So four weeks back I kicked off the
Badge System Design course within the school of badges. We had some outstanding participants and introductions. The related discussions were thought provoking, but like many free and on-line courses
participation falls off after the first few weeks. This course has been no different, and the learning was deep (at least for me, and I hope a few others). As the course designer, three main themes came from this past four weeks;
- the rubric designed as the foundation of the course needs to be broken into three rubrics, collectively still being the foundation. And also offering rubrics to what I now see as the three main types of badge systems.
- for traditional education
- for informal learning
- for events and community
- the webmaker badge system should be used as the example badge system for the sample solution within the course.
- the first release of many things get thrown away always. This also applies to course development.
Even though the course had strong participation at the beginning and fell off quickly, I still it as a very important course. The success of open badges is dependent upon people developing skills in badge system design, and any way I can assist in this effort is time well spent. This is how I see rebooting the Badge System Design course.
- Create a schoolofbadges google group which will be used as a shared discussion forum for all courses within the School of Badges.
- Create three new badge system design rubrics, one for each of the three identified badge system design realms.
- Invite others to assist in the development of the three different rubrics
- reach out to people who have developed badge systems in each of the areas and ask for participation, assistance, and insights
- Alter the P2Pu Badge System Design course to utilize the three different rubrics
- Try running the course again in the fall of 2013
