Recognizing competencies vs. completion vs. participation: Ideal roles for web-enabled digital badges

Open digital badges are new credentials that can contain specific claims and links to web-enabled evidence, and can then circulate in networks. Badges are helping facilitate broader shifts away from measuring, accrediting, and credentialing achievement and towards capturing, validating, and recognizing learning. A study of 30 funded efforts to develop badges found that none of the efforts to develop competency badges (for demonstrating specific competencies) resulted in thriving badge-based ecosystems, while four of the five efforts to develop participation badges (for engaged participation in social learning) resulted in thriving ecosystems. The findings were relatively mixed for the remaining efforts to develop completion badges (for individuals completing projects or investigations) and hybrid badges (for multiple types of learning). These findings suggest that innovators temper their ambition for capturing and recognizing evidence of individual competencies, and consider exploring more social assessments and informal and crowdsourced recognition.