Badges and Analysis - My Meandering Thoughts

As a idea with potential, badges have a lot going for them. However it's going to be a pretty incremental process and frankly I think many of the models pronounced by proponents of badging systems will fall to the wayside as proving to be unpractical. So here are the things I see as  most promising developments:

1. Badges for gamification purposes. People in general are bad at self regulating their education - game like systems including badges give students clear goals to strive for and clear benchmarks for success. Furthermore, if there's an element of social prestige attached to them that only sweetens the deal. Badges have an almost magnetic appeal to most children. Case in point, I remember playing a certain video game over and over while I was a kid in order to just obtain a badge, although I had been able to move to a different mission for quite some time. Putting systems like this in place will produce awesome results.
2. Badges as certifications for "hard" skills like programming and science, but probably not for soft skills such as writing or business. For these soft skills there are too many intangibles and immeasurables in play to make a digital test of very much worth. I imagine that in time some particular badges for these soft skills could potentially gain a brand in these fields similar to that held by successful universities but it would take a very long time for such brands to develop. Probably more promising in the soft skills domains are rigorous tournament like processes where there can only be one winner.
3. Badges as scaffolding for self-directed and self-motivated students. A well designed badge can provide a framework for an individual passionate about some particular interest to guide their education. Take me for instance. I'm trying to learn the guitar. When I practice I typically just pick it up and begin strumming, usually without any real purpose. A badge could let me know what to focus on and when. IE You need to be able to accomplish such and such a task while strumming before you should move on to such and such other task. This would be tremendously helpful. Such a scaffolding could also be useful for self motivated learners in domains traditionally taught inside universities, such as economics, science, and programming. 

However, there are several things I believe that badges probably won't be able to accomplish, despite the hopeful optimism of people like those from the Mozilla foundation. 

1. Digital badge aggregation as a quasi-substitute for monolithic university degrees. Here's the deal - employers want to gain as much information about potential employees with the least effort possible. That's why prestigious schools with good brands are so valuable - they inform the world with some degree of assurance that you've got what they're looking for. The employers already know about the institution so they don't need to do any extra research, and the signal is fairly reliable. Contrast that with digital badge aggregation. The aggregating process requires more time from an employers perspective than a simple examination of an "education" section on a resume. Moreover, chances are that the employers will have no clue whether or not the particular badges you have obtained are actually worth anything. Once again, for them to find out would require more time on their part. If certain badges or certain badge granting institutions find a way to generate trusted and reliable brands, then this could be overcome but would certainly be a slow process.
2. Badges as a scaffolding for learning. For any given assessment, badges provide wonderful clarity and scaffolding for students to base their learning decisions off of. However, over the long term of their education I imagine that most students would flounder, looking this way and that way for a badges that seem to fit  but at the end of the day not fitting together in any sort of meaningful pattern. Or worse, after having spent countless hours to obtain badges which you later discover to be utterly worthless. Humans are looking for a good return on their time and money spent for education with a minimum amount of risk. A mishmashing hodgepodge of digital badges scattered across the internet isn't going to provide this in almost all cases. So students will continue to go to monolithic degree granting institutions - especially as long as the government keeps footing much of bill for such a large portion of degree seeking students. 

So those are my thoughts on badges. Turning now to pre-instruction analysis...

The two papers discuss two separate elements of pre instruction analysis. Broadly speaking the exhortation in the piece by Dick et al is to fully consider the external motivating need for the instruction, while the piece by Smith et al is to discuss the need to properly account for the characteristics of your learners. These seem like two logical places to start before diving into creating instruction, although I imagine most teachers do it tacitly rather than the explicit manner used in these papers. 

Here's the 6 step process I gleaned from the external analysis and learning outcomes piece.

0. First decide if this is even an instructional issues. Some issues are technological in nature, and attempts to change behavior by instruction are simply a fool's errand. 

1. Decide learning outcomes. Make them as fleshed out and based on reality and real needs as possible. Specific is usually better if it doesn't come at the cost of omission of important skills. Don't leave it vague such as "be better at economic" analysis but specify the specific skill that will enable them to be better at the economic analysis. 

            -They describe this process as "De-fuzzification" (in its academic parlance) and cite two case studies where they go through this process. By starting at a broad goal and narowing it down to more specific criteria and measurable behaviors, it became readily apparent to me that it would be far easier to design instruction.

2. Gather the content. What things will students know that will enable them to accomplish the learning objectives. It's really nice if you're already an expert in the subject but if need be you can just enlist the aid of a subject matter expert. 

3. Create the instruction. 

4. Design the assessments based on the learning outcomes and your instruction. 

5. Continually test and revise the learning materials with real students.

6. Do all of the above in a reasonable amount of time. Make sure you haven't bitten off more than you can chew. 

This process made a lot of sense to me, although I wonder if the explicitness of the description given in the paper is fully necessary. I also wish they had provided examples of how the resulting instruction is far better than it would have been if the instructional designers had simply dove into the design process without doing a thorough analysis. I guess it comes down to the author's tone for me: they treat these steps as the gospel truth but a) I've never even heard of them before and b) they provide little support beyond their own word. Anyhow, these are just questions to think about.

In the piece on learner characters essentially it boiled down to analyzing four categories of the student's life and personality. 

1. Cognitive - What do they already know and how capable are they intellectually? Is there a high variance in this regard among the students?

2. Physiological characteristics - Do they have health limitations? (I can imagine this question being particularly important for special educators.) 

3. Affective characteristics - How self motivated are the students? What is their purpose in taking this class? How tired and energetic do they feel?

4. Social characteristics - How well do the students interact with each other. 

Each of these four characteristics - once analyzed - lead to some fairly straightforward design implications. If there's a wide range of variance in the students cognitive ability, consider how to break the class into subgroups. If they have low motivation, consider using external rewards. And so on. While the authors list many implications, they barely scratch the surface in their paper, I suppose leaving that to the instructional designers own ingenuity. 

While all teachers implicitly conduct these analyses, I can see a fair amount of benefit to be had from approaching it systematically and explicitly. I suspect however, that many of the most skilled teachers in conducting these type of analyses probably don't think of it in this explicit and systematic manner.