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See all the wonderful things jordan_hohensee has made

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Micro credentials are a digital credential or badge that is considered to be a portable credential that follows a person from location to location, allowing potential employers to verify a job candidate's fit for a position quickly.

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Student Learning and Development
Technology

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BloomBoard Partners with Higher Education Institutions to Offer Educators the Ability to Earn Graduate-Level Professional Development Credit for Completed Micro-Credentials

BloomBoard, the leading competency-based professional development platform has partnered with a select group of accredited higher education institutions to offer teachers the opportunity to earn graduate-level credit for completed micro-credentials. Graduate credit is available for a wide range of micro-credentials on the BloomBoard platform, enabling educators the ability to work toward salary advancement and/or recertification as they improve their practice through competency-based professional development.

Four accredited higher education institutions have currently partnered with BloomBoard including Brandman University, Fresno Pacific University, Portland State University, and University of the Pacific. Graduate-level professional development credit offered by each partner is non-degree bearing and available for select micro-credentials on the BloomBoard platform. To-date, over 150 micro-credentials have graduate credit available from at least one higher education institution partner. Micro-credentials are issued by leading educator development organizations including Future Ready Schools, eSpark Learning, World Savvy, and Trellis Education and focus on a variety of skills such as building classroom culture, collaborative problem solving, growth mindset, and managing change.

"BloomBoard is committed to providing educators with meaningful professional learning experiences and empowering growth," said BloomBoard CEO, Sanford Kenyon. "Through these new partnerships, micro-credentials not only provide educators with the opportunity to gain recognition for the skills they develop throughout their career, but as an added incentive, a pathway to compensation advancement and recertification."

In partnership with Digital Promise , the thought-leader in competency-based educator development, BloomBoard launched its micro-credentialing platform in 2015. Since then, momentum for educator micro-credentials has been steadily rising with approximately three to four percent of U.S. school districts having implemented professional development programs supported by micro-credentials. In addition, five states are running micro-credential based professional learning programs including the Tennessee, Florida, Washington, Arkansas, and Delaware Departments of Education.

To earn a micro-credential from the BloomBoard platform, educators must submit artifacts of learning from work in their classrooms, such as student work samples, classroom videos, or reflections, as evidence that they have achieved competency of the discrete skill outlined by the micro-credential. Certified assessors will review this evidence and award the micro-credential once the competency is demonstrated. Upon confirmation that the micro-credential has been earned, the educator can complete the university's process for applying for non-degree bearing graduate-level credit.
Educators who have earned a micro-credential and wish to apply for graduate credit can visit bloomboard.com/graduate-credit. Schools and Districts interested in learning more about BloomBoard's graduate credit offering can visit schools.bloomboard.com/incentives. Originally posted on PR Newswire.

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BloomBoard Partners with Higher Education Institutions to Offer Educators the Ability to Earn Graduate-Level Credit for Completed Micro-Credentials

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BloomBoard, the leading competency-based professional development platform has partnered with a select group of accredited higher education institutions to offer teachers the opportunity to earn graduate-level credit for completed micro-credentials. Graduate credit is available for a wide range of micro-credentials on the BloomBoard platform, enabling educators the ability to work toward salary advancement and/or recertification as they improve their practice through competency-based professional development.

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Universities are recognizing that learning doesn't always have to be packaged into multi-year chunks. It can also be broken up into less than 30-hour pieces, priced and awarded accordingly.

Enter micro-credentials: short, low-cost online courses that result in digital badges when learners complete one of them and certificates when they complete a series. Colleges are taking advantage of a business opportunity and an education need as they experiment with new learning concepts that help today's workforce.

During the Great Recession in the 2000s, many businesses stopped providing extensive training and continuing education internally for their employees. "For higher ed, that's an opportunity to really provide those services to students so they can continue to build their professional portfolios," said David Schejbal, dean of continuing education, outreach and e-learning at University of Wisconsin-Extension.

