Keywords

Introduction

A benefit of the twenty-first century digital education revolution has been the increased access to education provided by digital technologies. This interest in improving access has led to the growth of the open educational movement and an explosion of openly accessible and/or openly licensed resources for education such as Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs), textbooks, and other open educational resources. However, learning is more than content, and consequently open education must include more than just open educational resources (OER). As Wiley (2018) has argued, we need to talk about an open education infrastructure that includes open content, competencies, assessments, credentials, and even pedagogy. We further synthesize Wiley’s ideas and propose that an open education infrastructure for the twenty-first century should include methods, technologies, and plans for:

  1. 1.

    Open practices (e.g., open pedagogy, open research, and open sharing/collaboration of ideas).

  2. 2.

    Open content (e.g., MOOCs, OER, open textbooks)

  3. 3.

    Open recognition of learning (e.g., open assessments, data, standards, credentials, transparency of trust around recognizing learning)

While open content has been discussed for 30 years and is the most well-known, open practices and recognition have been largely ignored. However, new technologies have emerged to support open recognition and practices in the last 8 years. In particular, technologies supporting how we assess and recognize acquired knowledge, skills, and abilities are becoming increasingly popular.

One emerging innovation to support how we assess and recognize learning is digital microcredentials, also known as open microcredentials, open badges, or alternative digital credentials. While there are nuances in how these terms are used, they are often used interchangeably in the literature. These credentials have exploded in popularity in recent years with 45 million open badge credentials having been issued since their creation in 2012 (source: IMS Global). While some are concerned that breaking education down into microbits appropriate for microlearning would be detrimental, others argue that they instead present an enticing opportunity for educational innovation by playing a complementary role, creating the building blocks for more affordable degree programs, and promoting greater transparency for educational outcomes (Gallagher, 2019).

Rather than sweeping away degrees, new types of online credentials — various certificates, MicroMasters, badges, and the like — are instead playing a complementary role, creating the building blocks for newer, more affordable degree programs…. The growing digitization of credentials also heralds a new era of greater transparency for educational outcomes — providing more and better data on which corporate leaders can make hiring decisions. (para 9, 14)

In this chapter, we will focus on open recognition as one aspect of the open education infrastructure, and in particular open microcredentials due to their ability to disrupt traditional educational practices surrounding how we recognize and certify learning. In keeping with the spirit of the handbook, we will discuss the potential of open microcredentials to impact teaching and learning at the micro-, meso-, and macrolevels, concluding with recommendations for both practice and research.

Definitions

One challenge in discussing the literature on open badges/microcredentials is that the terms have been used very differently by different professionals and overlaps with other, similarly micro, open recognition technologies. For that reason, we begin our chapter by briefly defining the terms.

First, it is important to distinguish between open and controlled credentials. Open credentials use technology that openly distributes the role of assessing and credentialing learners among various institutions and persons. Meanwhile, controlled credentials are issued and controlled by a small group of persons or institutions. For example, the number of institutions that can issue a university degree is relatively small – only 3700 such institutions in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020).

In contrast, an open credential, by nature of the technology supporting it, cannot be controlled but could be issued by anyone. Because open credentials are based on common, open technology (such as the Open Badge Infrastructure, maintained by IMS Global, see https://www.imsglobal.org/activity/digital-badges), these credentials can be exported and imported freely between institutions – putting the learner in control. In this way, open credentials, as Hickey and Chartrand (2020) argued move us away from accrediting institutions towards endorsing actual learning.

Second, we distinguish between micro- and macrocredentials. Macrocredentials, such as degrees, diplomas, and professional learning certificates, represent a culminating recognition of program completion – such as the end of a university degree. Microcredentials, instead, do not signal the end of learning, but rather small steps on a learning trajectory, representing acquisition of a single skill, ability, or bounded set of knowledge. Because these credentials represent smaller pieces of education, they can be combined to form unique learning pathways.

