Dave Herholz

You can learn anything you want on the Internet, so the adage goes. But even if that’s true, even if it’s now easier than ever to learn about almost any subject online, there are still very few opportunities to gain formal recognition — “credit,” if you will — for informal learning done online.

In September, the Mozilla Foundation launched its Open Badges Project, an effort to develop a technology framework that would make it easier to build, display and share digital learning badges. These badges are meant to showcase and recognize all kinds of skills and competencies — subject matter expertise as college degrees are meant to indicate for example, as well “soft skills” that aren’t so easily apparent based on traditional forms of credentialing. (We examined some of the technology infrastructure of the Open Badges Project in a story earlier this year.)

When the Mozilla Foundation announced the Open Badges Project, it was in conjunction with the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC, as “Badges for Lifelong Learning” is the theme of this year’s Digital Media and Learning Competition, an annual contest that supports research of how digital technologies are changing the way we learn and work. On stage at the formal unveiling of the Open Badges Project were representatives from not just Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation, but from the Departments of Education, Labor and Veterans Affairs, from NASA as well as from other businesses.

When the Open Badges Project was first announced, some educators questioned whether “badges” were a form of gamification of education, just another way, they said, to force learners to think more about certification and credentialing than about the learning process itself. But participation in the Open Badge Project from businesses and agencies like the Department of Labor has given it credibility. And whether we like it or not, many learners are extrinsically motivated to pursue certain educational endeavors — they need skills and often certification in order to demonstrate their mastery to employers.

But even with the Department of Labor’s involvement in the Open Badges Project and in the DML Competition, will employers recognize badges?

As informal learning opportunities grow, gaining employers’ recognition and acceptance may well be one of the most important challenges of the coming years.

Having a formal degree — whether it’s a high school or a college diploma — still carries the most weight with employers, and in some ways, badges may simply serve to complement these. But even with the emphasis on degrees, having some way to highlight other skills, competencies, and experiences is important in setting one potential hire apart from another. Indeed, many job descriptions do frame the necessity of a college degree this way — “or equivalent experience” –  so the task ahead for the Mozilla Open Badges project will be, in part, to be seen as a valid “equivalent.”

A number of the badges that were submitted to the DML Competition, for example, serve to highlight the accomplishments of teens. As youth unemployment remains high — 16.8% in the U.S. and upwards of 50% in Spain — alternate forms of credentialing might be able to help those without any higher education and often without substantial work experience find ways to showcase the skills they do possess.

Similarly, a badge proposal from the Department of Veterans Affairs — Badges for Vets — may help veterans translate their military experience into civilian job skills.

While badges might help employers better identify and recruit qualified employees, there are still some questions about whether this would actually function any differently than current hiring practices. But a shift may already be underway, evident in other new forms of credentialing that the Internet is providing. The announcement from MIT this week about its plans to offer a certificate for its new online learning initiative is just one indication that informal learning is on the cusp of more formal recognition.

This is already happening, to a certain extent, in the tech industry where the right programming skills aren’t necessarily correlated to college degrees (it’s quite possible, for example, to have your Bachelor’s in Computer Science and not know a particular programming language). Stack Overflow, for example, launched a job recruitment site this year, allowing job hunters to highlight not just their resume but to showcase their best answers from the larger Q&A website. And another tech company TopCoder offers programming competitions whereby participants have long had the ability to share their scores with potential employers, something that CTO Mike Lyons says is helpful during job searches: “Rather than saying ‘look me up,’ people have this transportable widget at their Web site.”

Showcasing these sorts of accomplishments on one’s own Web site is becoming increasingly important as job applicants find ways to leverage their online presence — their blogs, digital portfolios, LinkedIn recommendations and the like –  knowing that employers are prone to Google them. As such, it seems clear that the resume of the future will likely contain lots of digital links, whether they’re Open Badges or otherwise. What’s less clear is how much of this digital profile will matter to employers, or if they’ll still look for that formal piece of paper, a college degree.

