Hello and thank you for watching our presentation today
called "Beginning to badge: exploring digital credentials at Virginia Tech."
My name is Marc Zaldivar and I'm the director of curriculum and assessment
for the TLOS professional development network.
I'll be presenting today with Amanda MacDonald, the undergraduate research
services librarian in the University Libraries.
The plan is for me to give you a quick overview of Virginia Tech's prior
interest in badging as well as a high level picture of what
we've been doing for the past year, then Amanda, one of our early
adopters, will give you details of her program
which focuses on undergraduate student learning.
Each of us will then wrap it up by looking forward to the coming next
developments with badging over the next year or so.
If you are unfamiliar with us, Virginia Tech is located in southwestern Virginia
in the midst of the beautiful Blue Ridge mountains. As you can see from the
statistics on the screen, Virginia Tech is a diverse place with a
wide outreach of impact. Its history is as an agricultural and
engineering school, and we still have nationally ranked
programs in those areas as well as in business, biotechnology, and
many other programs such as the relatively new School of
Medicine based in Roanoke, Virginia. Our college-based distributed nature at
Virginia Tech allows for very different cultures and
traditions of learning in the different departments, regions, and
campuses that represent Virginia Tech. That diversity makes us strong but also
poses interesting challenges for learning
and professional development. The unit that primarily sponsors badging,
what we call the service owner at Virginia Tech, is
TLOS professional development network. Our group
is within the division of IT but provides a primary crossover point
between IT and the teaching and research
mission of the university. Within IT, TLOS is focused on the
intersection of technology, learning, and pedagogy.
Within TLOS, PDN focuses on preparing faculty
and encouraging innovative strategies for improving teaching and learning.
For the purposes of today's discussion, I want to focus on two things that we do
in order to achieve these goals. First, we partner with units across
campus to encourage collaborative, innovative, and appropriate integration
of technology into teaching learning, daily
productivity, and research. Second, we also encourage faculty
participation in continuous professional development
through our computer refresh program whereby faculty receive a new computer
every four years through regular participation in
professional development events. This gives us an inherent audience of
faculty and staff ready for quality professional
development experiences such as trying out a new badge program.
TLOS has been working towards badging for several years now.
This has given me the advantage of having a high level view of the badging
attempts and technologies. 2019-2020 was our third first year
of piloting a badging approach over the past year
five years or so. The first two pilots were not failures.
Though they didn't stick, they taught us valuable lessons that carry with us
into this iteration. First, they taught us that broad-based collaboration of
various stakeholders is a necessity. Understanding the roles, benefits,
limitations, needs, ROI, and other elements of the partners
within the network can be difficult but is critically
important. The community and values behind the
badges are one of the most significant components
of having a worthwhile successful badging project.
Second, managing the technology and user experience
is also important. In some of our early projects, the giving,
receiving, managing, and publicizing of badges
was difficult and time-consuming. Evolving standards such as the open
badge standard and the comprehensive learner record
have improved transparency and ease of use greatly over the past
few years. Third, our first few iterations seemed at
least to me like kids with new toys. People were getting badges at
conferences or other places and wanted to play with them here at Virginia Tech,
but limitations and technology and deployment strategies left the toy less
shiny after a few passes and less people picked it up for round two.
Though we are only about a year into our third year one,
we seem to have resolved some of these issues of the past and are finding much
new success with this latest iteration of badging at Virginia Tech.
We have found the integration of Canvas and Badger to be very useful to moving forward.
We are able to work with faculty and
students in the same platform where they most commonly do other work.
We also have a much broader sense of community and participation in the
badging effort, with professional development partners
across the university considering professional development
through the lens of digital credentials focusing on adoption strategies for
faculty through their own development. In addition, Professional Development
Network has formed a partnership with the University Libraries
to explore badge use specifically in student populations.
In extra-, co-, and also curricular contexts, these new partnerships have provided a
focus in thinking about campus-wide needs
and best use cases for badging as we ramp up our usage.
In this first year, we have several really promising results.
First, we have almost 15 different official issuers,
and as a collective we have issued more than 1200 badges in the past year.
There are badges everywhere. The most popular areas of badging
were those that demonstrate completion or certification,
those that demonstrated steps of learning on a pathway towards completion,
and those that recognized award or honorific winners.
So let me now turn it over to my co-presenter to give some details on her program.
I have been incredibly fortunate to find such good collaborators to join
in our exploration of this complex process. I'll turn it over now.
Hi, my name is Amanda MacDonald and I'm the
undergraduate research services librarian at Virginia Tech.
I'm here today to talk to you about two badging programs that I coordinate at
the university. One is the undergraduate research
excellence program, and the second is the advanced research skills program.
The first program is called the undergraduate research excellence
program, UREP for short, which is a
university-wide discipline-agnostic undergraduate research program.
UREP was designed as an umbrella to connect undergraduate research programs
and training experiences across the university, while rewarding
and celebrating students. The second university-wide program is
called the advanced research skills program,
or ARS for short, which is an undergraduate co-curricular program
designed to provide students an introduction to research theory concepts
utilized in formal undergraduate research experiences.
We cover concepts such as data ethics, data management,
and file versioning, just to name a few. These two programs go hand in hand.
ARS was developed and launched four years before UREP.
In librarianship there was always the question, what is the carrot for students?,
meaning how we motivate and reward students who attend library workshops.
How do we show their value? So UREP was created as one way to do this.