The terms open badges and open microcredentials can describe either the same thing, or sometimes very different things – often with open badges representing smaller pieces of learning, or with microcredentials representing traditional university credit options but on a microscale, while badges represent noncredit, informal learning. Sometimes, however, the difference could be as simple as a difference in culture – for example, whether a particular society has a history of boy or girl scout merit badges for youth learning. However, in the end, both terms represent credentials supported by the Open Badge Infrastructure and are thus equivalent technologies. We will refer to these both as open microcredentials when talking about them generally, and in reviewing the work of others, we will use whatever specific term the authors use.

Key affordances of open microcredentials that we identify include their capabilities to: (1) recognize accomplishments at more granular level, (2) demonstrate mastery in a particular area, (3) provide verified and endorsed certifications, (4) serve as a lifelong portfolio that captures both formal and informal learning, (5) store rich formats of metadata to serve different purposes, and (6) be shared among different stakeholders.

Finally, there are other emerging credential technologies that use different open technology standards but share similar affordances. For example, verifiable credentials use open source technology maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model/) and comprehensive learner records (or extended transcripts) which are a comprehensive record of all of a learner’s accomplishments in school, on the job, or within communities – a record that can follow the learner wherever they go. This technology standard is also maintained by IMS Global (https://www.imsglobal.org/introduction-extended-transcript-et).

We believe that this concurrent push to develop comprehensive learner records, verifiable credentials, and open microcredentials is representative of the same underlying desire to create credentials that can be openly shared among institutions, controlled by learners, and representative of both small and large pieces of learning.

What Research on Open Microcredentials Has Taught Us

We will divide our discussion of the research findings into those related to microlevels of education (effects on teachers and learners and their perceptions of open microcredentials), mesolevels (effects on institutions), and macrolevels (effects on society), in keeping with the theme of this handbook.

How Do Open Microcredentials Affect Learning in the Microlevel?

Learner Perceptions on Open Microcredentials

Most learners hold positive attitudes towards the use of microcredentials (Başal & Kaynak, 2020; Malczyk, 2019). These learners suggested that the use of digital badges provides several advantages, such as promoting learning engagement and motivation, providing external rewards, providing feedback (Santos-Díaz, Hensiek, Owings, & Towns, 2019), triggering a sense of enjoyment or accomplishment, enhancing learner autonomy (Iwata, Wang, & Clayton, 2019), developing positive attitudes towards learning (Watson, Ann, Arabia, & Watson, 2020), and enhancing learner autonomy (Iwata et al., 2019). However, these perceptions can be heavily influenced by their perceptions of the course and engagement in it (Higashi & Schunn, 2020).

In contrast, other research showed that microcredential users may hold mixed perceptions on the adoption of this technology. For example, freshmen education majors have held some mixed attitudes (Beilstein et al., 2019) and considered microcredentials less prestigious than a certificate of completion (Dyjur & Lindstrom, 2017) despite being an innovative idea. Also, students with prior experiences earning a microcredential have perceived microcredentials as more beneficial compared to students with no prior experiences before (Hartman & Andzulis, 2019).

While these studies looked at the perceptions of learners using open microcredentials, other studies have looked at their actual impacts in various areas, including student motivation, learning performance, personalization of learning, and self-regulated learning.

Open Microcredentials and Student Motivation

Open microcredentials can promote motivation, encouraging participation, and engagement (Facey-Shaw, Specht, van Rosmalen, & Bartley-Bryan, 2020; Delello, Hawley, McWhorter, Gipson, & Deal, 2018; Başal and Kaynak, 2020). Learners given the opportunity to earn microcredentials find it motivating because credits were given to recognize their efforts and devoted time. With rich metadata, microcredentials can communicate different types of learning data, such as interactive activities and multimedia instructional materials. For example, digital badges can motivate online tutors to improve their online tutoring skills, monitor the quality of their work, and encourage them to reflect on their tutoring process (Hrastinski, Cleveland-Innes, & Stenbom, 2018). Skills-based digital badges helped middle and high school learners (N = 72) become more motivated, as evidenced by significantly higher self-efficacy and self-regulation ratings (Elkordy, 2014). Moreover, learners who worked with digital badges at a secondary special education school in North Holland (N = 34) showed a significant increase in their intrinsic motivation (Bareño, 2021).

