Educational and International Thematic Connections

With my new role at Edinburgh University, I've been enjoying hosting a study visit of twenty Chinese headteachers. We began the visit on Monday with sessions at Moray House to show them the long history of teacher education there, followed by a Scottish welcome dinner hosted at the City Chambers to celebrate strong partnerships between Scotland and China.

After great sessions yesterday at Moray House on the Scottish policy context and teacher professionalism and standards, theory was really brought into practice today during a fantastic visit to Dunbar Grammar School today. It was also my first visit to a Scottish high school, so I was quite interested in the visit and any thematic connections with my higher education research. The Headteacher gave an overview of his growing school community, the curriculum, and their School improvement plan. He highlighted student choice in the curriculum (which is much greater at this high school compared to elsewhere) and the breadth of subjects including health and wellbeing, computing, business, and home economics. Furthermore, the Headteacher emphasised the importance of not only teachers' and parents' voices but also pupils' voices contributing to the revised curriculum and the school improvement plan. It was great to hear the Headteacher speaking about the importance of student voice and student engagement.

The Chinese Headteachers really enjoyed the tour of the school, bringing it to life as they saw cooking classes, science, art, and PE. They even were able to see a social studies  class where students were being taught to think for themselves and articulate what they would do if they were President Trump with regards to building a wall with Mexico. The Headteacher emphasised of course that students were not being influenced in what to think (and could lose their job for this) and instead were learning how to think critically and substantiate their arguments with research they could do on their mobile phones in class.

We were all impressed to see the fantastic inclusive education support provided by the Pupil Support Workers both inside and outside the school including mindfulnesss sessions, trips to the beach, hiking, gardening, working on a farm, outdoor cooking, and building relations with local elderly residents (for which they won a national award for partnership).

The Chinese Headteachers were also very interested to hear about the support provided to newly qualified teachers by both the school and the local authority. They saw how new teachers needed to meet General Teaching Council Standards for Registration, and keep up their standards through continuing professional learning. They were particularly interested in performance management of staff who did not meet the standards, which is an important issue that can arise across all education contexts internationally. In looking at the similarities and differences between secondary and higher education, I was reflecting on how universities offer the PG Certificate in Academic Practice to new lecturers and opportunities for academic staff to earn Higher Education Academy Fellowship, but they do not tend to have strong performance management processes for staff who do not excel in teaching.

Last but not least, we enjoyed learning about and seeing the various technology used in the high school. This included EdBuzz Google resources, email for submission of homework, collaborative areas where teachers could share resources, the Pupil Record System, students' digital portfolios of their progression records to document their learning, Kahoot online quizzes which  students could complete using smartphones, and ShowMyHomework to document homework for students and their parents. They also were able to learn about student voice including the prefect system, student council, and surveys. They saw student feedback forms (including questions on enjoyment of learning, academic challenge, and the quality of feedback provided by teachers) and learn how they are used as one way to monitor and support teacher performance.

It was a fantastic visit and it was especially interesting to focus on themes of student voice in the Scottish education system, student curricular choice, technology in the classroom, and inclusion. There are such interesting connections between these themes in secondary education which carry on into higher education. It was also fascinating to explore sometimes tricky issues such as smartphone use in the classroom, dealing with student behaviour issues, and processes for teacher performance management which are not often spoken about in higher education.

Tips for Creating Open Badges

After I first heard about Open Badges two summers ago, I was keen to adopt them into my work in academic engagement at Edinburgh University Students’ Association and over this time the project has been extremely successful. Open Badges are flexible, free, digital forms of accreditation that are full of information (metadata) about what individuals have done to earn them. They are open source and hundreds of organisations and companies around the world use them. The Open Badge scheme I set up at Edinburgh University Students’ Association was the first Scottish higher education scheme, but now increasing numbers of universities across the UK and around the world are adopting them – the more Open Badges are used, the more widely recognised and valuable they will become.

