Digital Badges and Access to Quality Education for All

The Education Trifecta: Reducing Cost, Preserving Mission, Increasing Assess

The advent of digital badges might be an important part of the answer to several problems whose solutions seem to compete for resources: education debt, narrowing of education's mission, and disproportionate access to quality education. Adding complexity, these issues are often perceived to align with opposing visions for education. The problems are pitched as having mutually exclusive solutions - a fix for one is understood to exacerbate one of the others.

1: Education Debt

The cost of education has become so high many young people are priced out of their futures. Too many students graduate with so much debt they cannot afford a mortgage, struggle to repay student loans, and worry they can't afford to have children.

2: Narrowing Education's Mission

Focusing education purely on job skills runs the risk of hobbling graduates' competencies, reducing engagement in civics, curtailing creative thinking, and eliminating opportunities for serendipitous discovery of talents and interests.

 

Let us Not Forget, 3. Disproportionate Access

Disparity in access to quality education is one of our times' most vexing challenges. Furthermore, the two problems above disproportionately impact students according to background and other determinants unrelated to capability. As such, solutions need to additionally be designed to achieve educational equity for all. Digital badges might have the potential to meet these three issues at their crossroads. The theory underpinning such a system is represented in the following diagram.

Digital Badging Systems Theory Diagram

Digital Badging Systems Theory

A thoughtful digital badging system could reduce cost by allowing learners to attain credentials in any number of settings, with the potential to truncate the pathway to competent job skills and civics. This system can include competencies related to history, government, social studies and other highly valued traditional undergraduate fare. Employers, indeed, continue to value the full range of competencies represented by a broad-spectrum college education, as revealed in recent research. Jeremy Bauer-Wolf explains:

[B]usiness leaders appear to value more generalized skills, ones that aren’t specific to certain majors.

It is possible that a digital badge system could make quality educational experiences (including generalized as well as specialized education) open to all, creating options that replace the single-pathway paradigm with a multiple pathway structure. Myk Garn wrote a stimulating piece on this subject, published by Inside Higher Education, describing the concept of digital badging as a process of mapping the academic genome.

Digital Badges to Ensure Access to Quality Education for All

It is important to recognize such mapping as explained by Garn occurs in K-12 education as well. As such, these academic genomes can run the gamut from high school through college and beyond. In fact, only addressing the above problems at the college level will ultimately fail to improve access. Developing the readiness for employment and for civic engagement begins in elementary school. By the time students from disadvantaged backgrounds reach college age, significant barriers often lie between them and their college/career aspirations. Designing a digital badging system that begins during the K-12 phase of education can further reduce cost, much as numerous early college programs do currently.

Why not have a system in which students begin to pursue and earn badges at whatever point they are ready? 

There are many programs that enable high school students to graduate with associate's degrees. Perhaps the same could be achieved with digital badging. These systems can, and should, be designed through partnerships with employers to ensure the badges are recognized and valued for purposes of career entry as well as preparation for advancement. Private sector involvement need not be viewed as the boogie-man to education. In an interview with Ryan Craig (A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College), Goldie Blumenstyk quotes the higher ed entrepreneur:

I get that the “private-sector involvement in higher education” well has been somewhat poisoned by for-profit universities. But keep in mind that none of these new pathways take [federal] Title IV dollars. And many of them are guaranteeing employment outcomes without charging any tuition. That’s a risk-reward profile that’s the polar opposite of the problematic for-profit universities of yesteryear.

 What, then, becomes of education? First, a proportion of the current pathway will continue to exist and be greatly valued. Second, education will employ for micro-credentials its unparalleled capacity for creation of content and assessments. Third, education will continue to serve its social contract of preparing learners to fully participate in, and benefit from, the civic and the economic aspects of society.