Students who complete ARS also earn the UREP training badge as part of the UREP
program, and students who complete all of UREP not
only earn all of the related badges but also a graduation cord.
For us, the digital credentialing and the graduation cord motivates students
and celebrate their hard work. It also helps with documentation
and outcome assessment.
To describe UREP a bit further, it is a program for undergraduate students in
any major to connect with resources and support
and ultimately receive recognition for their engagement in undergraduate research.
Programmatic goals include providing
students a chance to track their undergraduate research journey including
trainings, validate their experience through
recognition of their research efforts and achievements,
and showcase their experience for potential employers and professional or
graduate schools.
While we designed the model of the program, we really wanted the student to
have a chance to consider all of the work they've done at the university
and how those undergraduate research experiences inside and outside of the
classroom informs their choices post graduation
and has made them workforce ready. Because undergraduate research is
experiential learning, it's not terribly surprising that we see this program
aligning with the full cycle of experiential learning.
As you can see in this model, there are three stages for students:
explore, engage, and scholar. Reflection should take place throughout
the program in the students career so it is crucial part of the program all
three parts. Explore is the introduction in early
education in a student's career. This is where exposure happens.
This could be workshops, it could be intro classes. So this is where the advanced
research skills program or ARS would fall. Students might also decide to
take a class such as the intro to research practices
course, so something like that would fit here as well.
Engage is where the student is actually conducting research.
This could be independent study courses, it could be working in a lab,
it could be a summer experience something like an REU.
Scholar is where the student is ready to disseminate research.
They're thinking where they want to present and publish. They may practice
placing artifacts in an e-portfolio or even in a university digital repository.
They may present at a conference here, at NCUR,
or even at a discipline-specific conference, maybe with a faculty member.
The three-tier design was created because we want every student to have a
well-rounded experience, yet we understand that what
undergraduate research looks like across majors can be very different.
Ideally this program is designed so that any undergraduate student
of any major could enter at any point in the undergraduate career
and begin tracking for success, but the earlier the student starts, the more
likely they'll be to earn the badges and the cord.
As I mentioned, ARS is a co-curricular series designed to introduce students to
research theory concepts that will prepare them for the formal
research experiences. After completing ARS, students will be
able to explore the role of ethics, organization, and best practices in
working with research data and information,
identify potential faculty members and practice drafting emails to find a
research position, and design an effective poster highlighting
newly developed skills from the series.
So how did we deploy the program? For both programs,
students self-enroll into them using a Google form.
ARS is a campus course. There are six modules,
each with assessments. Students can earn one micro badge per workshop, or six total,
and the final badge for completing the program.
UREP is also a Canvas course: five modules, but no assessments.
Students upload proof of undergraduate research participation for each section,
administrators verify. Micro credentials are awarded as students complete each
section. Final badge is awarded and student earns
a graduate cord for completing the program.
UREP itself has no training or experiences for students.
Rather, it's designed as a place for students to track and report their
experiences via assignments. Because UREP offers no training for
students, it easily serves as a connector for UREP training and experiences
across campus. Once the experiences are verified,
students will receive a badge for each stage: explore, engage, and scholar.
To earn their graduation cord, they must fully complete all three stages of the program.
This year was a pilot for both programs, so only students in the spring cohorts
of ARS and UREP have earned badges to date.
In UREP we've given 65 badges, and ARS we've awarded 146.
Badging has enhanced both programs in a variety of ways.
For UREP for students badging helps them see where they are in the program:
what they've completed, and what they have yet to complete. For program
administrators, it helps make overseeing the program
much easier. It lightens our load in terms of manual counting and points.
For ARS, for students it provides an automatic
sign that they've completed requirements. Once we grade the assessment they earn
the badge. For students who enroll in UREP, they
automatically see they've completed the training module
which again makes it really easy for us in terms of scoring.
I have several goals for badging as we move forward towards a new academic year.
Evaluate UREP and consider streamlining the process by removing points.
Two, expand ARS modules to include more workshops and corresponding microcredentials.
And three, integrate badging and pathways into all
ARS and UREP offerings from this semester forward
to ease manual administrative work. ARS is embedded in courses, labs, and
summer undergraduate research programming,
and UREP is divided into graduation cohorts, which is why
integrating all of the badging and pathways will be essential to us moving forward.
[Marc Zaldivar] One thing that I have found is that
badging helps to bring some new focus to old problems.
In the growing collaborative environment we want to find better ways to track
learners over a longer time, but also with greater detail. We want to provide
unique learning experiences for each of our learners, yet provide
central access to important learning data for managers, advisors, employers, and
other interested parties. We want learners of all levels, both
faculty and students, to engage intentionally with their
learning choices, and we want to provide easy access to
learning systems that promote that learning.
Finally, we want to make this as easy as possible for as many as possible.
So these are the kind of questions that are guiding my personal thinking and
learning about badges currently. As I have seen Virginia Tech
grow from a few interested parties to a consistent flow of interested
groups and related departments, there is a clear and increasing need for
collaborative pathways for learning, for certification for professional
development, and for personal learning choices.
So thank you very much for giving us a little bit of your time and attention
today, and and letting us tell you a little bit
about our projects. On the screen you should see our contact
information. I know all of us feel very new at this still, so
we encourage you to reach out to us with any comments or questions you have about
our project. We are hoping and anxious to join the
community and learn as much as we can over the coming few years.
So thank you very much for your time today.