Developing Ready-to-Use Digital Learning Badges to Improve Workforce Readiness

 by Jama S. Coartney -- 

Most people enjoy games. From an early age, whether it’s peek-a-boo or hide-n-seek, games are one of the fun ways in which we learn and engage with each other.  Within education, Bellotti and colleagues describe gamification as the “introduction of game elements in the design of learning processes.”  In an earlier post, Dr. Ben Casteel described the benefits of creating fun and engaging learning through the use of gamification. He has experimented with gamification, including the use of digital badges to mark learning achievements. You can read more about his work here. 

Digital learning badges are an increasingly popular means of adding game-based learning to curricula to help motivate and engage students.  These badges are an educational strategy to award achievements and skill-development.

Digital learning badges are versatile tools that can be applied across a multitude of settings and purposes.  For example, Virginia Cooperative Extension offers a certification badge that can be earned to indicate someone has met the requirements to be a Certified Turfgrass Professional.  Another example is IBM’s online offerings, which include a variety of badges around both technical as well as professional skills for the workplace.

Professional or employability skills are extremely important for preparing today’s workforce. A survey conducted by The Association of Public and Land Universities (APLU) identified 11 employability skills that were most important to stakeholders and had the largest gaps in terms of workforce readiness.

The Agriculture Workforce Training for Collaborative Leadership (AWT4CL) project is developing a set of digital learning badges to help instructors better prepare students for today’s workforce.  These learning modules address APLU’s eleven most critical growth areas that students are the least prepared for as they enter the workforce.


The AWT4CL badging system provides a foundational set of digital learning badges that fall within five broad categories: administration, communication, decision-making, professionalism, and leadership. Each badge has a general description about its purpose. Each badge also includes criteria for what learners must do to earn it.  Below is a list of the foundational level badges:

  • Welcome Badge
  • Communicate Effectively, Accurately and Concisely
  • Listen Effectively
  • Ask Good Questions
  • Identify and Analyze Problems
  • Realize the Effect of Decisions
  • Transfer Knowledge from One Situation to Another
  • Build Professional Relationships
  • Accept and Apply Critique and Direction in the Workplace
  • Understand Role in the Workplace and Have Realistic Career Expectations
  • Recognize and Deal Constructively with Conflict
  • Navigate Change and Ambiguity

In developing the AWT4CL digital learning badge system, we hope to improve students’ awareness of the importance of these competencies to employers and to build students’ capacity with these workforce readiness skills. Plans are underway to pilot the badging system. Instructors will have opportunities to incorporate learning badges into their curricula with a set of capacity-building activities.  More information will be available on our website later in 2023.

References:

Bellotti, F., Berta, R., De Gloria, A., Lavagnino, E., Antonaci, A., Dagnino, F. M., & Ott, M. (2013). A gamified short course for promoting entrepreneurship among ICT engineering students. Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT) 2013 IEEE 13th International Conference. (pp. 11‐13). IEEE. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6601857





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