Universities can use their prestige, teaching and assessment skills to help employees continue their education at a price point and time investment that makes sense for them in their careers. That's what the University of Wisconsin-Extension and five other universities have done with The Learning Store, which started posting courses in 2016. Students can buy courses and take an assessment to earn a badge for $25-$150 with a three- to 30-hour investment. The University of Washington Continuum College and Georgia Institute of Technology are offering the micro-credentials along with the University of Wisconsin-Extension on the platform. This project has a startup mentality, and like a startup, the universities aren't making any money for now.

While micro-credentials have become more popular, they still have some issues that universities need to work through. For example, who decides what skills and knowledge students will gain in micro-credentials, and how can they be compared across institutions? That's something the Lumina Foundation, the Corporation for a Skilled Workforce and the Center for Law and Social Policy have been working on in the Right Signals initiative. The foundation commissioned a beta credentials framework that 20 community colleges in 15 states are testing, and it's based on competencies - what students can know and do after they complete the credential. This framework has the potential to allow employers, colleges and learners to accurately compare credentials so they can see how valuable they are.

Lifelong learning is now expected not just in retirement, but throughout an employee's career, Schejbal said. For those who already have a two- or four-year degree, they may just need to brush up on some skills or learn some new ones in a short amount of time to advance in their career. For others who can't afford a full degree, they may be able to afford a short period of learning focused on specific skills they can use to get a new job or advance in their current job. The most popular micro-credentials in The Learning Store are ones on finding a startup or small business job, mapping the business supply chain and emails that work in the digital age.

"Students really need to engage in learning over a lifetime in fits and starts, and many of those fits and starts neither require say a four-year commitment or even a two-year commitment, nor is that warranted," Schejbal said.

University of Wisconsin-Extension is taking advantage of this educational need by mapping complementary pathways between micro-credentials, two-year degrees and four-year degrees so that employees can start on whatever end they need and jump back and forth between types of learning throughout their career. For example, students who finished the university's bachelor of science in health information management and technology could take a micro-credential to study for their annual professional exam on the privacy and security provisions in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Similarly, students who take enough micro-credentials in business administration topics including project management, supply chain management and writing could convert them into credit and transfer it into a bachelor's degree in business administration at the university. These types of use cases are what the university's working on now.

While the university started this project to provide more education access to U.S. students, it's also helping students internationally, as are other micro-credential projects. A business English coach from Morocco has taken courses from University of Wisconsin-Extension as well as other universities to brush up his skills. Yassine El Maifi trains IT collaborators and managers how to communicate with others over the phone, write effective emails, and make presentations in English. They need to learn English to be able to talk with customers from all over the world.

Micro-credentials and massively open online courses help El Maifi continue learning ways to improve his teaching at a more affordable price than typical university programs - and when he has time to go through them. "This micro-credential provides me an opportunity to do more self-paced work."

While experienced workers do need to level up on their skills, they don't seem to be looking for badges or micro-credentials to show their employers, wrote online learning consultant Michael Feldstein in a blog post. Rather, students who need more than a high school degree, but less than a bachelor's degree to get a job will likely drive the need for micro-credentials moving forward.

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Why Micro-Credentials Are Taking Hold in Universities

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Universities are recognizing that learning doesn't always have to be packaged into multi-year chunks. It can also be broken up into less than 30-hour pieces, priced and awarded accordingly. Enter micro-credentials: short, low-cost online courses that result in digital badges when learners complete one of them and certificates when they complete a series.

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Just ten years ago, one would never have considered the portability of credentials that could follow a person from location to location, allowing potential employers to verify a job candidate's fit for a position quickly. However, that is just what has happened, and the explosion of interest in digital badging and microcredentials is changing the landscape of higher education.

