Here’s one ideal scenario for fans of alternative credentialing: learners of all ages can earn evidence-based badges in a variety contexts beyond the walls of a formal learning institution (say, at an amazing afterschool program) and present them for placement or credit, the way that AP students sometimes do in the transition from high school to college.

Except, credit for those colleges = $$$, and even for well-established programs like AP or International Baccalaureate, this is less straightforward than some think. Unless your school has a giant endowment, that might be hard armor to pierce in selling the idea to administrators.

Another ideal: the same learner can use alternative credentials in the course of the typical college application process as a mark of equivalency for required courses that their school might not have offered (or they might not have known they’d need to take), which is often the case for learners coming from under-resourced public schools.

Except equivalency requires time, and multi-departmental process, and an infrastructure for making that process fair. All of this may not be a luxury that every university has while the world experiments with new ways of assessing and demonstrating skills and understanding, digital badges being one such experiment.

So here’s a third possibility: what if universities, many of which have explicit goals to increase diversity in the fields they support while also working to better match candidates for their programs, partnered with portfolio-driven learning programs in ways that benefit all stakeholders and costs very little money?

In earlier posts I talk more about Why We Badge at Mouse, and about ourcredential endorsement project with partners at Parsons The New School for Design. Recently I’ve posted also about an exciting new dimension to this project, funded by the National Science Foundation, where together with partners at the EDC’s Center for Children and Technology, we’ll be doing some research to find out whether youth of color from under-resourced schools benefit from badged portfolios as a course-setting factor for futures in STE(A)M. We care a lot about this work, as we’re focused heavily on how our learning experiences and content can support youth identity as we work to address the opportunity gap especially in technology, engineering, and design. We think there’s a shot that evidence-based digital credentials (badges of a certain type) can help.

Where to start:

Get people on board. We worked on building interest, and checking our assumptions with folks at the university who would be most involved. We had a concise pitch deck that talked about the program we looked to endorse, the challenge faced by our learners, and the impacts we saw possible from the university getting their brand and a few faculty involved.

It helped to have the Dean of Art, Media & Technology as our ally, and the faculty lead for the university’s pre-college programs. We pitched the project also to the Committee for Undergraduate Education (CUE), who determine 1st-year curriculum for undergraduates, the Director of the Design & Technology program, and the Director of Undergraduate Admissions.

What did we find? Overwhelming support. At each of these levels there were questions, of course. But with those questions in mind, the university saw benefits for everyone involved.

What’s next?

We worked with CUE to compare the intended outcomes of our Design League program, a yearlong afterschool experience focusing on the process of human-centered design and building tech solutions for real users, with the intended outcomes of Parsons’s 1st year undergrads. It turned out the two were a striking complement to one another. Below, Mouse badges like “Empathy” and “Iteration” are shown with 1st-year outcomes.

After realizing the material connection between our curricular outcomes, we began drafting a set of common institutional goals around which we would build a formal agreement. Here they are:

1. to increase interest among K–12 learners in the advanced study of design and technology and subsequent professional identities in related fields

2. to recognize relevant competencies and skills among pre-college learners as a way to better scaffold their trajectory between pre-college learning and higher education

3. to improve the representation of non-dominant demographics (including race, class, and gender) in the fields of design and technology

4. to improve the ways that learning artifacts (beyond transcripts and test scores) in both formal and informal K12 learning contexts can be applied to future academic and career pursuits

5. to establish a better (more scalable) “standard” by which K12 learning organizations can align efforts with higher education programs and vice versa as a means of improving “college-readiness” especially among non-dominant demographic groups

Our agreement included language about the standard that Mouse agreed to uphold, and the extent to which the university’s mark could be used by learners to support their applications — not just to Parsons, but to any school where they applied. We developed a mark that we could use on badge criteria pages, and an Endorsement Page that linked from the mark to detail the meaning of the endorsement. Ours includes things like:

• formal alignment of desired curricular outcomes
• in-person review of partner organization’s programming and pedagogy through multiple touchpoints by University stakeholders, and
• in-person evaluation and critique of project-based work product by University stakeholders

What’s in it for my institution?

In addition to what’s obvious — that every post-secondary organization should be committed to improving access for all learners — there are benefits to these partnerships. For starters, badge endorsement is an extension of a college or university’s brand. In the growing virtual landscape for post-secondary institutions, there’s new territory to blaze where brand ambassadors exist beyond a school’s alumni. If 200 badge earners share a badge publicly for an impressive well-evidenced skill like human-centered research and receive even 20 unique views, that’s a lot of positive impressions, other students, educators, and other influencers connecting a school or program with the cutting edge of their field. (And without spending a dime on advertising.)

It’s also a low-stakes way to fulfill sometimes overlooked aspects of your school’s mission and vision. You may not have aspects of your charter around equity specifically, but here’s a line from Parsons’s vision statement:

We will fulfill our mission by extending The New School’s legacy as a nontraditional academic community, nimble and responsive to change, that…Prioritizes humanity and culture in designing systems and environments to improve the human condition, an approach that draws on design thinking and the liberal, creative, and performing arts

another school…

aims, through public service, to enhance the lives and livelihoods of our students, the people of New York, and others around the world.

one more…

…seeks to attract and serve students from diverse social, economic and ethnic backgrounds and to be sensitive and responsive to those groups which have been underserved by higher education.

And here are some other considerations:

• Endorsement processes can involve university faculty in the admissions process in exciting ways. Faculty who spot programs that present promising candidates and practices can establish more formal partnerships that attract students when considering their next steps.
• A growing number of universities use portfolios as standard or supplemental material for admissions. Badge endorsement, in most cases, will center around the portfolio practices of the program. Post-secondary institutions can help disseminate best practices, and improve the quality of applications.
• Colleges and universities depend on being situated as crucial fabric that connects communities with their economy through employers. The discourse about the relevance of traditional post-secondary credentials to employers grows more complex. Some question the role of traditional post-secondary institutions in the future of connecting skills and jobs. And while there’s no question to me about whether there’s a role, it will only become more crucial that schools can pronounce their value in the chain between all citizens and the qualifications they seek.

Last but not least, we’re actively seeking new endorsement partners. Message me on Twitter @malesser, or my other contact info.

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