MOOCs, open badges & the future of e-learning

Another year of blogging draws to a close, this time dominated by the themes of MOOCs, open badges and the future of e-learning.

This year my blog enjoyed more robust discussion, and I thank everyone who cared enough to comment. Comments are the lifeblood of bloggers, so cheers!

It would be remiss of me not to call out three commenters in particular – Crispin Weston, Chris Taylor and Matt Guyan. Thanks so much for your thoughtful, supportive and challenging comments: you improved my thinking.

I invite everyone to review my posts for 2013 – and yes, please comment!

MOOCs

• The moot point of MOOCs
• Putting the moo into mooc
• Reflections of a mooc unvirgin
• 10 hot tips for moocers
• 7 big opportunities that MOOCs offer corporates
• Is the pedagogy of MOOCs flawed?

Open badges

• Badges of honour
• The past tense of open badges
• Top 5 benefits of open badges for corporates

The future of e-learning

• All hail the electronic calf
• The equation for change
• The future of learning management
• The paradox of augmented reality

Miscellaneous

• Human enough
• M-Learning’s dirty little secrets
• Udemy for you and me
• Face time
• Boiling the backchannel
• How to become an eLearning Professional
• Funny business
• Would you like an education with that?

Merry Christmas, and here’s to a provocative 2014!

Top 5 benefits of open badges for corporates

I’ve been blogging a lot about open badges lately. That really means I’ve been thinking a lot about open badges lately, as I use my blog as a sense-making platform.

Through my blogging, combined with the insightful discussions following both Badges of honour and The past tense of open badges, I have been able to consolidate my thoughts somewhat.

This consolidation I rehash share with you now in the form of my Top 5 benefits of open badges for corporates.

1. Open badges can motivate employees to learn.

Badges are widely perceived as being childish, yet there is no denying that the game mechanics that underpin them can work. Some people are incredibly motivated by badges. Once they’ve earned one, they want to earn another.

You will note that I am using weasel words such as “can” and “some”. This is because badges don’t motivate everyone – just ask Foursquare! But my view is if they motivate a significant proportion of your target audience, then that makes them worthwhile.

I consider this an important point because as learning in the corporate sector becomes more informal, the employee’s motivation to drive their own development will become increasingly pivotal to their performance, and hence to the performance of the organisation as a whole.

2. Open badges can credential in-house training.

Yes, corporates can print off certificates of completion for employees who undertake their in-house training offerings, only for them to be pinned to a workstation or hidden in a drawer.

And yes, corporates typically track and record completion statuses in their LMS, but that lacks visibility for pretty much everyone but the employee him- or herself.

In contrast, open badges are the epitome of visibility. They’re shiny and colourful, the employee can collect them in their online backpack, and they can be shown off via a plugin on a website or blog – or intranet profile.

Badges therefore give corporates the opportunity to recognise the employees who have completed their in-house training, within an enterprise-wide framework.

3. Open badges are portable.

Currently, if you undertake training at one organisation and then leave to join another, you leave your completion records behind. However, if badges were earned through that training, their openness and centralisation in the cloud means that you can continue to “wear” them when you move to your next employer.

This portability of open badges would be enhanced if third parties were also able to endorse the training. So an APRA-endorsed badge earned at Bank A, for example, would be meaningful to my next employer, Bank B, because this bank is also regulated by APRA.

Still, the concept holds without third-party endorsement; that is to say, much of the training provided by Bank A would probably still be meaningful to Bank B – because Bank A and Bank B do very similar things.

4. Open badges are task oriented.

Despite my talk of “training” thus far, open badges are in fact task oriented. That means they recognise the execution of specific actions, and hence the mastery of skills.

I love this aspect of open badges because it means they don’t promise that you can do a particular task, but rather demonstrate that you have already done it.

That gives employers confidence in your capability to perform on the job.

5. Open badges can formally recognise informal learning.

I have argued previously that in the modern workplace, we should informalise learning and formalise assessment.

My rationale is that the vast majority of learning in the workplace is informal anyway. Employees learn in all kinds of ways – from reading a newsfeed or watching a video clip, to playing with new software or chatting with colleagues over lunch.

The question is how to manage all of that learning. The answer is you don’t.

If a particular competency is important to the business, you assess it. Assessment represents the sum of all the learning that the employee has undertaken in relation to that competency, regardless of where, when or how it was done.

I see open badges as micro-assessments of specific tasks. If you execute a task according to the pre-defined criteria (whatever that may be), then you earn its badge. In this way, the badge represents the sum of all the learning that you have undertaken to perform the task successfully, regardless of where, when or how that learning was done.