However, this research on the potential impact on motivation from using microcredentials has been mixed (Roy & Clark, 2018), with some studies finding they can decrease motivation (Chou & He, 2017; Reid, Paster, & Abramovich, 2015; Tomić et al., 2019). Contradictory results can even be found in different methodological sections within the same study. For example, in a quasi-experimental study conducted in an introductory programming course (N = 362), the survey results suggested no impact of digital badges on learners’ intrinsic motivation, while in the focus groups and interviews, learners using digital badges expressed motivation to learn programming (Facey-Shaw et al., 2020). Other research showed that the use of microcredentials had different impacts on different types of learning, improving motivation for extrinsic learners but not intrinsic ones (Sullivan, 2013).

Open Microcredentials and Student Learning

While the effects on learner motivation are mixed, and to date still uncertain, it has been argued that microcredentials can influence learning performance and skill development. For example, Newby and Cheng (2019) found that preservice teachers who learned with digital badges outperformed those who learned with traditional projects in an undergraduate-level educational technology course. Also, the preservice teachers in the badge group reported more gains in their technology integration ability than those in the nonbadge group. Similarly, researchers found that the elementary students who earned digital badges for reading outperformed those who did not earn badges in reading acquisition tasks (Collins, Grroff, Mathena, & Kupczynski, 2019).

Microcredentials have also helped K-12 educators learn twenty-first century skills of collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity. Microcrendentials help them become more goal-oriented and reflective on their learning and effectively communicate their conceptual understanding of the learned skills with each other (Yanek, 2021). Theoretically, microcredentials can also support inquiry-based learning through outlining prerequisite knowledge, chunking the problem into manageable subproblems for novices, and providing criteria and evidence for flexible assessment (West, Tawfik, Gishbaugher, & Gatewood, 2020). In addition, student achievement in reading and writing about literature was found to be positively correlated with their engagement in a course embedding soft skills badging (Naimark, 2021).

Open Microcredentials and Personalized Learning

Microcredentials may also support personalized learning, or instructional and learning approaches based on the needs of individual learners, which can spark curiosity of students through active engagement with the learning environment (Hughey, 2020). Microcredentials can support this personalized learning by first breaking content into small modular units, so learners can create their own learning pathways (Erickson, 2020; McGovern & Gogan, 2021).

Second, open microcredentials are typically associated with individualized portfolios, documenting earned skills and knowledge for lifelong learning (Amano et al., 2019) and recognizing accomplishments (Wolfenden et al., 2020; Leaser, Jona, & Gallagher, 2020; Zhou, Chen, Fan, & Ji, 2019) so that learners can “use the terminology and examples that the gatekeepers of higher education would recognize and value” (Martin, Gutierrez, & Muldoon, 2020, p. 20). With microcredentials, learners can easily communicate their accomplished skills and knowledge in a more granular level and gain the flexibility to hop on and off “the formal education bus” when needed (Ryken, 2006). For example, in the CHAMPIONS NETWork program, Chicago high school students could earn seven digital badges of online experiences on health advocacy to prepare them for future health professionals. Students could then share earned badges with employers and colleges (Heinert, Quasim, Ollmann, Socarras, & Suarez, 2020). In this way they could take better advantage of employment opportunities at current skill levels and resume the degree completion path when new skills and knowledge are needed (Pearea, 2020).

Third, microcredentials can support personalized learning by providing specific and prompt feedback (Besser & Newby, 2020) as well as instructions with details, explanation, hints, and examples (Besser & Newby, 2019; Hensiek, 2018). While digital badges may serve as a fine-grained and an informational feedback tool, they only become effective when students acknowledge the value of using this type of feedback and show an expectancy for learning, as Reid et al. (2015) argued.

Open Microcredentials and Self-regulated Learning

Finally, research about how microcredentials might affect learners has also explored the impact on self-directed or self-regulated learning. For example, in a study of college graduates studying self-directed e-learning content, researchers found that the badge group reported higher levels of autonomous regulation than the nonbadge group, indicating that the use of digital badges had a positive impact on learners’ self-regulation (Agola, 2020).

