How to Design a Digital Badging Program That Will Increase Student Success

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Location: La Nouvelle Ballroom, Table 6
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Participate and share : Poster

Amanda Nguyen
Learn how to create a schoolwide program that helps all students develop, demonstrate and articulate skills in order to earn digital badges. Hear how these badges can be used as part of a larger program designed to increase student success and build their confidence for future careers.

Audience:	Curriculum/district specialists, Teachers, Teacher education/higher ed faculty
Skill level:	Beginner
Attendee devices:	Devices not needed
Topic:	Innovation in higher education
Grade level:	Community college/university
ISTE Standards:	For Coaches: Collaborator Establish trusting and respectful coaching relationships that encourage educators to explore new instructional strategies. Partner with educators to identify digital learning content that is culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate and aligned to content standards. For Educators: Designer Use technology to create, adapt and personalize learning experiences that foster independent learning and accommodate learner differences and needs.

Proposal summary

Purpose & objective

Participants will be able to:
- describe the key components of a competency-based digital badge
- describe how to create learning resources to support independent earning of digital badges (hyperdocs that leverage UDL principles)
- articulate the value of competency-based digital badging programs in terms of increasing student success and career-readiness
- explain how to create a school-wide model that is easy to adopt in both academic and extracurricular settings
- list the skills that are currently highly-sought after by employers and explain why those skills are important for success in careers
- see the types of data that can be collected using the Badgr platform to see individual student success along a pathway, as well as success of cohorts with particular skills.

Supporting research

While we haven't read a clear research study that uses our exact method, we did learn from other studies that found strategies that didn't work -- and have tried to either avoid those strategies or design supports within our program to lessen the negative effects. Here is an example:
Stefaniak, J., Carey, K. Instilling purpose and value in the implementation of digital badges in higher education. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 16, 44 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-019-0175-9

Beyond that, we used data from our employer advisory board as well as the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to guide our decisions on which skills to focus on and the 'common language' to create for our students and employer partners. Here are the NACE competencies which result from their research across hundreds of employers and colleges: https://www.naceweb.org/career-readiness/competencies/career-readiness-defined/

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Presenters

Amanda Nguyen, Great Schools Partnership

Amanda Nguyen is the Program Director of the Centers for Innovation at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. She supports programming and partnerships that create opportunities for learners to thrive in innovative and career-focused pathways. She is a former high school math/science teacher and administrator. She has created and implemented several statewide professional learning and teacher leadership programs for Maine educators. She earned her B.A. in Biology from Bowdoin College and M.Ed. focused on Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the 2021 ACTEM ACHIEVE award winner (the Making IT Happen award from Maine).