Dive Brief:
- The University of Notre Dame has harnessed the power of e-portfolios for students’ pitches to employers by incorporating digital badges into them.
- Notre Dame has a badge directory that provides information for employers once students earn badges, and now, with the university’s new tech partners, Credly badges can be easily embedded into Digication e-portfolios for tighter integration than the project originally had.
- The multi-phase initiative has become significantly more streamlined, and project leaders are now looking into ways digital badges and e-portfolios can be highlighted on official transcripts.
Dive Insight:
The University of Notre Dame’s Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning has led the e-portfolio makeover. Team members plan to build on this work by studying how badges incentivize completion of massive open online courses, which have traditionally enticed large numbers of students to take courses but few to complete. This push is part of a wider effort across higher education to give students credit for work they do outside of classrooms. With alternative education opportunities springing up in the form of coding bootcamps, online mini-courses, and guided trips abroad, there is a recognition that assigning credit must be better standardized to get employers to take notice.