As widely acknowledged, self-regulated learning is a goal-oriented process, that is, self-regulated learners are intentional about information needed and take steps to master this information to achieve a desirable goal using strategies and responsive feedback (Zimmerman, 1990). Microcredentials can support learners’ goal-setting process to enhance self-regulated and self-directed learning (Cheng et al., 2020; Cheng, Watson, & Newby, 2018) via a couple of mechanisms – for example, by helping to set explicit goals. In two studies conducted by Morris, Dragovich, Todaro, Balci, and Dalton (2019), no difference was found on learning performance across four groups, badges only, goal only, badge+goal, and control group, indicating that badges serve a similar role as goals in supporting learning.

Second, open microcredentials could theoretically help in establishing the necessary background knowledge and pathways. With microcredentials, learners could earn prerequisite credentials that prepare them to enter a complex problem-solving realm with sufficient background knowledge (West et al., 2020).

Third, these credentials help in optimizing goal-effects on learning (Cheng et al., 2018, 2019). Four specific functions of digital badges had been found in prior research on facilitating learners’ goal setting process: connecting multiple goals, affecting goal commitment, scaffolding complex tasks, and providing personalized feedback. With the support of digital badges, learners can more easily connect learning goals, professional goals, and lifelong learning goals to optimize the effect of goal-setting on learning and professional development. Digital badges also influence learners’ commitment to a goal as learners may devote more time and effort to achieving a badge (goal). Many digital badges not only serve as a pure extrinsic reward or recognition of accomplishment, but also bear different metadata including interactive instructional strategies and activities. Each digital badge also serves as a steppingstone that scaffolds a learning process towards achieving a complex objective. In addition, both the badge visual itself and the embedded feedback could provide learners with both summative and formative personalized feedback (Cheng, Richardson, & Newby, 2019).

How Can Open Microcredentials Support Learning in the Mesolevel?

Thus far, most research on open microcredentials has focused on the microlevel of individual learners, teachers, and experiences. Adoption of an innovation at the level of an institution, organization, or system is much more difficult, requiring policies and practices to be rewritten. Perhaps because of this, Borrelli and Tateo (2021) observed that it has been difficult to fully evaluate the benefit of open microcredentialing compared to traditional credentials as limited pedagogical models are available to consider. In this section, we review existing research, organized into a few common themes.

Microcredentials Can Communicate Pathways Towards End Goals

Some organizations have explored how to organize microcredentials into pathways, stacks, or playlists that represent an educational journey. Communicating these feasible pathways of learning is especially important for community colleges and other institutions working with students who may feel disoriented or less confident in their educational goals. Perea (2020) argued that stacking microcredentials allows learners, especially underrepresented population and individuals who are vulnerable, in persisting in ambiguous and poorly designed degree programs, to be able to “have multiple on and off ramps at certain milestones in a pathway towards degree completion and take advantage of employment opportunities at their current skill levels, and then later resume the degree completion pathway without starting anew” (p. 23). Perea then shared three case studies of community colleges stacking microcredentials in ways that guided students towards degrees while also recognizing their progress along the way and empowering them with credentials that could benefit them in the short and long term (see Table 1).

Table 1 Three cases from Perea (2020) of community colleges stacking microcredentials
Full size table

Microcredentials Can Communicate Their Value and Make Organizational Goals Visible

While at the individual level, this helps students “see a pathway toward higher level credentials, toward progressively higher levels of workforce skills” (Perea, 2020, p. 23), at the institution-level, this can help with establishing shared expectations, vision, and goals. For example, digital badges can make library learning goals visible (Ekordy, 2014) or provide a record of granular and traditionally undocumented teaching skills (Spencer & Bussi, 2020).

