‘Digital Badges: signposting learning’
Presenter: John Parkinson (Senior Academic Developer, Middlesex University)
Digital Badges have recently emerged as a means of credentialing learning within formal and informal educational settings. The strategic and relatively self-contained focus of individual digital badge awards makes them an ideal vehicle through which recipients can demonstrate the acquisition of granular skills and competencies. In an HE setting this provides educators with an opportunity to acknowledge incremental skills acquisition that might otherwise remain hidden within the programme curriculum and final award.
Outline: This presentation will describe a live project launching in September 2016 during which the acquisition and acknowledgement of key skills within the BSc Nursing programme will be facilitated through a dedicated Digital Badge system within the Middlesex University My learning environment. during the initiative the project facilitators will seek to evaluate the affordances of Digital Badges as credentials of learning, as tools for learner engagement, and as a method by which students might positively gauge their own academic progress.