The tried and true printed college transcript has served us well, but many higher education institutions are considering the inclusion of digital badging/credentials as supplemental information. In the immediate, Generation Y society we live in today, millennials want a way to instantly port their credentials; they want to show potential employers the certification and competency skills they earned during their college journey. One demographic that can benefit from microcredentialing is the working adult, who may have either never attended college or stopped attending to pursue family or career options. The idea of earning a microcredential may seem less daunting than going back to school for a full degree.[1] Badging has the potential to attract these working adults because it provides tangible credentials with less commitment than a full degree plan requires.

The public service arena is another demographic that can benefit from microcredentialing. All fire and emergency services personnel are required to maintain minimum performance standards and obtain continuing education units (CEUs) to maintain certifications. Methods of showing minimum performance standards and obtaining CEUs include attending in-service classes and training events. Many fire rescue and emergency management organizations have adopted a computer-based education program that "buys" or purchases training time from a central repository. The fire and emergency management services fields are the fertile ground for badging and microcredentialing.

Knowledge, skills and abilities are the foundations of any career field. Within Fire-Rescue organizations, the two predominant certifications are Pro Board and International Fire Service Accreditation Congress. In Emergency Management, it is the International Association of Emergency Managers. Electronic badging delivers more reliable and complete information about achievements than any paper- or card-based system. Digital badges encoded with microcredentials contain meta data that links back to the issuer, performance criteria, and verification of evidence. Meta data could include logistics, planning, operations, finance, command, and liaison training and experience. Other data could relate to paramedic, cardiac technician, public health, law enforcement, explosives ordnance disposal, or other specialty skills.

Ultimately, badging offers portability of acknowledged skills and abilities that can be carried anywhere to demonstrate competency. Learners can accumulate badges across institutional platforms, and the badges can be sorted, shown, or hidden by the learner to reflect achievement in the particular skills or knowledge which the learner wishes to exhibit.[2]

Perhaps the greatest unexplored territory is the value microcredentialing can bring to graduate students. Indeed, one can surmise that like the professional career fields discussed earlier, graduate students can also benefit. Graduate students working in the technical, medical, legal, environmental or physiological fields can take the very same advantage of microcredentialing as working professionals. Their ability to port their certifications and credentials can be advantageous and can serve as a "portable electronic transcript." Microcredentials can also personalize professional learning to meet the learner's individual needs, allowing them to take quickly what they learn and apply it within their careers.[3]

As we progress into the second decade of the new millennium, the demand for digital credentialing will continue to increase. As more colleges and universities move to offer such programs, student expectations of microcredentialing institutions will increase. In fact, digital badges will continue to be offered as an essential accessory, an online representation of learned skills as participants pave their personal learning pathways and master digital literacy skills.[4]

The landscape of undergraduate, graduate and technical higher education is changing, and the advent of innovative credentials and microcredentials has the potential to reshuffle the deck of higher education. It is important that educators pay close attention to the impact of digital badges as an accepted credentialing tool. Much like how the personal computer inspired the development of online higher education, digital badging and microcredentials have the same disruptive potential.

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Works Cited
[1] Jovanovic, J., & Devedzic, V. (2015). Open badges: Novel means to motivate, scaffold and recognize learning. Technology, Knowledge and Learning, 20(1), 115-122. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10758-014-9232-6

[2] Mozilla Foundation & Peer 2 Peer University (2011). Open badges for lifelong learning. White paper. Retrieved from https://wiki.mozilla.org/File:OpenBadges-Working-Paper_012312.pdf

[3] Seven Lessons Learned from Implementing Micro-Credentials." PR.com 28 Jan. 2016. General OneFile. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

[4] Katerynych, C. (2015). Digital badges: One year of stylized growth. The Medium (Online), , 0_1,1-5 Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1692718770?accountid=27715

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Additional References
Roscorla, T. (2016, Mar 31). Micro-credentials offer universities an opportunity to bridge skill gaps. TCA Regional News Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1777521073

Zalaznick, Matt. "Badges hit the big time: micro-credential programs target professionals needing a skills boost." University Business Oct. 2015: 18. Academic OneFile. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

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How Microcredentials are Changing the Landscape of Higher and Technical Education

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Just ten years ago, one would never have considered the portability of credentials that could follow a person from location to location, allowing potential employers to verify a job candidate's fit for a position quickly. However, that is just what has happened, and the explosion of interest in digital badging and microcredentials is changing [...]

