What the project is?
Digital badging is recognised across educational sectors as a global trend. It offers a new way to reward and motivate learners providing evidence of skills and achievements in a variety of formal and informal settings.
The Open University has attempted to demonstrate an ongoing institutional commitment to new models of teaching learning and assessment to serve both informal learners and students. It currently attracts over 4.4 million informal learners annually to its free public provision on OpenLearn (www.open.edu/openlearn) with around 39 million in total having visited the site. OpenLearn hosts over 850 free courses drawn from undergraduate and postgraduate course provision released under a Creative Commons licence. The primary aim is to introduce free learning to those that might not otherwise have considered the option nor had the opportunity to study formally and to help prepare those who want to make the next step from informal to formal learning.
What the project hopes to achieve?
Open University’s aim is to release a free public version of a Badged Open Course on Digital Literacy. It would pull together existing resources into one complete resource. This would enable learners to:
- improve their academic success and employability
- use technology confidently and critically to achieve their goals in study work and life.
Project success will be evaluated through the following methods:
- Start and end of course surveys to determine learner demographics and motivation
- Data analytics to determine completion of course and issuing of badge
- Data analytics to determine subsequent enquiries to the OU.
Take a look at the new free course 'Succeeding in a Digital World'.
