Digital badges provide new affordances for online educational activities and experiences. When used with points and leaderboards, a badge can become a gamification element allowing learners to compete with themselves or others, and to know how close they are to accomplishing a goal and acquiring its accompanying reputation. In this role, badges motivate continued engagement, which increases time on task and supports skill acquisition through performance. Learning outcomes signified by badges can also be displayed in an e-portfolio or on web sites and are highly transportable to social media sites. In this role they summarize achievement and signal accomplishment. With these characteristics, digital badges have the potential to become an alternative credentialing system, providing visible recognition in digital symbols that link directly via metadata to validating evidence of educational achievements in public displays. This paper will trace the brief history of digital badges, define what they are, give examples of their use, and discuss their educational affordances.
The term “badge” or more specifically “digital badge” in some circles has become a catchall term for any form of digital credential. This isn’t accurate however, and is often a source of confusion. Digital badges are just one subset of digital credentials, and this fact is worth diving deeper into.
Simply put, a digital badge is an indicator of accomplishment or skill that can be displayed, accessed, and verified online. These badges can be earned in a wide variety of environments, an increasing number of which are online.