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Given the frequency with which I am asked about the summertime pace on university campuses, I suspect there are many who imagine the gears of innovation grinding to a halt. Sorry to disappoint. There is just a bit of a break from the norm but summertime in Ann Arbor is anything but monotonous.

As we imagine again the future model of teaching and learning at a public research university we often create opportunities to collaborate with innovators from other institutions, relax constraints to encourage new ideas, and work together to design a better future. This summer we'll support collaborative and open research when hosting the Learning Analytics Summer Institute and we'll go gameful in launching the first Gameful Course Design Summer Institute.

But first up this summer was an interactive workshop focused on micro-credentials and college admissions. Barry Fishman (@BarryFishman) is Professor of Information and Professor of Education at the University of Michigan. Stephanie Teasley (@stephteasley) is Research Professor at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Last week, Barry and Stephanie hosted a workshop in Ann Arbor that pulled together leaders from more than a dozen institutions and organizations that are actively exploring the potential of micro-credentials.

Barry and Stephanie graciously agreed to answer my questions about the direction of micro-credentials, aka badges, in college admissions as we work toward an elegant design that effectively considers access, participation, and learning.
Question 1: Last week you hosted a workshop at the University of Michigan with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that focused on micro-credentials and college readiness. Can you give us the backstory? What was your goal for the workshop? What problems are you trying to address?
This workshop was born out of an interest in exploring new pathways to and through higher education. Our work over the past decade has explored various ways to expand participation and success in higher education, through a range of means. Micro-credentials -- also known as digital badges -- struck us as a promising tool for recognizing student learning in ways that are not currently captured by more typical measures such as standardized tests and high school GPAs. We were aware of the excellent work being done by colleagues in the Chicago City of Learning and Mouse in NYC to support and record diverse learners' engagement in a range of informal and formal learning activities using badges, and wanted to see how their work could be leveraged along with efforts at broadening access to higher education. Because of a general orientation towards academic innovation and diversity, equity, and inclusion, the University Michigan has already begun to explore new pathways into the university. The time seemed right to explore this topic further on our own campus.
Question 2: How would you characterize the micro-credentials and badging landscape today? What are some of the most important questions people are working through?
Many if not most of the required technical components are in place for a robust badging infrastructure... but we're still lacking strong use cases and a coordinated strategy for implementation. This is a common challenge in education (and other fields), where people often focus on isolated elements of a challenging problem, but don't take on the harder task of building workable solutions or the underlying social and technical infrastructures needed for complex real-world systems. There is a near-final second-generation standard for digital badges from IMS Global, along with a (small) number of groups and companies working on platforms and infrastructure for awarding and sharing badges. Groups like Mouse and Chicago City of Learning are developing practices for awarding and aggregating badges for K-12 learners. And several consortia are thinking about how badges can be used at the college level to indicate workforce readiness. But how these various efforts translate into coordinated broader application remains unknown.

