consortium
- IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS Global/IMS), the world leader in EdTech interoperability and innovation, the Mozilla Foundation, and Collective Shift/LRNG announced today an agreement for IMS Global to become the organization responsible for advancing the development, transferability, and market adoption of the Open Badges specification beginning January 1, 2017.
- “IMS is the smart choice for the next step in the evolution of the Open Badges initiative,” said Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, who serves on the Badge Alliance Steering Committee along with Dr. Rob Abel, CEO of IMS Global, and Connie Yowell, CEO of Collective Shift/LRNG.
- “The IMS community is a very good fit for this effort because of our leadership in the education technology market, our collaborative K-20 and EdTech supplier member network, and our existing investments in enabling better digital credentialing, specifically our focus on Open Badges extensions for education, the extended transcript, and competency-based education,”
- the Open Badges community is actively working towards the release of Open Badges 2.0, the most significant upgrade to the specification since its release, which will make it possible to address dozens of high priority use cases identified by key stakeholders.
- Comments from Leading Open Badges Ecosystem Organizations
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Credly
"In the marketplace for knowledge and skills, digital credentials are emerging as the currency of choice. A crucial input to the development of any currency is the adoption of standards across industries and applications," said Jonathan Finkelstein, founder and CEO of Credly. "As early advocates of credential and badge standards, Credly is pleased to see the Open Badges specification find a new home, and to build on contributions to the ecosystem with partners like IMS Global, LRNG, and Mozilla."
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Blockcerts are friends of Open Badges | Open Educational Thinkering
- Certificates are open badges compliant, which is important, because there is an entire community of open badges issuers that we want to support, and because open badges is becoming an IMS standard.
- upcoming Mozilla announcement in this regard.
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Google Grant Application Eligibility – Google for Nonprofits
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Deployment Options - Blockcerts : The Open Standard for Blockchain Certificates
- The Blockchain Certificates standard does not cover the end-to-end workflow of the issuance cycle, which provides the Issuer flexibility in their deployments
- in which the learner simply sends their Bitcoin address through some already trusted form of communication, such as email.
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Going to University - Free Online Courses - FutureLearn
- Developing Your Research Project
- How to Succeed at: Writing Applications
- Innovation: the World's Greatest
- Learning Online: Learning and Collaborating
- Understand what innovation means and consider the history and developments of innovations that are important in our daily lives.
- Become an effective online learner and develop your online communication skills when working with others.
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'FutureLearn Choices' Program Highlights Uni Courses for High Schoolers
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Five Reasons High School Students Should Consider MOOCs — Class Central
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10 Uses of MOOCs for High School Students - Etale - Ideas that Matter
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Blockcerts Standard - Blockcerts : The Open Standard for Blockchain Certificates
- Reference implementations
- I don't see any reference to Open badges standards
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System Overview - Blockcerts : The Open Standard for Blockchain Certificates
- They will add them to a certificate store
- This allows anyone with the certificate URL to view and verify the certificate.
- The cert-verify component is separate from the viewer – this allows any party to serve as a certificate verifier without needing to store the data
- The issuer should notify the recipients to let them know a certificate is available. This allows the recipients to import their certificate into their cert-wallet mobile app
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Introduction - Blockcerts : The Open Standard for Blockchain Certificates
- Please note that this standard is not attempting to solve identity. In other words, this solution does not certify the mapping of public keys to individuals or organizations
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Endorsement 2.0: Taking Open Badges and E-Credentials to the Next Level | EDUCAUSE
- Unlike conventional credentials, digital badges can contain specific claims and detailed web-enabled evidence supporting those claims, and this information can circulate freely on the Internet.
- One of the biggest issues — the credibility of these digital credentials — is about to take a big step forward
- New features in the Open Badges Specification will soon make it possible for third parties to add verifiable endorsements to these e-credentials.
- It has taken some time, but recruiters and employers can now readily locate individuals who (a) are widely endorsed for specific skills by (b) other individuals who are closely connected in LinkedIn and (c) who are widely endorsed for those same skills by their own close connections.
- These features will allow individuals or organizations who issue badges to add endorsements by other parties to add to their credibility and trustworthiness across different communities
- The companies and organizations investing in Open Badges can now begin building features that will help badge issuers, earners, and consumers understand and build more value, without having to start from scratch
- The Open Badges Specification is the most widely adopted standard for digital badges
- Badge Alliance in 2014
- open badge systems extensible
- Back in October 2016, the Badge Alliance board announced that all of the Open Badges Specification work and some community support would move to a new home within the IMS Global Learning Consortium, starting January 1, 2017.
