Enhancing Student Engagement with Digital Badges, House Points, and Certificate
Teacher Introduction
Michael James Day
Assistant Professor in Department of Educational Studies
Course Module: EDS402 & EDS411
His research interest includes Web Education, Technology in Education, Digital Ethics, Digital Culture, Cyberpsychology, Digital Citizenship, Sociology of Education, etc.
Key Points
The Peer Assessment activity provides an opportunity of:
The use of Digital Badges within the classroom has several benefits, such as:
- A reward gratification model for undertaking positive student behaviours.
- A tangible way to add gamification to your learning without much challenge.
- Teaching students to think about industry and professional identity related to fields.
- A sense of greater ownership and flipping of even traditional learning environment.
- Students and staff can make badges themselves, as a seminar activity.
Case Details
I was motivated by the material I learned about through my Senior Fellowship of the HEA work, whereby I had to read and implement innovation strategies over a longer period. This was challenging, but the HEA has a wide variety of resources on digital gamified learning. Likewise, the Royal Society for the Arts offers an overview of similar projects implemented in schools and learning projects designed to promote and encourage engagement in industry driven learning. Motivated by their resources and ideas, I sought to create a similar model myself for my students, in order to help retention, raise engagement and promote students towards learning more interactively. Sometimes, students in the classroom felt disengaged and didn’t want to participate, so this innovation helped that.
Student engagement was higher after deploying the innovation. There were notable improvements in MQ scores before and after implementing it. Comments in student feedback also remarked that they enjoyed the badges. Whilst one or two students were critical, as they felt the activity was childish, there were many more who really enjoyed it, engaged with it and seemed proud of their badges, and the subsequent certificates they earned through a ranking point system I applied to the badges.
- That it is important to experiment with new ways of promoting student engagement and participation within the classroom.
- That often it is important to deploy easy to engage and use resources in the classroom, without making things too complex.
- Design a range of badges that connect to lifelong learning skills or the vocational themes of your learning.
- Consider ways to create a competition league or competitive model to promote students towards trying to win the badges.
- The badges are not just for individual activities, you can apply them to group work, lab work or anything else.
- You can also connect the badges to writing student references, hence designing them in such a way that students can report them to you, in order to speed up your referencing and writing of references/awards or student outcomes.
- You can also connect the badges to handing work in on time, or even earlier, which promotes assessment strategies.
Technological Toolkit
Announcement activity
One of the Learning Mall tool that can be used to send notifications to students.
Click here to learn more.
Badge Design website
This is free website for designing a digital badge.
Click here to learn more.
Overview
Digital Badges, House Points and Entrepreneur Innovation certificates are easy-to-deploy mechanisms to raise engagement, retention and enjoyment within your classroom environment. It can be used to promote sustainable, industry-focused and transactional attitudes amongst students whereby they are rewarded for performing certain positive roles within the learning environment, such as helping others to answer questions, critical thinking, promoting a global world that is necessary to complete, in particular, the course they were designed for, or alternatively for sharing insights about their own culture, history or national policy that is relevant to the learning process. The use of digital badges, deployed weekly through the learning mall after a lecture, but designed in software outside of it, have many applications, can be combined with a points, scarcity or competition league within the classroom, or used to reward group participation in activities. Research on digital badges has shown positive engagement changes.