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About ‘Badge Earners’


Who are they and what do they want?

Who is an ‘Earner’?

An earner is someone who completes the learning experiences successfully and ‘earns’ an open badge for their effort. They can store their collected badges in the Mozilla Backpack and display them on the Web in such places as their Web site, social media profile, or blog in order to tell others more about their informal learning and skills.

>>Read more: http://openbadges.org/earn/

Who can become an Earner?

Anyone can become an earner as long as the experience allows them to be. They can be any age, in any location, or of any skill set. Because there are limitation on who can become an earner, badges have the potential of serving many different purposes such as crediting informal learning, skills for employment, credit for participation in emerging fields not currently represented by formal education, and much more.

>>Click here to take a look at a more detailed list provided by Mozilla.

Who is your audience? Who are your Earners?

While anyone can become an earner, it is important to think about how your audience can vary when developing your learning experience. How open is your learning experience? Consider the different experiences and age ranges that might take part. You may have to vary your activities, provide optional learning opportunities for those who do not meet the prerequisite knowledge needed to understand the information,or offer different options for learning the material that may appeal to different fields.

Discussion Prompt:
Take some time to think about your earners.

  1. List up to 5 different possible earner profiles. (Check out sample profiles on The Edupunk Guide homepage.)
  2. What learning experience accommodations do you need to make for your diverse group of earners?

Task Discussion


  • Kerstin Namuth said:

    There a many potential earners for a Moodle badge, e.g.

    1.       Non-editing teachers who take over a ready-made course on a Moodle platform. They will need to understand the existing activities and be able to use them as teachers. e.g. grading assignments, monotoring student activity.

    2.       Course editors. As there is no such thing as a once and for all ready-made course, most teachers will very quickly want to move on from non-editing teachers to teachers with editing rights. They need to learn how to use the editing tools and which settings they should select for every one of the learning activities in their course.

    3.       Administrative staff who are not educators themselves, but help less digital teachers to publish materials.  

    4.       Course creators who, hopefully, are digitally competent and have some experience from online learning and teaching. They need to understand the pedagogical potential and limitations of the platform.

    5.       Explorers. Teachers and others who want to futher develop their own and their students’ online learning. They might want to share experiences with other explorers, integrate their moodle courses with other learning environments, etc.

    The ideal learning situation and content depend a lot on the individual teachers' digital competence and their goals. The variation of paths towards a badge that I mentioned earlier should give all teachers opportunities to move forward.

    on Dec. 30, 2013, 11:32 a.m.
  • Pelle said:

    1

    a. Teachers from preschool to gymnasium that wants to blogg about a specific school subject.


    b. Teachers from preschool to gymnasium that takes part in a film.


    c. Teachers from preschool to gymnasium that makes their own films.


    d. A bureaucrat at the administration of education that bloggs about a specific school subject.


    e. A bureaucrat at the administration of education that that makes their own films.


    2

    We will have to set up specific goals for the two groups bloggers and filmcontributors. Statistics will be followed via Google Analytics. A difference is that you often take part in only one film but you will make several bloggposts. The blog traffic will probably be measured over some time interval. For example reach 1000 clicks within a month.

    on Dec. 5, 2013, 5:04 a.m.
  • ToddP said:

    Badge earners may come from one or more of these profiles:

    1. Traditional undergraduate college student, 18-14 years old.  Not sure where they will end up but taking my class as an elective. 

    2.  Non-traditional undergraduate student, 20-60 years old.  Working adults with complex issues.  Need to earn a degree to get a raise, promotion, or retain their position

    3.  Non-traditional undergraduate student, 20-60 years old.  Working adults want to earn a degree to move into a new field.

    4.  Single, working individual you is attending corporate training I have been contracted to deliver.  Often mandated to take training to keep their job.

    5. Participants at a conference. Learning professionals who have paid to attend breakout sessions to learn more about new ideas related to instructional design, elearning, instructor best practices, learning assessment, and so on. Usually one hour sessions with some interaction.  

    I have to make learning relevant to a diverse group based on their situation and motivation, often a struggle with those attending due to external motivators.  In some college formats I teach online so I have to accommodate learners in different time zones and countries. In other formats classes are compressed into three weekends, face-to-face so I have to consider fatigue and personal life demands.  

    Non-traditional students in the graduate courses I teach must produce a higher level of output, demonstrating competency and creativity, so I have to accommodate them by allowing more freedom of expression. 

    on Aug. 1, 2013, 6:33 p.m.

    Leah MacVie said:

    Wow- you have a lot of different profiles here, Todd. I'm glad you had a chance to work on this in this space because this information may come in handy for buy-in some day. You are right, the upper-level students will have to produce a higher level of output to earn their badges, but this isn't always linked to autonomy(it should be!)- autonomy is best practice, however, to keep people interested and allow them to take ownership of their learning experience- which, in the end, should produce better results. Good luck!

    on Aug. 8, 2013, 7:59 a.m. in reply to ToddP
  • Jason said:

    Like Peter, I have a fairly specific audience in mind, nevertheless, earners might include:

    a  New Faculty member doing badge as part of onboarding

    b current faculty assigned " course" as part of remediation / improvement plan

    c. adjunct hired at last minute needing to get up to speed quickly

    d faculty at other institutions which don't have their own similar program of training looking for validated learning to include in evaluation plan

    e  experienced faculty seeking targeted refresher training

    2.  Because different learners will have different timelines for completion it may be necessary to have non parallel feedback (like in the badge system design course) to make the peer review work.

    on June 13, 2013, 11:35 p.m.