- IMS Global is a membership organization whose primary function is establishing standards for Internet-based educational technologies, such as learning tools interoperability (LTI) standards. The LTI standards make adding functionality (including digital badges) to learning management systems easier
- Among the most important capabilities defined in the 2.0 specification are those that support endorsements.
- These specifications permit interoperable and extensible features that allow "third parties" to endorse badges issued by the "first" party to learners, the "second" party.
- accreditation is a comprehensive endorsement of everything that ends up on a transcript.
- In key respects, Open Badges were intended to disrupt the existing accreditation model. In addition, allowing the recognition of more granular and less formal competencies, a consumer of these new credentials (e.g., an employer, admissions officer, educator, peer) could examine the evidence in the badge and reach his or her own conclusion about whether that evidence supports the claims made by the badge.
- However, accreditors do not typically endorse certifications for such a specific competency as knowledge of HIPAA; accreditors' focus is on the academic programs as a whole.
- Our HIPAA example illustrates the opaque tangle that the new nonprofit Credential Engine (formerly known as the Credential Transparency Initiative), is attempting to straighten out. With support from the Lumina Foundation, the Credential Engine is working with a diverse group of stakeholders to bring more coherence to the credentialing marketplace.
- Certificates are typically issued by continuing and professional education programs. They typically require less coursework than an associate's degree, but lead to gainful employment in the certified field, while paving the way for further education and career advancement. Certifications are typically issued by an industry to the individual based on competency and skills.
- Continuing and professional education certificate programs are usually housed in community colleges. However, this sector of higher education is undergoing massive transformation via online learning, the globalization of education and employment, accreditation-related closures, MOOCs, boot camps, etc.3 This is disrupting the traditional relationships between educators and employers in particular regions and sectors. The demise of these informal "learning recognition networks" is simultaneously undermining educators' responsiveness, students' confidence, and employers' trust. Fortunately, the pending introduction of endorsements and other features in Open Badges and increased use of Open Badges by certificate and certification programs has the potential to reverse these worrisome trends, while also making it easier to track progress towards these important national goals.
- In 2014 the Endorsement Working Group at the Badge Alliance set out to extend the Open Badge Specification to allow badges to be endorsed more explicitly
- Endorsement is a game changer for how badges are used, understood, and trusted, because it allows third-party organizations to publicly indicate which badges are aligned with their values — those that are the most meaningful and useful to them. It adds a new metadata component to the Open Badges standard and defines the structure for rich, well-defined endorsement information and criteria such as alignment with standards, uses for the badge in the context of the endorsing organization, description of evidence of learning and assessment techniques the organization values, etc.
- The intentionally open structure of badge endorsement provides opportunities for a variety of different types of endorsers, including community organizations, employers, standards bodies, and groups that are re-envisioning how the value of learning is defined.
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- One or more third parties can endorse a specific badge before it is issued (the so-called BadgeClass).
- One or more third parties can endorse earned badges after they are issued to the earner (the so-called Assertions of each BadgeClass).
- One or more third parties can endorse an issuer profile so that the endorsement passes through to all of their badges (that is, their BadgeClasses and therefore the Assertions that follow).
This allows (and encourages) all platforms that issue or display Open Badges to support three types of explicit endorsement:
- Credly
- their platforms to embrace the 2.0 Open Badges Specifications
- This would mean that Credly and other badges systems that are compliant with the 2.0 specifications could present a logo and a statement of endorsement from the EFF.
- The endorsement would be automatically verifiable (to prevent scammers from faking it) using the same mechanisms that make Open Badges Assertions verifiable.
- This would add value to the endorsement above and beyond other potential endorsers who might demand such compensation (and therefore possibly compromise its integrity). It is worth noting that the distinction between uncompensated/compensated endorser is not currently included in the forthcoming 2.0 Open Badges Specification.
- Endorsement 2.0 features would allow him to seek external endorsement of all of his firm's badges. He presumably has the option of going with a more conventional professional and continuing education accreditor such as ACCET and IACET or a more specialized medical education accreditor such as AACME.
- This is just one example of the many ways that "open recognition" afforded by Endorsement 2.0 could transform e-credentialing.
- The transparency associated with "open recognition" more generally might allow such practices to emerge and flourish in productive ways, while avoiding the breakdowns that have recently disrupted the accreditation industry.
- illustrates how (1) badge issuers can insert evidence and links to more evidence to support the claims made by a BadgeClass when it is issued, (2) this evidence can be unique for each assertion of the BadgeClass when it is issued, and (3) Endorsement 2.0 will allow one or more third parties to endorse specific Assertions of a BadgeClass.
- Together, these features will permit previously unimaginable models of endorsement for e-credentials
- Because Open Badges put all of this information in a standardized Linked Data format, both machines and humans can easily read and interpret it.
