Marcy Towns’ lovely paper from 2015 described the use of digital badges in higher education chemistry, specifically for assessment of laboratory skills. This work was important. The concept of badges had been around for a while. When I first came across them while doing an MSc in E-Learning back in 2010, laboratory work seemed an obvious place to use them. But while the technology promised a lot, there wasn’t feasible systems in place to do it. And what exactly would you badge, anyway? And would undergraduate students really take a digital badge seriously?
Towns’ work was important for several reasons. On a systematic level, it demonstrated that issuing badges to a very large cohort of students in undergraduate laboratories was feasible. At Purdue, they used an in-house system called Passport to manage the badging process from submission of videos to viewing online for assessment, and subsequent issuing of the badges. But more importantly for me, Towns’ work reasserted the notion of laboratory skills and competencies as something worth assessing in their own right. Skills weren’t being implicitly assessed via quality of results or yield in a reaction. This approach – videoing a student while they demonstrate a technique was directly assessed. This is not something you come across very often in the education literature (some notable exceptions are pointed out in our paper).
This work answered two of the three questions I had about badges – there are systems in place (although as I discovered, Blackboard just about manages to do this, with a lot of creaking). And there is scope for badging laboratory skills – the concept of badging is built on demonstrable evidence, and videoing techniques is part of this. Whether students take badging seriously I think still needs to be answered. My own sense is that there will need to be a critical mass of badges – an obvious ecosystem where it is clear to students how they can progress, and our own work in this regard is extending into more advanced techniques.
Incorporating peer review
One of the great insights Towns and her students shared at a workshop at BCCE last summer was the notion of narration in demonstrating techniques. Early videos in their initial pilot studies were eerily silent, and it was difficult for them to know what the students’ understanding was as they completed a technique – why they were doing things in a particular way? So they built in narration into the requirements of the demonstration. I think this is one of those things in hindsight that is obvious, but for us to know up front in our own implementation was invaluable.
We opted to have a system where students would video each other rather than be videoed by a demonstrator, and that the narration would be in effect one peer telling the other how they were doing the technique. To facilitate a review of this at the end, the demonstrators in the project came up with the idea of a peer observation sheet (they designed them too – bonus points!). The whole set up was to encourage dialogue – genuine interactions discussing the experimental technique, and allowing for feedback on this based on the guidelines presented in the peer observation sheets. These acted as a framework on which the lab was run. Lord knows chemists like instructions to follow.
Feedback then is given in-situ, and indeed if the student demonstrating feels after discussion that they would like to video it again, they can. This notion of quality, or exemplary work, is underscored by the exemplars provided to students in advance; pre-laboratory videos dedicated to correct display of technique. This whole framework is based around Sadler’s design for feedback, discussed… in the paper!
We’ve documented our on-going work on the project blog and the paper summarising the design and analysis of evaluation is now available in CERP. It is part of the special issue on transferable skills in the curriculum which will be published in the Autumn, primarily as we felt it developed digital literacy skills in addition to the laboratory work; students were required to submit a link to the video they hosted online, rather than the video itself. This is giving them control over their digital footprint.
Resources
Resources – digital badges, peer observation sheets, links to exemplar videos – are all freely available on the project website. I really think there is great scope for badges, and look forward to where this project will go next!
Great stuff, and we’d certainly share your interest in the effective use of badging for skills development. We’re supporting multiple badge roll outs and building up a set of guidelines for effective implementation.
Thanks! Look forward to hearing about your work.