In fact, Carey and Stefaniak (2018) found that this visibility and transparency of organizational goals is not only a great benefit, but a necessary precondition for using open microcredentials. They further argued in a different paper that microcredentialing systems must effectively communicate their value to learners for the system itself to be adopted successfully, because most learners will not be motivated to pursue these credentials without understanding their value. As Stefaniak and Carey (2019) stated, “badge participants emphasized the importance of creating badges with internal and external value to maximize buy-in. The recommendations also emphasized the importance of a comprehensible purpose for the badges” (p. 15).

It is also important to communicate the value of open microcredentials to employers and other end consumers of these credentials. For example, Randall and West (2020) surveyed potential employers in the field of education and found that employers often did not know what badges were, but if they did, they valued them. Similarly, Perkins and Pryor (2021) surveyed 73 employers and found 93% were unfamiliar with open badges. However, they wanted to understand the credentials better. This indicated that educational entities need to better partner and communicate with employers about these credentials: “Such synergies are crucial to address the changing skills agenda, to prepare students to thrive in physical and virtual work environments” (p. 24).

Microcredentials Can Widen Participation in Higher Education

In addition to providing vision to students through potential stacks and pathways, microcredentials can widen student participation and persistence in higher education. The UK Open University, for example, has offered MOOC courses on basic skills. This project aims to develop students’ confidence and skills as a “personal ‘journey from informal to formal learning’ (or JiFL)” in a way that creates “a steppingstone into accredited education” (Hills & Hughes, 2016). They found that 28% of learners “clicked-through” to learn more about enrollment in regular OU programs.

Similarly, Carnevale, Garcia, Ridley, Quinn, & Georgetown University (2020) reported that students in certificate programs at Georgetown University are more likely to be minority or older – in other words, nontraditional. In total, they found that in the United States, 50% of students in undergraduate coursework were enrolled in certificate or associate’s degree programs. They argued “the middle-skills pathway—between a high school diploma and a bachelor’s degree—is often overlooked.” (pp. 3–4). However, they caution that to date, “not enough is known about the risks and rewards” of these educational paths, a gap we also identified in the literature.

However, one potential benefit that badges/microcredentials can play with this segment of students is in helping them communicate their skills for these “middle-skills” careers. Martin et al. (2020) found that “programs need not only to help participants gain knowledge and skills, but also to give them tools for communicating their accomplishments to college and career gatekeepers” (pp. 16–17) – something they believed digital badges could do as tangible representations of learning.

Microcredentials Can Be Interwoven with Traditional Credentials

Some may view microcredentials as competitors to traditional degrees, but there are many documented cases of micro- and macrocredentials being interwoven (or latticed, as Perea, 2020, described) together. Doing so can “break down the silos between workforce development education and transfer education and provide learners with flexibility in meeting both education and career goals” (Perea, p. 23). Indeed, because microcredentials require thoughtful design and consideration of assessment, evidence of learning, and supportive resources, creating a microcredentialing system can cause teachers and institutes to reflect and rethink teaching practices and curriculum. Eaton, Rauseo, d’Entremont, and Dziorny (2019) found this in their evaluation of the Boston After School and Beyond and the Providence After School Alliance programs and reported that providers, “did not realize that the deep work involved in aligning programmatic activities with the pilot’s skill-building goals would strengthen the quality of their own programs” (p. 6).

One example of interweaving open microcredentials with traditional academic credit was described by Randall et al. (2013). They designed over 40 skill-specific open badges available within a preservice, grade-based educational technology course. Students could elect to earn credit towards a degree, and if they wished, they could also earn as many open badges as they wanted to demonstrate mastery of specific skills. While finding this to be an effective method to support personalized learning in the course, one challenge was the burden of additional assessment/grading (also identified by Stefaniak & Carey, 2019), as well as the time required to create new microcredentials to support every potential personalized learning pathway. As Stefaniak and Carey (2019) explained, “It takes time to pitch, design, develop, promote, implement, and manage a badge program” (p. 14).

One solution employed by Randall and colleagues was to train students – peers of the target learners – as evaluation and design assistants to help develop new badge credentials and assess/issue credentials to other students. By comparing the quality of design from these student assistants to established experts, they found the student assistants to produce badge rubrics of equal quality, if they had received sufficient training (Randall et al., 2019), indicating that organizations seeking to integrate open microcredentials into traditional educational systems can do so through trained student assistants, alleviating some of the burden on faculty to run the system.

