World of E's

School of Webcraft Badge Pilot

Drum roll please…it’s time for the great unveiling of our initial assessment and badge pilot!!

(Actually, being part of the open and transparent communities of P2PU and Mozilla, I’ve actually presented this many times, but this is my first official blog post about it)

Check out this wiki page for complete background information and pilot details.

Here’s the skinny, as I have discussed in previous posts, there is broad recognition of the need for alternative paths to certification and ways to legitimize the learning that is happening outside of formal channels, including informal and social learning. Both P2PU and Mozilla are committed to providing these open, free and personalized opportunities for learning, as well as making them ‘count’ in more formal contexts. We think badges (and associated assessments) can be a way to help capture, formalize and translate the learning that is occurring through these alternative (and awesome) channels. 

So that brings us to The Badge Pilot [emphasis added and intentional, its a big deal :)].  We are piloting a set of assessments and badges in the School of Webcraft, which is a joint venture between Mozilla and P2PU to offer peer-driven courses on open web development skills.

The pilot will is intended to explore different types of badges, as well as different types of assessments, and will include:

BADGES:

• Skill badges (Javascript Basic, Javascript Expert, PHP Basic, PHP Expert)
• Value badges (Accessibility Foundations, Accessibility Evangelist)
• Community-Oriented Badges (Peer Mentor, Good Communicator, Team Player, Innovator, Community Builder)
• Behavior/Participation Badges (within the community forum environment) (First Responder, Best Answer, etc.)

ASSESSMENTS:

• Peer Assessment - Basic badge work will be assessed and voted on by peers. At some threshold of Yes votes, the badge will be issued.  Peers will also assess the community-oriented badges and issue to peers directly based on their experiences within courses.
• Guru (Or Has-A Badge) Assessment - Expert/Evangelist badge work will be assessed by those community members who have already earned the badge.  This will ensure that we have expert work assessed by experts. We will seed the community with the first gurus and then they will assess the initial submissions. As they issue the badge, those learners will also be able to assess submitted work. 
• Stealth Assessment - All of the Behavior/Participation badges within the community forum will be issued by the system based on predefined logic. Badges will be awarded as a ‘surprise’ in many cases, and can help train and guide ideal community behaviors and types of participation. 

DELIVERY:

The assessments and badges will be delivered via an instance of the open source question and answer system, OSQA. This environment will help us manage the assessments (via voting) and badge issuing. 

INFRASTRUCTURE:

The badges issued within the OSQA environment will be ported to a prototype of the open badge infrastructure that is also currently in development as a parallel project. Badges will be collected within the infrastructure prototype and then displayed in the P2PU profile. 

And that’s about it! We are aiming to roll out the assessment/badge environment the week of Feb. 21st (coming right up!), to give learners a couple weeks to submit work for assessment, peers/gurus to assess the work and badges to be issued. And then we evaluate and see where to go from there!

Again, for lots more info, check out this wiki page and all the embedded links.

While this is definitely a low-fi, piece-meal prototype pilot, I think we have set it up in a way that we can learn a lot and inform our own future efforts, as well as the larger badge/certification community and efforts. I will report back!

-E