Open education advocate and university professor David Wiley is optimistic. “Say I’m Google,” he writes on his blog, “and I need to hire an engineer. My job ad requirement says ‘BS in Computer Science or equivalent.’ I get two applicants. The first has a BS in Computer Science from XYZ State College. The second has certificates of successful completion for open courses in data structures and algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning from Stanford and MITx. Do you think I’ll seriously consider candidate two? You bet I will.”

But Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is less certain that the Open Badges Project, in its current manifestation at least whereby anyone can create a badge and offer a credential, will actually mean anything to employers:

If a “badge” is the sort of thing that by common practice almost anybody can define, and then claim, then I’m not likely to take it seriously, and most others won’t either. In other words, the badge is a credential and a credential has to have, well, credibility. If supposed credentials are granted as easily as diploma mill “degrees,” the whole endeavor will–obviously, I think–not get off the ground. Some geeks might go about claiming to have all sorts of “badges,” but when it comes to hiring, I will ignore such self-claimed badges.

Of course, we have a long way to go before badges are ubiquitous the same way that college degrees are. As it currently stands, the Open Badges Project is too young to elicit much attention from Human Resources Departments. (The HR officials I talked to hadn’t heard of the project.) But as alternative credentialing efforts — whether from Stack Overflow or from MIT — take off, it’s likely to be an issue that more employers (and employees and higher education institutions) are going to have to face.

Flickr: J. Gresham

For many Americans, going to college has been the next natural step after graduating from high school. A college degree has served not just as a status symbol, but also proof that graduates have mastered a subject and can put the knowledge they’ve acquired in school to practice.

But the value of a college degree is being questioned by those who wonder if there’s a better alternative. With free, high-quality education available online, and a growing new movement around nontraditional ways of earning credit for expertise through digital badges (a digital portfolio of sorts that includes credit for online courses, traditional college courses, and workplace achievements), colleges must find new ways of staying relevant.

Distilling a recent New York Times interview with Richard DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities, a few imperatives are becoming clear.

• INFORMATION IS PRICELESS. With MIT’s OpenCourseWare – the university’s classes offered online for free – as well as a long list of other quality free educational resources, the public perception of what holds value in education has changed. Facts and how-to’s are freely available to anyone with Internet access. So why pay upwards of $40,000 a year in tuition? “OpenCourseWare was an important signpost that hammered home the point that the content of a university course was being rapidly commoditized by technology,” DeMillo said in the interview with New York Times reporter Tamar Lewin. “If you [college professor] think your value is in 13 weeks of lectures, then exams, it’s true that that’s probably not going to be as valuable in the future.”

• GO STRAIGHT TO THE SOURCE. When faced with a huge drop in enrollment in the computer science program at Georgia Tech after the dot-com bust, DeMillo had to find a way to lure students back at a time when everyone believed tech jobs would be outsourced to other countries.  Rather than confer with the insular academic community, DeMillo looked out to the real world for advice. He spoke to dozens of video game companies about what they were looking for in computer science grads. “They said they needed people who not only know the technology but were skilled in the art of storytelling, the narrative arc,” he told the Times. Armed with this knowledge, he reconfigured the computer science department to allow students to choose two “interdisciplinary threads,” like computing and media. The lesson? “What engineers are good at is out-of-the-box solutions, prototyping, and not waiting for a big system change to make an improvement.”

• THE FUTURE IS WIDE OPEN. With more than 120,000 students signed up for Stanford’s online course, more open education sources being added to the list, a new way of building a portfolio through badges, and a growing movement to deconstruct higher education, the fate of the university as we know it is unknown. “The only thing we can be sure of, here in 2011, is that there’s going to be a wave of innovation over the next century, and 100 years from now, higher education won’t look the same,” DeMillo said.
• LOOK FORWARD. Rather than insisting on adhering to age-old traditions, college presidents must find ways to set these institutions on the road to innovation. “Sometimes you have to be a chief executive officer, make priorities and set a direction that’s different from where you were going before,” DeMillo said. Especially now with the crippled U.S. economy, universities must find ways to add value to students’ prospects apart from what they could find on their own.