Microcredentials Can Assist Employers in Tracking/Providing Professional Learning

Employers are key end consumers of microcredentials, and the most successful credentialing systems design credentials that benefit employers as well as students. But what aspects of a microcredential are most important to employers? In one study of educational principals and hiring personnel, Randall and West (2020) found that employers saw the most value in achievement and capability badges, in comparison with participation/attendance or other types of badges. In particular, the employers valued the evidence link and endorsements from established professional organizations. Most employers in this study believed badges would be useful in the hiring process, but they worried about having too much data and being able to sift through the information effectively. Thus, microcredentialing systems and technologies may consider developing better ways of helping these end consumers parse, aggregate, and filter the data available in digital credentials.

Besides interpreting badges/microcredentials on resumes as part of a hiring process, employers have developed microcredentials as part of their own staff training programs. For example, Clements, West, & Hunsaker (2020) described the successful design of a gamified employee skill tracking and professional development system using open badges for employees of a multimedia center in a university library. In this case, the badges were developed to help the supervisor know who was qualified to teach certain workshops and also to establish regular goals and reward opportunities for employees continuing to develop their skills.

Similarly, Copenhaver and Pritchard (2017) reported on a microcredentialing program at Eckherd College Library to train student employees due to the lack of satisfaction with the previous program, which did not fully meet learning outcomes nor engage the employees. In particular, students had difficulty connecting library work to career development. In redesigning the training as modules with open badges, they found they covered more material in greater depth and had better employee retention and learning.

Similarly, National Instruments designed an open badging system mainly to train customers of their products in professional skills for using the products in their own workplaces. Young, West, and Nylin (2019) found that learners felt the badges were helpful and they were likely to repeat the training program to earn additional ones and were likely to recommend the program to peers. For both the badge earners and National Instruments the company, the value seemed to come from the ability to share the microcredential, which helped the earner in progressing their career and applying for new positions, but also provided marketing benefits to the company.

Similarly, IBM developed a robust badging system (first piloted in 2015) to recognize professional learning by its employees and others (Leaser et al., 2020). Results were staggeringly positive, as attendance increased 125% and course completions increased by 226%. In 2017, IBM partnered with Northeastern University to convert these badges into academic, graduate-level credit. As the authors put it, “This type of partnership provides a blueprint for how colleges can collaborate with businesses to improve the job market alignment of their academic credentials in a way that delivers more value for students and employers” (p. 40). By 2018, IBM had issued more than a million badges to 400,000 people in nearly 200 countries.

From this robust implementation of employer-based badges came a few insights documented by Leaser, Jona, and Gallagher. First, that community colleges should focus on areas in-demand by industries and create badging programs aligned to those needs. In fact, issuing badges, they argue, can provide a powerful feedback loop to universities about what skills and abilities are “hot” in the market. Second, they argued that these partnerships between employer badging systems and universities work best in online programs. Third, faculty engagement is essential. Fourth, robust communication and marketing is important to articulate the opportunities to learners. Fifth, the digital badges/credentials must provide very clear specifications and criteria to make it easy to understand what competencies they recognize. Sixth, they argue for the need to develop new and robust policy that understand partnerships between academia and industry and articulates where – and how much – academic training can be provided by industry.

How Can Open Microcredentials Support Learning in the Macrolevel?

Although limited in empirical research, there have been many discussions on the societal and cultural aspects of open microcredentials. Many believe that open microcredentials may help break the boundaries of education by connecting formal and informal learning, enhancing lifelong and community-based learning, as well as building a new network of trust. In addition, different regions and cultures have found the use of open microcredentials valuable in different ways.

