Stories from practitioners: Badges and prior assessment of learning

PLAR/RPL (recognition of prior learning) practices include diagnostic and formative assessment, which can include self-assessment and peer assessment. With this in mind, some issuers are using selfie badges as a way to surface learning (Pakanen, 2021). This can be an entirely “build from scratch” approach, or learner claims of scaffolded badges saying, “I Did A Hard Thing,” where they justify it as they claim it as they would in a portfolio, or goals, even learning contracts (“I am learning about SDGs”). Or badges issued by peers (“You are a great colleague”). These are informal digital badges that can be part of a journey to a more formal micro-credential or be useful in themselves. – Don Presant

Case study: Read the article Micro-credentials as Evidence for College Readiness: Report of an NSF Workshop (Fishman et al., 2018), about a workshop conducted by the University of Michigan Faculty of Information and funded by the National Science Foundation. One of the goals of this workshop was to explore whether micro-credentials could serve as valid and reliable evidence of prior learning and future potential.

Stories from practitioners

Learners in a current learning situation could create a learner analysis artifact. This might allow for future connections in the workplace and for keeping abreast of the sphere of influence that the credential allowed. It’s a start to building incoming and outgoing pathways.

Use video of students’ lived experiences as part of the cohort introduction. These can be structured by the educator to support and validate the learning outcomes of the credential. Students can showcase incoming skills sets, and then vouch for the new competencies they acquired by achieving the micro-credential .

“E-folio” projects used as assessments can serve as a permanent record of students’ incoming competencies and the mastering of outgoing competences (content specific) for cross-institutional recognition. – Anonymous