This is my blog, so of course all of the above assertions are the product of my own opinion. Naturally, I believe it to be an opinion informed by experience.

Other people have different opinions – some concordant, some contrary, as the comments under Badges of honour and The past tense of open badges will attest.

So, I’m curious… what’s your opinion?

The past tense of open badges

Some commentators are heralding open badges as the nemesis of the college degree. I don’t quite see it that way.

It is true they are uneasy bedfellows. As Mark Smithers observes…

“It’s interesting that the reaction to open badges from senior academic managers is often to dismiss them as being child like and akin to collecting a badge for sewing at scouts.”

…and…

“I also suspect that traditional higher education providers will resist providing them because they don’t fit in with traditional academic perceptions of achievement and credentialing.”

I wonder if these academics have consulted their own faculties of education?

Of course, open badges and college degrees are not mutually exclusive. If a particular university can overcome its initial prejudice, it will see badges for what they really are: representations of achievement – just like those pieces of paper they dole out at graduation ceremonies.

There is no reason why a university couldn’t award a badge upon the completion of a degree. In fact, it could also award badges upon the completion of individual subjects within the degree. That would give the student a sense of accomplishment while in the midst of a multi-year program, and I imagine showcasing one’s backpack on the university’s VLE would become rather competitive.

Speaking of competition, I don’t see open badges as a serious disruptor of the higher education system in the way that MOOCs are. And that’s because MOOCs are disrupting the delivery of education, rather than its credentialing.

A degree will always command a certain level of gravitas. It represents a structured, comprehensive education from – according to broader society – an elite bastion of knowledge and research. In short, it equips you with the intellectual foundation to do something in that domain.

In contrast, open badges are task oriented. Beyond the nebulous notion of “study”, they recognise the execution of specific actions. For example, Mozilla issues its Div Master Badge upon successfully using the div tag at least 2 times in its Webmaker Project.

If the task were passing an exam, the badge could indeed represent the acquisition of knowledge; but the spirit of open badges dictates that the task be performed in the real world, and hence represents the mastery of a skill. And this is meaningful to the corporate sector.

For example, if I were an employer who needed a graphic designer, I would seek someone who knows how to take awesome digital photos and edit them in Photoshop. So an applicant who has earned badges for digital photography techniques and advanced Photoshop operations would be an obvious candidate.

Yet if I were seeking a IT executive, I don’t think open badges would cut the mustard. Sure, badges earned by an applicant for various Java programming tasks might be attractive, but a wide-ranging role requires the kind of comprehensive education that a degree is purposefully designed to give.

When we look at learning through the lens of the college degree, we see its application in the future tense. The learner has a well-rounded education which he or she intends to draw from. In other words, the degree recognises something you can do.

In contrast, when we look at learning through the lens of the open badge, we see its application in the past tense. The learner has demonstrated their mastery of a skill by using it. In other words, the badge recognises something you have already done.

So the degrees vs badges debate isn’t really about the latter displacing the former. The emergence of badges is merely re-roasting the same old chestnut of whether degrees are necessary for the modern workplace.

And that’s an entirely different matter.

Badges of honour

“Will I get a certificate for this?”

No matter how much we try to cultivate an informal learning culture within our organisations, this question pops up time and again. It’s a symptom of the way workplace education (and education more generally) has been administered over the years, and while I don’t blame people for thinking this way, I confess to being frustrated by the redundancy of it all. It reminds me of that episode of Peep Show in which Mark presents Jeremy with a life coaching certificate, replete with 4 stars.

The fact remains: people love recognition for what they do. Mozilla’s Open Badges initiative leverages this phenomenon by gamifying the learning experience. The initiative allows training providers to issue digital “badges” to the participants in their courses, who thereby earn online representations of their newly acquired skills. Each learner can earn badges from all manner of verified issuers, collect them in their online “backpack”, and show them off by plugging them into their website or blog.

And you know what, it works. When self-confessed cynic Mark Smithers earned his first badge after completing a jQuery course, he was chuffed:

“I have to say that my feelings were of enormous pleasure at finishing my course and being able to display that quickly and easily. It also made me very eager to get another badge to add to my collection. If feelings like this can be engendered in someone as notoriously cynical as me then that’s a pretty powerful reaction.”

Powerful indeed. And yet I suggest that open badges have more powerful potential still.

To put this into context, let me first explain that Australia is one of the most regulated nations on earth. And that, of course, includes our financial services industry.

Partly credited with shielding our economy from the worst of the GFC, the flipside of our regulation is that it is widely considered to hamper productivity, agility and innovation. Moreover, mandatory compliance training is universally disdained and dreaded in equal measure.