Connecting Formal and Informal Learning

Open microcredentials earned in informal educational experiences could be used in and transferred to different parts of formal education, such as college admissions (Gutierrez & Martin, 2021), university transfer decisions, career development, and cross-institution credits transfer. This can help connect formal accredited schooling, informal interest-driven learning, and any other recognition of learning accomplishment (Casilli & Hickey, 2016). The documentation of both formal and informal learning enabled by microcredentials is adjustable and responsive to situational needs and economic demands (Jirgensons & Kapenieks, 2018). For example, many out-of-school-time (OST) programs, such as the Design League program offered by Parsons School of Design, have helped learners in disadvantaged backgrounds communicate informal learning accomplishments to formal educational institutions like college and potential employers. These OST programs leverage digital badges as alternative credentials by recognizing and valuing the shared values among the involved organizations and institutions (Martin et al., 2020).

Similarly, in the Informal Ed to Higher Ed (IE2HE) workshop, different stakeholders including microcredential developers, educators, and faculties from two- and four-year institutions worked with informal learning providers from New York and Pennsylvania to help low-income high school youth enter STEM programs. This partnership could easily yield future work, leveraging community colleges to build cross-institution relationships (Gutierrez & Martin, 2021). To be successful, though, the value of using microcredentials needs to be recognized by different stakeholders in informal, formal, and higher education before microcredentials can truly serve as important alternative credentials (Itow & Hickey, 2016; Martin, Gutierrez, & Muldoon, 2020).

Although much of the research literature in education focuses on formal (e.g., in structured courses) and informal (e.g., self-directed, unstructured) learning, new semiformal educational spaces have arisen in the twenty-first century, where learners can self-direct their learning through structured, but unaccredited and lightly assessed, learning opportunities. One example could be MOOC courses such as those offered by the Open University, mentioned above. These courses allow anyone to enroll and participate at any time, but without direct interaction with the teacher or designer of the course.

Enhancing Lifelong and Community-Based Learning

These semiformal spaces open up the possibility of lifelong learning options, and open microcredentials could help to acknowledge lifelong and lifewide knowledge (knowledge learned from a variety of contexts and environments (Reischmann, 1986), skills, and accomplishments by “unbundling” degrees into small components, recognizing granular accomplishments (Cummings, 2021). With open microcredentials, learners can simultaneously pursue both degrees and workforce credentials (Derryberry, Everhart, & Knight, 2016) and design individual development pathways across K-12, higher education, professional development, and different careers throughout one’s lifetime.

A robust microcredential system is also valuable in helping connect school communities, such as local educational institutions, historical sites, and habitats. For example, community-based organizations with afterschool and summer learning programs in both Providence and Boston have piloted the use of digital badges to certify courses offered in the Expanded Learning Opportunity (ELO), an after-school program. With these digital badges, learners can showcase all of their learning, not only the components that show up in a grade point average or a standardized test score (Eaton, 2019).

Microcredentials have also been used in developing community-based research. For example, in Aboriginal communities in northern Australia, indigenous researchers take contracting work to earn a salary within flexible working hours while living in their home communities. Microcredentials were designed to help these researchers recognize intercultural research skills, playing an important role in promoting community-based research services and reforming education services offered by universities (Spencer, 2020). Microcredentials may also be used to connect community colleges with four-year colleges, acting as a bridge to build cross-institution relationships (Gu & Martin, 2021).

Improving the Credibility of Credentialing

Educational assessment at its core is an act of communicating – communicating to the learner or to potential employers or important peers – about what the learner knows and can do. We are accustomed to verifying a person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities through degrees and certificates. However, there are concerns about how to trust these credentials and improve their rigor (West & Randall, 2016). With the increasing need of recognizing on-demand and informal accomplishments, how to increase the security, verifiability, and transparency of different credentials remains a challenge (McGovern, 2020).

Like all credentials, open microcredentials function best in society when they can be trusted. However, the basis for this trust is substantially different than with traditional credentials. Instead of basing this trust in the accreditation and the authority of the issuer, the trust shifts to open transparency about the explicit criteria and evidence for earning the credential. In contrast with commercial networks of recognition such as Linkedin, which use endorsements to promote a proprietary network, the open nature of open microcredentials allows the development of trusted networks as other open education resources (e.g., Wikipedia) and provides participants with free and open options of accomplishment recognition services (Cummings, 2021).