- While they took two decades to emerge, "Value Recognition Networks" are now taken for granted by most e-commerce stakeholders
- soon take digital "Learning Recognition Networks" for granted in just a few years
- widespread use of Linked Data will make it much easier to search for and quantify the information about education, competencies, endorsements, and employment that make up a network
- Open Badges, the open standard for the recognition of learning achievements, has proved the power of a simple, affordable, resilient and trustworthy technology to create an open recognition ecosystem working across countries, educational sectors, work, social environments and technologies. Open Badges have demonstrated that we have the means and the opportunity to put an end to the disparities of the recognition landscape. Connecting and informing competency frameworks, they become the building blocks of an open architecture for the recognition of lifelong and life-wide learning achievements. They create the conditions for individuals to be in control of their own recognition, to establish their identity and agency, whether formally (within institutions) or informally (across communities).
- open recognition of learning
- While it will take some time for the newer digital e-credentialing systems and networks to become established, it appears quite certain that they will.
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- Badge (terms:Badge)
- A recognition designed to be displayed as a marker of accomplishment, activity, achievement, skill, interest, association, or identity.
- Digital Badge (term:DigitalBadge)
- A badge offered in digital form.
- Open Badge (terms:OpenBadge)
- An Open Badge is a visual symbol containing verifiable claims in accordance with the Open Badges specification and delivered digitally.
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- Certification (terms:Certification)
- A time-limited, renewable non-degree credential awarded by an authoritative body to an individual or organization for demonstrating the designated knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform a specific job.
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- Micro-Credential (terms:terms)
- A credential that attests to achievement of a specific knowledge, skill, or competency.
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Credential Engine: Driving a Transparent Credentialing Ecosystem | EDUCAUSE
- Unfortunately, the existing maze of credentials lacks the transparency to meet these needs.
- The nonprofit organization Credential Engine (previously known as the Credential Transparency Initiative
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- Developing common terminology for describing the key features of all kinds of workforce credentials (degrees, certificates, certifications, licenses, badges, etc.)
- Creating an open, voluntary, web-based Credential Registry for sharing the resulting comparable information
- Developing and testing a practical software application that enables access to this information and serves the needs of institutions of higher education, employers, job-seekers, and others
- Lumina Foundation
- George Washington University's Institute of Public Policy; the American National Standards Institute's affiliate, Workcred; and Southern Illinois University's Center for Workforce Development
- 800 in-person and online attendees of a major conference in Washington, DC
- Such enthusiasm is one reason that in spring 2017 leadership will shift to the board and staff of Credential Engine, a new nonprofit created to sustain the system and grow it to scale, now funded by JP Morgan Chase as well as Lumina
- the Credential Registry uses Web 3.0 technologies to capture, connect, archive, and share information about credentials, credentialing organizations, quality assurance organizations, competency frameworks, and more to support an open software applications marketplace
- The Credential Registry is based on a common language known as the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) that was developed with broad input from hundreds of credentialing stakeholders in an iterative process
- form of metadata schema and vocabulary that describe key features of credentials, credentialing organizations, quality assurance organizations, and competency frameworks critical for determining the quality and value of credentials.
- The CTDL conforms to the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) specifications and builds on Schema.org.
- earning or competency requirements, location of those requirements in selected competency frameworks, primary scope of the competency set's application (e.g., targeted industry, occupation, and geographic area), type of assessment and how it was developed, costs and time to attain the credential, labor market value, transfer value, location in education and career pathways, role in occupational regulation and licensing, third-party approval status, and credential holder verification
- he first app created on the registry is an open-source prototype search app maintained by Credential Engine to demonstrate the power of the registry and promote the development of additional software app
- At present, the prototype app is available to the organizations putting information about their credentials on the registry
- And now that Credential Engine has been established as a 501(c) (3) nonprofit to take the system to scale, all credentialing organizations, including colleges, certification bodies, apprenticeship programs, and license and badge issuers, are encouraged to join.
- So also are organizations that accredit, endorse, or otherwise approve credentials and credentialing organizations. There are no fees for participation, which requires little time and effort.
- Participation allows schools or programs to gain visibility in a large market of students, employers, and others who increasingly use virtual search tools to find and compare credentials of interest. Participation also demonstrates a commitment to transparency and the confidence to display the quality of the credential involved.
- Finally, participants receive a suite of services that are useful for short- and long-term technology planning, including information about Web 3.0 technologies and a customized roadmap for advancing their capacity to operate on the emerging web of linked data.
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Distance Ed Costs and Price: Not as Closely Correlated as You’d Think « WCET Frontiers
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Credential Engine: Driving a Transparent Credentialing Ecosystem | EDUCAUSE
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