Competencies in Context: New Approaches to Capturing, Recognizing, and Endorsing Learning

Most current practices for measuring, credentialing, and accrediting achievement are opaque and analog. This makes them expensive, inefficient, and entrenched, characteristics that in turn obstruct innovation and other necessary developments in education and educational technologies. This chapter describes general and specific responses to these achievement problems. These responses represent a trend towards capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning. This trend is part of a larger movement in educational technology towards a focus on the context in which learning takes place and the contexts to which the resulting knowledge might transfer. These trends are increasingly important because new technologies (and particularly digital networks) can provide useful information about the context in which learning took place and the context in which evidence of that learning was gathered. Including information about context makes it possible to capture, recognize, and endorse a much broader range of learning and to do so in a much broader range of settings. After summarizing broader responses to problematic achievement practices, this chapter delves into a more specific response in the form of open digital badges. Examples from one digital badge system developed by the authors for an open online course are presented to illustrate new ways of capturing, recognizing, and endorsing learning.