There are reasons for this – and in Take the law out of compliance training I argue that it shouldn’t be so – but the point I wish to make here is: how do we know the training is legally sufficient? Of course we draw the content from SMEs and run it by Legal, but at the end of that long and winding road, we effectively roll the dice and hope it never gets tested in court. I personally believe it would stand up nonetheless, but without going to such extremes, how else could we ever truly know…?

In a conversation I had with a friend the other day, I suggested one solution might be for the various regulatory agencies to develop their own training courses for their minions in Workland to complete. But I have since realised this is a terrible idea. Not only would it put a lot of e-learning developers out of business (compliance being their bread and butter) but government is in the business of governing, not training.

This is where I think open badges can play a role. Instead of a badge representing the provision of training by a particular organisation, it can represent the endorsement of the training by the organisation. It is a subtle difference but an important one. It means training providers such as employers can continue to endorse their own courses (naturally) but so too can other organisations such as ASIC, APRA and Standards Australia. The latter don’t produce the content, but rather review it and stamp it with their seal of approval if it meets their exacting requirements. All for a fee, no doubt.

This slightly modified approach to open badging promises significant benefits for the stakeholders:

• For the regulatory agency, it weaves its governance more tightly into the workplace, not to mention generating a new revenue stream.
• For the employer, it instills a sense of confidence in their training program, not to mention a legal defence.
• For the employees, it gives them the shiny recognition they crave, not to mention better protection of their and their customers’ safety and security – which of course is the whole point of compliance.

And that’s not all: open badges can also facilitate the portability of employee training records. Currently, if you complete your training at one organisation and then leave to join another, you leave your training records behind and thus have to do your compliance all over again. What a laughable and desperately inefficient proposition.

If, however, you earned ASIC- and APRA-endorsed badges from your previous compliance training, all you would need to do is authorise the connection of your backpack to your new employer’s LMS.

In other words, you wear your badges wherever you go.

They are, after all, badges of honour.

Similar but different

I for one welcome the Australian Government’s proposal to establish a National Skills Passport.

Tabled last year via the Working Future whitepaper, the idea is “to help people more easily demonstrate their skills to employers and reduce barriers to lifelong learning.”

Bravo. But of course the devil is in the detail, and so far there hasn’t been very much of that (perhaps by design).

Indeed, the Department of Education and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations have jointly released a consultation paper which advances the idea a smidgen more. For example, “Stakeholders have long called for the creation of a tool to help Australians demonstrate their qualifications to prospective employers. A skills passport could combine a person’s qualifications across VET and higher education to more effectively demonstrate their skills to employers.”

As per that extract, the document frequently uses the word “skills” in conjunction with the word “qualifications”, and I fear they’re being conflated.

You see, they’re similar, but different. I’ve previously expressed my view in the context of digital badges – see The past tense of open badges and More than just a pretty face – whereby a qualification is a promise that you can do something; whereas a badge is (or more to the point, should be) a symbol that you have done it.

There’s the rub. If the National Skills Passport is to be a collection of qualifications, then it will essentially be a promissory note. Granted, the interoperability of it across higher education and industry will be attractive, but it won’t ever evolve beyond Curriculum Vitae 2.0 because its premise will be flawed from the get-go.

In the corporate sector our strategies are increasingly skills-first, and I suggest the government’s proposed solution should be too. Rather than accumulating your qualifications, the passport should represent your skills.

Certainly a qualification can lend weight to your claim on a skill, but only to a certain level, because doing a course on data science doesn’t necessarily mean you are skilled at data science – P’s are degrees! In a similar vein, your employment history and other work experience could also lend weight, but occupying the role of Data Analyst for several years doesn’t necessarily mean you were a good one.

What I’m getting at is to be validated, a skill needs to be assessed. And because by definition a skill is practical, what is being assessed must be its practice. Now I realise this is challenging and potentially unwieldy to do, so much so that I’ve suggested that universities pivot their awards accordingly – see Higher Assessment – while some providers have spawned a new service offering – see DeakinCo and RMIT Online.

And I also realise that some courses are practically oriented, with their completion predicated on the production of a dashboard or the presentation of a project, for example. That’s a shift in the right direction, as the assessment of practice is integrated into the learning experience.

However, if the National Skills Passport is to be a National Skills Passport, then it needs to be founded upon… skills. Evidence such as qualifications and employment history contribute to your record of a specific skill at a particular level (aligned to a standardised rubric) but only through an independent assessment of practice can you reach the terminal level.

That way, if I’m looking for a SQL programmer who can speak Japanese, I can find someone at the click of a button without wondering how capable they really are.