Our workshop focused on the more limited - but still big - domain of college and university admissions. A real challenge for admissions is to develop trustworthy measures of student potential that can be reviewed in a relatively short period of time. Various issues remain challenging: measurement validity (How do we know what a badge measures?), endorsement (Who vouches for the validity of badges?) and scaling (Can badges help us evaluate thousands of applications?).
Question 3: To really explore the connections between micro-credentials and college readiness requires insight from individuals representing a range of roles and organizations. Can you tell us about the workshop participants how you thought about assembling the right group for this particular conversation?
Our goal was to bring together three key stakeholders: organizations that award badges to students, college admissions officers, and people with expertise in educational assessment and innovation. Badge awarding organizations were represented by Mouse and the Chicago City of Learning. College admissions was represented by the University of Michigan Office of Undergraduate Admission and the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design both at Michigan, and Kalamazoo College Admissions, as well as participants from the Parsons School of Design, Eastern Michigan University, the Stevens Institute of Technology, and others. The third group was made up of practitioners, university faculty, and innovation developers. We wanted to get people thinking about opportunities and challenges in both the college admissions space and the digital badge space. In the workshop, everybody was "surprised" by something - some new information or perspective - from a space outside of their normal work.
Question 4: Can you tell us about some of the key takeaways from the workshop? What do you hope to see happen next? Any bold predictions about the future?
The workshop was valuable for bringing important issues to the surface, and for informing different audiences about the nature of challenges faced by the people working in these areas. The goal of a workshop like this is not necessarily to find solutions to problems, but rather to help frame an agenda for making progress in the future. So one big takeaway from our workshop will be recommendations to the National Science Foundation (and others) about which problems in the badging-and-college-admission space need particular attention. Our workshop closed with the participants generating and prioritizing issues that need further focus. While we are still sorting through our notes, some issues that rose to the surface include: Developing an infrastructure that simultaneously meets the needs of college admissions organizations, badge awarding organizations, and learners; Creating systems for validating and endorsing learning from badges to support scalability and trustworthiness; and ensuring that newly created systems do not replicate or inadvertently amplify current inequities in the education system.
Question 5: How does this effort align with your own work as faculty at the University of Michigan? How does it connect to the President's Academic Innovation Initiative?
We see micro-credentials -- also known as digital badges -- as a key component of the larger conversation about how we might re-think what teaching and learning looks like at a public research university. The past five years have seen explorations in many areas at Michigan, from MOOCs to learning analytics to personalized coaching, from rethinking the nature of the academic transcript to re-framing classroom assessment with gameful learning. A lot of these efforts are either explicitly or implicitly oriented towards broadening access, enhancing participation, and supporting student success. We believe that digital badges can play a role in all three of these areas. For example, badges can be used to recognize learning and accomplishment. They might also serve as evidence of a student's readiness for study at a place like Michigan, adding information that goes beyond what we can learn from traditional measures like test scores or GPA. Digital badges can even be used to help identify students with particular interests earlier in their academic careers, so that those students might be steered towards activities that will open up further opportunities and help identify a possible set of higher ed institutions that may best serve their interests and aspirations.
Question 6: What advice do you have for people across the higher ed landscape who are just beginning to think about the potential for micro-credentials? How should they get started? What should they know about the conversation and experimentation already underway?
We encourage people to think broadly about their goals for enhancing access to and supporting learning across higher education. If you treat badges as an "add on" or purely extrinsic incentive or reward for some student behavior, it's unlikely that they will make a real difference for learners... or for your organization. College admissions is built on an elaborate infrastructure that shapes not just the application process, but K-12 education and how students engage with learning, especially in secondary schools. But that infrastructure came from somewhere, and took time to develop into its' current form. To make meaningful or lasting change, we need to engage with this infrastructure and design for uses of badges that have meaning and offer equitable access for everyone involved. As with most important challenges in education, there is no "one thing" that leads to real change or improvement. Those who seek to use digital badges to represent learning -- at any educational level or for any purpose -- will benefit most from partnering with others who are exploring in this domain, and working together to build a new infrastructure for learning supported by badges.
James DeVaney (@devaneygoblue) is the Associate Vice Provost for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan where he leads the Office of Academic Innovation.

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Micro-Credentials and College Admissions: Enhancing Access and Supporting Learning | Technology and Learning

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Given the frequency with which I am asked about the summertime pace on university campuses, I suspect there are many who imagine the gears of innovation grinding to a halt. Sorry to disappoint. There is just a bit of a break from the norm but summertime in Ann Arbor is anything but monotonous.