BCcampus attends invite-only Summit on Open Badges

Our very own Michelle Glubke, Client Services Manager is on the ground, along with 300 smart and visionary thinkers, in Redwood City, California for a prestigious invite only two-day summit.

The good news is that we can watch plenary sessions online and follow the official summit Twitter account @Badges4learning. (#SRL14)

Open Badges explores alternative ways for learners to receive recognition for skills, achievement and accreditation. The main aim of the summit is to start charting a path toward realizing the future of connected learning with Open Badges.

This two-day working summit brings together thought leaders, early adopters and new potential partners (like BCcampus) to accelerate the scale and spread of Open Badges from a series of successful pilots into a widely adopted mainstream movement.

Of special interest to BCcampus is exploring the use of digital technologies to reach and engage higher education learners. Open Badges, for example, have the ability to transform higher education and skills training.

Michelle will be sharing her learning from the summit in the coming weeks. She’ll be meeting with Creative Commons and WCET representatives.

The MacArthur Foundation is one of the United States’ largest and most-respected independent foundations. Through the support it provides, the Foundation fosters the development of knowledge, nurtures individual creativity, strengthens institutions, helps improve public policy, and provides information to the public, primarily through support for public interest media.

Other summit partners include include Mozilla, HASTAC, Digital Promise, and NestGSV.

Notable Quotes

Traditional certifications, such as degrees and diplomas, lack the detail to paint a rich picture of the skills people possess — such as specializations and interests within a discipline, or those that cut across disciplines, such as writing skills for an engineer or project management for an artist. These traditional certifications don’t show us how learning happens or the pathways someone took to get there. – Erin Knight | Senior Director of Learning, Mozilla