Dive Summary:
- Students receiving a digital badge for scoring at least 60% or above on the final exam for a short online course at Purdue is just one example of the new credential being used by prominent businesses and learning organizations including Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California, the Smithsonian, Intel and Disney-Pixar and spearheaded by the Mozilla Foundation.
- Badges indicate specific knowledge and skills--something that has become difficult to communicate with GPAs and degrees as a result of things like grade inflation--and badge programs are gaining in popularity at the same time as MOOCs, potentially making the information-age credentials the first serious competition to a traditional degree.
- Mozilla will be working with the National Human Resources Association and other organizations over the next year to help employers better understand how to best take advantage of badges.
From the article:
At the end of “Fundamentals of Atomic Force Microscopy,” a short online course offered by Purdue University, students who score at least 60 percent on the final exam will receive an e-mail with a file attached. It will contain a picture of a blue-and-white circle, roughly one inch in diameter, embossed with the stylized image of an atomic force microscope bouncing a laser beam off a cantilever into a photodiode, which is how scientists take photographs and measure the size of very small (nanoscale) things. The picture is a digital badge, a new type of credential being developed by some of the most prominent businesses and learning organizations in the world, including Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, the University of California, the Smithsonian, Intel and Disney-Pixar. The badge movement is being spearheaded by the Mozilla Foundation, best known for inventing the free Firefox Web browser, the choice of nearly one-quarter of all Internet users worldwide. ...