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Competencies in Context: New Approaches to Capturing, Recognizing, and Endorsing Learning

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Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology

Abstract

Most current practices for measuring, credentialing, and accrediting achievement are opaque and analog. This makes them expensive, inefficient, and entrenched, characteristics that in turn obstruct innovation and other necessary developments in education and educational technologies. This chapter describes general and specific responses to these achievement problems. These responses represent a trend towards capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning. This trend is part of a larger movement in educational technology towards a focus on the context in which learning takes place and the contexts to which the resulting knowledge might transfer. These trends are increasingly important because new technologies (and particularly digital networks) can provide useful information about the context in which learning took place and the context in which evidence of that learning was gathered. Including information about context makes it possible to capture, recognize, and endorse a much broader range of learning and to do so in a much broader range of settings. After summarizing broader responses to problematic achievement practices, this chapter delves into a more specific response in the form of open digital badges. Examples from one digital badge system developed by the authors for an open online course are presented to illustrate new ways of capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is worth noting that one common use of digital badges is for simply attending professional conferences. This is unfortunate as such badges almost never contain any evidence of learning. It is particularly unfortunate that such badges are often derisively labeled “participation” badges rather than “attendance” badges. This seems to have diminished the appreciation of evidence-rich badges in some professional communities and obscured the usefulness of badges as evidence of more meaningful participation in disciplinary practices such as those illustrated in this chapter.

  2. 2.

    Other assignments included extensive links to external open educational resources. This same approach is being used in other contexts that only rely on open educational resources. But the existing course was based on a textbook; university policy required that the Assessment BOOC be comparable if students were to be able to enroll in the same course for formal credit.

  3. 3.

    The issuer URL should point to an Issuer Profile on the web that contains the name, a description, contact address, and other information about the issuer.

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Author Notes and Acknowledgments

Daniel Hickey (danielthickey@gmail.com) is a Professor, Suraj Uttamchandani (sjuttam25@gmail.com) is a doctoral candidate, and Grant Chartrand (gchartra@indiana.edu) is a doctoral student, all with the Learning Sciences Program in the Indiana University School of Education.

This chapter describes research that was primarily supported by grants from Google and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional support was provided by a grant from the Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost for Research and an assistantship from the Indiana University Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology. Christopher Andrews and Caroline Pitt provided helpful feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

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    Daniel T. Hickey, Suraj L. Uttamchandani & Grant T. Chartrand

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Hickey, D.T., Uttamchandani, S.L., Chartrand, G.T. (2020). Competencies in Context: New Approaches to Capturing, Recognizing, and Endorsing Learning. In: Bishop, M.J., Boling, E., Elen, J., Svihla, V. (eds) Handbook of Research in Educational Communications and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36119-8_26

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