#ovae

Aquired: Babies.

Last Wednesday, the Office of Vocational Adult Education (OVAE), in partnership with the American Institute of Research (AIR), hosted a federal briefing on two working papers they've recently published, one of which is The Potential and Value of Using Digital Badges for Adult Learners.

That paper is the initial outcome of a project they kicked off last year around exploring the feasibility of badging in the adult learning space. As part of that project I was invited to co-author the initial version of the paper along with Jonathan Finkelstein from Learning Times and Susan Manning from Northwestern University.

I have to say co-authoring can be really hard, especially when you aren't co-located, but the AIR/OVAE folks did a pretty fantastic job wrangling us. It was a pretty fun experience, which included synchronous writing sessions on key issues to start to form a pool of notes that the outline was then derived from, dividing and conquering pieces of the paper and then swapping to put some fresh flavor, and facilitated chat discussions with a wider community to get feedback.

I learned a lot about adult learners in the process and really got excited about the potential. Adult learners are 'non-traditional'. They may be looking to enter a new career path with more opportunity for them, or to learn skills necessary to advance within their job. They often have many life demands that make a 4 (or even 2) year degree unrealistic both financially and time-commitment-wise. They often have a wealth of life or job experience that is not recognized in any way, or easily communicated to a potential employer. The existing education system wasn't set up for these types of learners and it does not always offer them many options. For me, badging was more than just feasible, it is needed. The adult learning space is screaming for a new way of thinking about learning recognition, discovery and communication. It's screaming for badges. The obvious fits out of the gate were:

Badges can liberate adult learners from lengthy, required prescribed pathways, and allow for more a la carte choice. This also potentially shifts the power balance a bit so that teaching and learning institutions are competing for the learner, versus the other way around.

Badges can recognize more incremental learning so that a learner has something to show for the time they could put in, even if they couldn't finish the course or complete the program at one particular time.

Badges can offer a map - a way for learners to better understand the skills they have, the skills they need, and where to find learning opportunities.

And finally, badges can help learners build their complete story and identity (including representing experience they already have) and connect that directly to employers.

While working through the paper, the conversation quickly moved from feasibility, to where to dig in first. The paper does a nice job outlining the potential uses of badges, as well as the particular affordances of badges that AIR/OVAE and the broader community felt had the most potential for adult learners. Some overlap with my initial thinking, but said much more eloquently. I'll share an excerpt here:

Digital badge standardization and the democratization of achievement recognition: A world where achievement is recognized primarily with diplomas and degrees represents a world full of barriers for many adults. Badges break down walls and allow many organizations—even those not traditionally in the credit-granting realm to recognize success and achievement in their own domains of observation and interaction with people. Granularity, portability, and retention: As the very definitions of literacy and most adult literacy curricula suggest, the skills required to be truly literate span a wide range of competencies and can be developed across a broad spectrum of disciplines. For adults, whose life demands make them prone to interruptions in completing courses of study, the granular nature of digital badges makes them an appealing measure of ongoing progress and success. Embedded learning, new skills, and alternative providers: By virtue of their capacity to recognize discrete skills and the fact that any organization or entity can issue badges or digital credentials, digital badges open the door for the recognition of new skills and competencies....Badges magnify the potential to reward adult learners for their contributions, involvement, and achievement in nontraditional and alternative learning settings.

Despite a late March snow storm in DC, the briefing was well attended (only virtually by me thanks to said snow storm) and there was a lot of great discussion around the paper and badging in general. A few of the points that came up have inspired additional blog posts that will follow shortly.

All-in-all, a great experience and great things ahead.