Badging at UNO

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The Power of Digital Badges:

UNO's Institutional Goals for Digital Badging:

Badging Framework (how to get started badging):

The Power of Digital Badges:

Badges are the "nutrition facts" of your learning journey, providing a clear picture of your skills and achievements.

Here's why they matter:

1. Skills Recognition: Digital badges visually represent your skills, achievements, and knowledge. They're like digital credentials that let you showcase your accomplishments in a specific area. Think of them as a way to stand out when applying for jobs, higher education, or connecting with professionals.

2. Portability and Trustworthiness: You can easily share digital badges on social media, websites, or digital resumes. They come with detailed info about who issued them, the criteria, and evidence you needed to earn them. This makes it easy for others to verify their authenticity, which boosts your credibility.

3. Microcredentials and Experiential Learning: Digital badges are perfect for short, skill-based courses. They let you collect evidence of your achievements from accredited institutions, associations, or employers and share them with potential employers. They also can capture learning that happens outside the classroom, through leadership roles and experiential learning opportunities.

4. Enhanced Assessment: Badges aren't just about test scores. They can be tied to various assessments like projects, peer evaluations, or real-world applications. This gives a more well rounded picture of your abilities.

5. Skills-Based Hiring: For hiring managers, digital badges are a great way to match candidates with the skills they need. They complement traditional hiring criteria like work experience, degrees, and time-based measures.

6. Motivation and Engagement: Badges can motivate you to participate actively in educational activities. They break learning into smaller, achievable goals, fostering a sense of accomplishment and progress. Plus, they encourage healthy competition and collaboration.

7. Lifelong Learning: Digital badges are your lifelong learning companions. As you acquire new skills and knowledge throughout life, you can use them to demonstrate continuous growth and professional development.

8. Flexibility and Stackability: Badges can be stacked as complexity or depth of learning in an area increases, and can also be stacked from various organizations. This helps to demonstrate growth and development in specific competencies, whether they’re durable or technical skills.

9. Community Building: Digital badges bring people with similar achievements together to create communities. You can connect, collaborate, and share knowledge with others who've earned similar badges.

UNO's Institutional Goals for Digital Badging:

• Create a comprehensive badging framework for learners to signal skills and competencies.
• Be an industry leader in badging.
• Align with emerging expectations from regulatory bodies and partners.
• Start badging pilots in August 2023, with full-scale implementation in 2024-25.
• Explore the integration of badging into learners' transcripts as appropriate.

Badging Framework:

Badge Areas

Badges can be given in four areas:

• Non-credit/External Audiences
  • Example: UNO Microcredentials
• Faculty/Staff
  • Example: Management Badge tied to Bridge training completion
• Student Co-curricular
  • Example: Honor Society Recognition
• Student Curricular
  • Example: Skill Development within a course

UNO Badge Public Page

NU Advance Badge Public Page

Process and Campus Roles

UNO emphasizes a campus-wide approach with both centralized and decentralized elements. Units and departments actively choose what to badge within their scope of work. Each unit designates roles for completing badge request forms, verifying criteria, and issuing badges.

Building a Badge, Behind the Scenes:

Information collected through the form process is used to create badges, including badge criteria, in Canvas Credentials.

If you are interested in exploring badging reach out to Myah Lanoux-Nguyen - mlanoux-nguyen@unomaha.edu.

Badge Development FAQ:

Why do you need 3+ people to create a badge?

• Having multiple people come together to develop and propose the badge encourages collaboration, avoids duplication and helps add a layer of oversight from peers and collaborators to ensure the badge holds value widely.

• An approver can be an issuer however that is unlikely to be the case in most siuations.
  • Approvers are unit leads designated to approve the form (student organization advisor/sponsor, Director of Service Learning Academy, HR Director, Dean or representative from Dean’s office, etc.)
  • Issuers are administrative roles within badging, they validate that the earning criteria is met before issuing the badge to the learner.

What badges are being created at UNO?

• The College of Buisness Administration has several badges including "Resume Review" and "Mock Interview" in a pathway that leads to the "CBA Career Readiness".
• UNO New Student and Family Programs created a series of badges including "New UNO Enrollee" and "UNO Ready for Takeoff" for new students as they progress through variosu activities during orientation week that ends with a collection badge "I'm a Maverick".

How did badging at UNO get it's start?

• In the summer of 2023 ainterdisciplinary group came together to develop a framework for badging. The result was a white paper that was presented to the Deans in August, you can read the UNO Badging White Paper Here.

How do I know my badge is a success?

• There are several ways to measure success but the two most common is the number of badges issued (This indicates that the learners see value in the knowledge they are earning that they are seeking out the badges), and how often they are shared (this indicates the learner is excited to share their accomplishment with others).

What role does ILCI play in badging?

• ILCI supports badging through the coordination and facilitation of approval and the set up of badges.
• They also partner broadly across campus to strategize badging in all areas of learner engagement at UNO.
• They provide a quarterly update on impact and reach of badges, this will include the number of badges issued and what was shared. A goal of the initiative is to track the market value and learner success in the job market.
• A yearly review will be conducted to ensure badges are current and still being utilized by issuers.