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New MOOC Explores Role of Badges for Professional Credentials

The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET), Mozilla, Blackboard, and Sage Road Solutions have joined forces to offer a new MOOC that will delve into the subject of badges for academic and professional credentials.

The six-week course, "Badges: New Currency for Professional Credentials," will begin Sept. 9 using Blackboard's CourseSites platform. It is open to anybody but is targeted at leaders from education, business, industry and trade associations, standards bodies, accreditation organizations, foundations, and government.

Badges provide a method of verifying and documenting individual's achievements so they can be shared online with educational institutions or potential employers, and the course will examine their role in academic and professional credentials. The Mozilla Foundation has already created an online standard called "Open Badges," and the Clinton Global Initiative has committed to helping 1 million students and 1 million workers access opportunities through Open Badges.

According to information from the organizations behind the course, participants will discuss, debate, and increase awareness about the value of badges, and they will also learn how to design, use, and support badges. Featured speakers will include Cable Green, director of global learning for Creative Commons; Mark Surman, executive director of Mozilla; Cathy Davidson, professor at Duke University and director of the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC); Pamela Tate from the Council of Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL); and Jennifer McNelly from the National Association of Manufacturers. Additional speakers will be announced in the coming weeks.

Further information about the course, "Badges: New Currency for Professional Credentials," and a sign-up link can be found on CourseSites.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

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