This resource discusses accreditation of open education, the role of higher education as formal accreditation institutions and the potential impact of Mozilla’s Open Badges initiative. It is based primarily on two academic papers, one which positions institutional accreditation as the solution to making open education count and the other which argues for a new peer-based paradigm for assessing and accrediting 21st century skills. Participants are asked to work through four main themes and contribute to a feedback forum if they would like to.
You should expect to spend no more than four hours on the course. The first page, Open Accreditation, may take the longest as you will be asked to read two academic papers. Try not to spend too long on these, just get a flavour for their arguments, as we will return to them in later sections. The section on Open Badges relies on much shorter resources and is designed to give a flavour of what they are - and what they are not! The Visions theme tries to get us thinking visually about how some of the main players in the field see the area mapping out. This is very much to do with structures, the inter-relationship of open and formal education and granularity of learning objects, therefore a visual mode of analysis seems useful. Finally, in Metaphors, a genealogy of badges is introduced and questions asked about the effectiveness of badges as a metaphor for recognition of achievement. This seems like an important consideration for badge design - and in considering a suitable place for badges in an accreditation ecosystem.
It should be noted that this is a first pass at putting together an OER, as part of the coursework component of the Digital Futures for Learning course in the MSc Digital Education programme at the University of Edinburgh. As such this is also about playing with ideas of what an OER could be.
I see this as an organic resource, both in terms of thinking about the issues and in terms of building on what's here. I would greatly appreciate any feedback you have on any aspect of the resource. There is a discussion page with forums for each theme. Please feel free to contribute your thoughts there. Also, where there are images, I have provided links to the Google Drawing templates. Please feel free to use this template, and amend if you think appropriate. You can link the results back in through the discussion forum if you would like to use it as feedback. Instructions below.
Finally, I notice that a new book will be published next year: Open Learning and Formal Credentialing in Higher Education: Curriculum Models and Institutional Policies. The website looks like a useful resource, not only for reviewing the current research themes, but also as a resource for key terms and definitions.