Establishing this trustworthiness of open microcredentials will be essential to their adoption. For example, Erickson (2015) interviewed 20 Minnesota hiring directors and found they are interested in open digital credentials because this tool may help increase the potential hiring pool. However, they emphasized that to trust these credentials, standards should be established and recognized by the stakeholders (Fishman et al., 2018), and this recognition process requires negotiation, translation, and partnership among stakeholders across formal and informal educational institutions (Itow & Hickey, 2016).

From a technical perspective, open microcredentialing systems could also be integrated with blockchain technologies to offer a trustworthy credentialing network. For example, in the QualiChain project to support learners’ lifelong learning journey and their career trajectories, open badges were integrated with blockchain technologies to make the issuing, storing, and transitioning of open badges more transparent and reliable, providing transparent and reliable accreditation services (Mikroyannidis, Third, Chowdhury, Bachler, & Domingue, 2020). Also, many European countries had been experimenting with educational blockchains to create an infrastructure to document, store, and manage credentials in a permanent, transparent, and sustainable manner while providing learners a lifelong record of achievements (Jirgensons & Kapenieks, 2018).

Open Microcredentials in Different Cultures

These issues of how to develop trust in microcredentials may vary across cultures. Open microcredentials originated with the Mozilla Foundation in the United Kingdom and quickly spread throughout Europe and North America. Today, microcredentialing is still more common in some cultures than others, in part due to differing expectations for what an educational credential should be, look like, and communicate. In addition, there are different connotations for words such as credential and badges in different cultures. However, increasingly, many varied regional and cultural contexts have found the use of this new technology valuable (Mcgovern et al., 2021), and new research is emerging from these additional cultures. For example, open microcredentials are especially appealing to Kyrgysztan teachers because this technology aligns well with Krygyzstan’s nomadic culture, which praises individualized learning, instant reward, constructivist-based instructional methods, and learning flexibility (Gwin, 2021).

In many regions with different cultures, open microcredentials have been applied as an effective approach to support teachers’ professional development (Erickson, 2020). For example, in Southeast Asia, microcredentials were used to provide an extensive range of digital professional learning experiences that enabled educators to learn on-demand skills related to their pedagogical practice, student needs, or school-wide collective goals (Casey, 2019). The Information Communication Technology for Rural Education Development (ICT4RED) initiative in Cofimvaba, Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, also used digital badges to reward teachers participating in professional development training. This project was so successful that later the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany learned from this experience and adopted it in an online Master’s Degree course and designed a multichannel open badge system with an advanced validation system (Niehaus et al. 2017).

Microcredentials were also adopted in teachers’ professional development in other countries such as Canada (Dyjur & Lindstrom, 2017), Tanzania (Ghasia, Machumu, & DeSmet, 2019), and Finland (Brauer, Kettunen, & Hallikainen, 2018). In China, digital badges were used as learning modules in Moodle to teach Chinese college students multimedia animation design and production. Students can earn different digital badges, such as participation and completion badges, assessment badges, knowledge talent badges, independent learning badges, and communication badges (Zhou et al., 2019).

Conclusion

In this chapter, we have discussed our analysis of the research literature on open microcredentials/open badges according to the 3 M framework of micro-/meso-/macroeffects. While the research literature in this area is thin, limited to certain contexts, and sometimes contradictory, there have been interesting case examples and research findings documenting benefits of open microcredentials. Because the technology supporting these credentials has existed for only the past decade, it will be important to continue future research into their potential positive and negative effects on learners and educational systems. In addition, important questions remain, such as: How do we recognize learning? What kinds of learning recognitions do we trust? And what role does learning recognition play in the overall teaching and learning process?

Open microcredentials may be one way of exploring the answers to these questions, but other possibilities exist, including verifiable credentials, comprehensive learner records/wallets, and other technologies. Common among these tools is a focus on data representation, openness and transferability, and learner agency. These are sticky ideas and ones that we are excited to see explored in current as well as future technological innovations.