    ToddP said:

    We are just starting a Faculty Mentoring program at one of my schools and I was asked to be a mentor for adjuncts, and help get the program off the ground.  This is the same school that is interested in how we can uses badges and eportfoilos with students.  I would love to use them for new and existing adjuncts.   

    on Aug. 1, 2013, 6:37 p.m. in reply to Jason

    Leah MacVie said:

    Usually, we hear about badges in the context of K-12 or non-academic professional development, but faculty development is another great use for badges. My own school had the idea of a professional development program for administrative associates. At the time we were looking at using BadgeStack, which now has a powerful free plug-in for Wordpress called BadgeOS, You may wish to check it out. 

    on Aug. 8, 2013, 7:55 a.m. in reply to ToddP
  • Peter Pasque said:

    List up to 5 different possible earner profiles. (Check out sample profiles on The Edupunk Guidehomepage.)

    The badge system I’m creating is designed for students within our high school.  However, we are hoping to expand the validity of our badges to institutions outside of our school.  We are also hoping to evolve our initial system into one that allows badge issuers to reside outside of the school.  That being said, we are really limiting our badge earners to our high school students.

    1) A magnet student from one of the 4 magnet classes.

    2) A non-magnet student who is taking a magnet elective.

    3) A FIRST Robotics student who is in our robotics club.

    4) A FIRST Robotics parent/volunteer who is in our robotics club and is interested in learning discrete skills.


    What learning experience accommodations do you need to make for your diverse group of earners?

    The learning experience accommodations we need to make might include breaking larger curricular units into smaller parts.  Traditionally, teachers have a cumulative grade or two for each content area unit of study which may include a project, performance, or traditional test.  In this type of course we may need to identify specific standards and determine whether individual skills will be badged, or clusters of skills.  When identifying the skills to be badged we need to understand where the badge will lead, or what’s the badge good for?  We will also need to determine how the badges are tracked by the student and teacher.  If we only use Mozilla’s OBI and Backpack we could potentially lose track of an issued badge.  So, we will need to use some type of system to help easily make sense who has earned specific badges.

    We also need to figure out if badges that have been earned outside of class, either in the robotics club, internship, online, or from a physical space will be worth anything in the magnet classes and what the value will be.

    on June 10, 2013, 12:50 p.m.
  • ToddF said:

    Earner Personas:


    1)  College student enrolled in an on-line course

        a)  The over-achiever

        b)  The competitor

        c)  The altruist

        d)  The procrastinator

        e)  The contrarian

        f)   The struggler

    2)  High school or college student using on-line reference tools

    3)  The professor or teacher who is building on-line course materials

    4)  The K-12 student using on-line reference tools


    Goals:


    - Make the system engaging for the competitors and over-achievers, but don’t de-motivate the struggler and procrastinator.

    - Allow alternative achievement paths for competitors, over-achievers, contrarians, and altruists.

    - Don’t annoy the learner with too flash and distraction (Microsoft Clippy)

    - Provide clear paths for the struggler to engage



     

    on April 13, 2013, 9:45 a.m.
  • Peter Rawsthorne said:

    Given the self-directed nature of the Open and Networked PhD the diversity of learning will be the responsibility of the learners. The first challenge of the OnPhD is designed so people will identify and develop their own learning experience.

    on March 30, 2013, 10:36 a.m.
  • Peter Rawsthorne said:

    I have identified four learner profiles for my badge system, I am sure there would be others and i will update this comment when I identify them. Or if someone else identifies another learner profile it would be appretiated if they add it as an additional comment;

    1. The person who has participated in traditional institutional learning to a Masters degree level and is looking toward a PhD as their next step in life-long learning. They believe a self-directed approach to achieving a PhD level of subject domain mastery would work best for them.
    2. Teen, high school student, home-schooler, "drop-out" who feels capable of subject domain mastery to a PhD level. They also believe they are capable to make a significant contribution to their chosen domain of human knowledge. They are willing to put in the time (10000 hours) to achieve mastery of thier chosen subject.
    3. The mature adult learner who has a life time of self-directed learning. They have achieved many things in their life and have proven they are nimble of mind and able to perform at the same levels as peers with academic credentials. They believe they can perform all the tasks and learning required to have a PhD level of subject domain mastery.
    4. The budget concious adult learner who has attained higher education qualifications, but is unable to continue thier persuit of knowledge in the traditional institutions due to there costs and the scheduled times away from work. They believe they have skills, knowledge, motivation and abilities to complete the work to attain subject domain mastery to a PhD level.
    on March 30, 2013, 10:29 a.m.