Digital Badges Exposed

Our academic library’s tutorials program has dramatically scaled up the number of students that receive basic library instruction without requiring any additional librarian time beyond development and maintenance. This program gives students a thorough orientation to the library and the basics of doing library research using self-contained online tutorials with built-in assessment. For each tutorial completed with a 100% score (tutorials are repeatable), students earn a digital badge that is viewable in the learning management system by peers and faculty alike. The badges feature allows both librarians and campus instructors to confirm student completion and track who has mastered basic library and information literacy concepts. This program allows librarians to make better use of in-person time and helps to scale up library instruction on a campus of 40,000 students.

We are lucky to have the technology that we do to build this program – but there are many alternatives to build a similar program at your own institution. WordPress, for example, is an open-source platform expandable through free and paid plugins to issue digital badges on the open badges standard. Most learning management systems allow you to create a course with open enrollment into which you may embed videos and quizzes to measure and track student learning. Let’s discuss how to identify and choose the technologies necessary to build your own badges program to scale up instruction at your institution!