Authenticity and Badges

While doing more research on badges this afternoon, I stumbled upon this article on The Chronicle of Higher Education called “A Future Full of Badges.” The author is discussing the new methods of credentialing that are becoming available, and he introduces badges as a potential way around traditional educational structures. I really like how he explains the link between credentials and traditional degrees, as well as the potential badges pose to get around these more restrictive structures.  The author states that:

“Instead, the value of the traditional degree comes mostly from the presumed general authority of the granting institution—and the fact that traditional colleges have a legally enforced near-monopoly over the production of credentials that are widely accepted for the purposes of getting a job or pursuing advanced education. ‘

‘Open systems tend to blow such lucrative arrangements apart. The doomed effort of for-profit academic publishers to maintain their grip on prestigious scholarly journals is one example. The imminent demise of the physical textbook market is another. Open badges won't be controlled by incumbent institutions with a vested financial interest in limiting the supply of valuable credentials.’

‘When that happens, it will create hardship for traditional institutions that now use the revenue generated from their undergraduate-credential franchise to subsidize the cost of graduate education, administration, scholarship, and other activities. But society as a whole will benefit enormously. The store of human capital will be more broadly and accurately represented by credentials that are useful in a mobile, interconnected world. Separating the credentialing and teaching functions of higher education allows organizations to specialize in one or the other.”

While this does touch upon many ideas I’ve already mentioned, I think this is a very good way to describe the future of badges, especially through a separation of teaching and credentialing. This does lead to one of the main questions I’ve heard about the authority represented by badges and how these can have the same weight as an academic degree. While we’re obviously not there yet, I think it’s vital to separate the skills and ideas that are learned within a degree from the actual piece of paper. Badges allow anyone to demonstrate their knowledge through clear criteria, and open access to the requirements and even work, so that it is not just those with a degree that can demonstrate that yes they’ve learned how to do skill x. Instead anyone, anywhere can learn these skills from real experts (whether they have a degree or not), and as long as there is clear documentation of how and where this work was done, badges provide the necessary proof to solidify these skills into something marketable.

While this does lead to potential problems regarding this openness, especially as anyone anywhere can create their own courses, I think this is also the key factor that makes everything work. Through this openness there must be equally open means of verifying authenticity and the depth of the course offered, and this then means that authority can exist anywhere as long as this openness is also there.