Badges and Certificates
Digital Badges are a mechanism that many organizations are exploring to recognize and support professional development. Digital Badges are being used in creative and innovative ways to recognize competency, reward effort, and incentivize behaviors. Digital badge credentials provide metadata that link back to evidence of contribution, achievement, skill development, performance, or behavior. Providing a more complete picture of an earner’s knowledge and skills, digital badges can make accomplishments more visible, can be shared, and like certificates and other credentials, are becoming a professionally valued currency. They can be shared on online profiles, professional portfolios, with prospective employers, professional groups, schools, collaborators, and other learners in online social community spaces.
SUNY Online Teaching has developed an award-winning digital badging ecosystem that recognizes online community of practice membership, contributions, and the competency development of our online practitioners. This digital system of badges has enabled an effective, engaging, and visible way to recognize the development of online teaching and course design competencies, and support/incentivize key behaviors in our community of practice. Four overarching paths are tied to the roles online practitioners play in our community, and form constellations of types of badges that add levels and a journey metaphor to the environment that help to clarify and integrate the goals of the badges within a true community of practice where members can move from novice to masters, share/learn from each other, and demonstrate their commitment to continuous improvements in their online teaching and course design. Listen to a podcasted overview of the OLC Effective Practice Award project, “Using Digital Badges as a Framework to Support and Scale an Online Teaching and Learning Community”
Digital badging offers creative ways to define professional development paths, recognize accomplishments, experience, and competency, and encourage/incentivize specific behaviors. Badge systems can be combined with additional incentives such as promotion/tenure, institutional recognition, mentor opportunities, and further professional development.
We award badges.
- We used the original Credly platform to organize and deliver the digital credentials until September 2020, and have now migrated to Credly (by Acclaim).
- To date:
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- We have created 89 badges: in the professional development and community engagement categories.
- We have issued 7,719 badges –4% in Twitter, 9% have shared their badges in FB, and 87% have shared their badges in LinkedIn.
- A group of campus-based volunteers have assisted by providing feedback on the design of the badging system: Chris Price – Brockport/CPD, Kelsey O’Brien – UA, Anne Reed – UP, Jeremiah Grobowski – UB, Jim Lynch – MVCC. Some input from Tera Doty-Blance – Broome and Linda Ryder – HVCC. Also includes various SUNY Online and CPD staff.
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If you are interested in badging, please join the SUNY Online Teaching online community and network using #badging.