Digital Badges for Students’ Assessment and Recognition – A University Case

Abstract

The main goal of the paper is to describe current practice and experience of one university in application of digital badges with particular attention to two research questions: What are the purposes of issuing digital badges to students? How digital badges are used in fully online or blended learning studies referring to student’s assessment and recognition? A case study design has been selected in order to analyse real-life issues and practices. Virtual learning environment and characteristics of meta data of digital badges have been analysed. The results of the analysis indicate that majority of digital badges were issued in order to assess students’ knowledge, skills, and competencies while the rest of the digital badges were issued to acknowledge personal features ant to motivate. However, recognition using digital badges does not take please at the University. Findings indicate that teachers need trainings on the development and application on digital badges in order to offer transparent procedures when the system itself gives digital badges to students after their fulfilment of predefined criteria to make assessment process more objective.