Published on 06.04.2022 under Agency, General, Consultation, Community, STEM education
Open Badges make informal learning visible
An application example from STEM education in the pilot phase
by Arne Klauke and Vanessa Funke
What are Open Badges? We learn. Always and everywhere. In different contexts. And that for a lifetime. But what has been learned cannot always be expressed transparently in grades, certificates or degrees. It is much more common for us – often in an informal way – to provide services and develop skills that are not visible at first glance in job applications or social networks.
This applies to specialist skills that are outside of fwere acquired in normal educational systems such as school or university. The joint offensive zdi.NRW stands for non-formal learning in mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology (MINT). In a wide range of extracurricular offers - from courses to company projectsarts to competitions - students discover their interest in STEM and acquire valuable skills and knowledge.
This also applies to the so-called 21st Century Skills such as critical thinking, self-organization, teamwork or creativity – these skills have become indispensable in everyday (working) life, and yet there has often been a lack of the opportunity to map them transparently and verifiably.
How can these diverse competencies be recognized and made visible to third parties in a simple and condensed way without having to present a series of different and non-comparable certificates of participation? This is where Open Badges come into play.
Open badges as digital proof of competence
Open Badges are digital badges that verifiably prove that someone has achieved certain learning achievements or acquired competencies. From a purely technical point of view, these are digital images such as pictograms or logos that contain individual metadata for later access and verification (e.g. creator, owner, achievement, course content). Open Badges can be obtained within the framework of formal school and university education, but they are also used in extracurricular learning, professional development or volunteer work. The metadata is encoded in accordance with the Open Badge Standard jointly developed by the Mozilla Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. This is an open technical standard, so any person or organization can create, issue, manage, collect and check Open Badges via special online platforms, so-called Badgr.
Visibility, motivation and orientation through Open Badges
Open Badges make previously “invisible” learning successes, competencies and talents visible – digitally, uniformly, verifiably and condensed. This offers great added value as a supplement to classic proof of qualifications, especially for potential employers. Individual and multifaceted competence profiles are created that can be presented in digital CVs, on websites or in profiles of social and professional networks. This plays an important role in light of the fact that job descriptions and the corresponding skill requirements are becoming more and more complex, specific and individual and are also in constant flux.
But Open Badges can do even more.
In the zdi.NRW project, for example, we are currently creating open badges that are linked to career and study orientation courses throughout NRW. In the future, badges can be assigned in up to 2.000 courses, which can then be displayed in the private profile of the young people on the zdi community platform be available. Pupils take part in courses, company projects or competitions with different focuses from the MINT cosmos and collect Open Badges throughout their school career - let's call them MINT.OBadges. The metadata stored makes it possible to verify participation and, for example, it becomes transparent what content was covered, how long the course lasted and what methodology was followed.
By collecting the MINT.OBadges, individual achievements and areas of interest quickly become visible - this helps with targeted career and study orientation. For the students it becomes more tangible what is behind a certain job description, where their interests and strengths lie and what this can mean for their future professional life. In this case, the MINT.OBadges do not primarily mark the completion of a process, but rather accompany individual learning paths as milestones. The “playful” collecting of the MINT.OBadges also increases the motivation of the students to take part in extracurricular learning opportunities and they experience recognition for learning success outside of the regular curriculum.
Lifelong learning, lateral entry and transitions can also be facilitated by MINT.OBadges, for example, supporting those who drop out of university or those who are changing careers in a reorientation. In this way they are a crucial part of the future of non-linear career guidance.
Open Badges - an approach with a lot of potential (not only) for them STEM education.
