Background
This resource discusses the provision of formal credit for open education - open accreditation - and the role of higher education. This is discussed in relation to the Mozilla Open Badges initiative, as a potential infrastructure for an open accreditation ecosystem. 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.
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 an introduction to 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 is an important consideration for badge design - and in considering a suitable place for badges in an accreditation ecosystem.
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. Email and Twitter links are provided at that top of each page and you will find a contact form in the Resources section. Also, where there are images, I have provided links to the Google Drawing templates. Please feel free to reuse these templates, and amend if you think appropriate.
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.
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.
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 an introduction to 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 is an important consideration for badge design - and in considering a suitable place for badges in an accreditation ecosystem.
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. Email and Twitter links are provided at that top of each page and you will find a contact form in the Resources section. Also, where there are images, I have provided links to the Google Drawing templates. Please feel free to reuse these templates, and amend if you think appropriate.
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.
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.
What you will need
- To use the image templates you will need a Google account and access to Google Drive.
- Save a copy of the template image to your Google Drive account.
- Open the Drawing and select File > Publish to the web...
- Select, and copy, the Document link.
- Paste the link in an email or web page.