Millions of digital badges exist, with more entering the marketplace every day. With so many badges to decipher, how is someone supposed determine the value of any one specific badge…quickly?

According to J. Finkelstein, E. Knight and S. Manning, “Badges can represent different levels of work and engagement, including more granular skills or achievements, marking in some cases small and/or very specific abilities.” Digital badges at their core can be designed to represent a myriad of things. This makes them useful in all sorts of situations, but also challenging to consume.

As one of the leading higher education badge creators, we needed to find a way to consistently and clearly classify our badges.  After much research, what we found was there are classification systems that help define digital badge value in the #digitalbadgeosphere, but nothing that applies to higher education. A lot of organizations are creating badges that have creative names, but are difficult to determine exactly what the value is. We were sometimes able to find the value by digging deeper into the metadata of the badge, but not always. This very quickly taught us that the value of a digital badge is something that should be front and present, not something anyone should have to search for.

With that in mind, the Digital Credentials Institute at Madison College designed a taxonomy specifically for higher education.  We pulled sources from digital badges and classification systems created at IBM (workforce) and LRNG (K-12), to fill the void in higher education.

Our goal in creating this taxonomy was to create lanes or containers that would allow and define different types of badges.  We wanted each lane to be easily distinguished and the value be instantly recognizable without explanation.  Rather than create new names for each type of badge, we decided to utilize terminology that is already widely used in higher education – Knowledge, Skills, and Ability (KSAs). “A primary purpose of KSAs is to measure those qualities that will set one candidate apart from the others. In federal personnel guidance, KSAs are defined as the factors that identify the better candidates from a group of persons basically qualified for a position.” https://www.cdc/gov/hrmo/ksahowto.htm  When this taxonomy is provided to our faculty and employers, they know at a glance the value of each type of badge.  We already know that digital badges are increasing engagement among our students, now we can provide an easy way to communicate the value of each badge to consumers of the badges.

Resources

The Potential and Value of Using Digital Badges for Adult Learners

The Importance of KSA’s (Knowledge, Skills and Abilities) in the Federal Application Process