This past year I have tried to share my experiences of setting up an Open Badge scheme with as many people as possible within the higher education community. I have published a case study about my experiences of setting up and piloting Open Badges, led workshops at conferences to help others learn how to incorporate Open Badges into their own work, and responded to many enquiries from individuals across the country.

I now want to consolidate all of my tips in one place, so keep reading to see my advice!

Clarify Your Aims: How Will Open Badges Benefit Students and How Will they Benefit Staff?
I have found that Open Badges have a large number of benefits, but it’s important to be clear about how they benefit students (i.e., why they should bother earning them) and how they benefit staff at your organisation (i.e., why it’s worth the effort to develop them). Below are examples of benefits relating to the support I give to Class Reps at the Students’ Association.

Benefits for Students:

• Better understanding all aspects of the role, and serving as stepping stones to the Edinburgh award for representing students
• Reflecting on and documenting their work
• Sharing best practices with Reps in other schools who may be working on similar issues
• Sharing their work & successes with the students they represent (see examples of anonymised blog posts on our Schools pages in the ‘news’ tab for each)
• Earning open badges and adding them to their LinkedIn profiles

Benefits for the Students’ Association:

• Fewer questions about the Class Rep role and, in particular, what activities are part of the Edinburgh Award for Reps
• Learning more about the local work of Reps in their School (there are over 2,000 Reps at Edinburgh University who work locally within subject areas and Schools)
• Learning more about the impact of the student Rep role on students’ personal and professional development
• Having access to fantastic blog posts that we can include on our Schools webpages
• Providing a new form of recognition for our Reps who are volunteers (see more in the sparqs accreditation report – my example of Open Badges is on pages 10- 12)

Think About the Bigger Picture: Develop Clear Criteria and a Framework for Your Badges
While you can create a one-off Open Badge, it’s best to think about the bigger picture: will your Open Badges be part of a framework for your activity, or within a bigger framework with your organisation? You should have a think about what activities you want to incentivise students to take part in and make sure this fits in with the benefits you aim to have for your scheme. If others within your organisation also offer Open Badges, how will your scheme fit in (separately or together?) and will it be the same level of difficulty to earn badges offered by different areas of your organisation?

For Class Reps, you can see the image above of the many activities we see as part of the Class Rep role. When students earn three badges in one category, they will earn that category-level badge. When they earn all three category-level badges, they will earn the Class Rep Gold Badge. Based on feedback from students we didn’t create a bronze, silver, and gold scheme since students didn’t like the idea of going from all being equal to suddenly being in a tiered scheme. We wanted to give Class Reps lots of choice and flexibility so we developed these broader categories.

For the criteria, we usually required students to use a blog post to explain: what they did and what the impact was for themselves and/or others. For example, in the Implementing Change badge acknowledges the Class Reps who schedule individual meetings with University staff members to bring their peers’ concerns forward and find potential solutions. Students will have to write up a brief report on their work implementing change, including:                      

• the problems they raised with the staff member                                                   
• the solutions they proposed     
• staff response and action                                                                         
• how the Rep communicated with other students to let them know about the positive changes that were implemented (or the reasons why the idea could not be implemented)

Learn How the Technology will Work for You
Open Badges can be ‘triggered’ by different things. In my understanding, there are three ways to issue an Open Badge:

• Successful completion of an online quiz or online module (automatic badge release upon minimum threshold grade being achieved – we use this for when students earn over 80% on our Class Rep online training quiz and they earn the online training badge)
• Participation in an event, training, conference, etc. (manual grade centre updates to trigger badges – we use this to input attendance into our virtual learning environment to issue the intermediate training badge)
• Graded blog posts (manual grading is needed here and we have student staff members help with this, but we use a grading scheme as simple such as 0 for not meeting badge criteria and 1 for meeting the criteria and issuing the badge)

There is different technology to issue Open Badges, including many virtual learning environments such as Blackboard and Moddle. You can also use Cred.ly and Wordpress’ Cred.ly plugin, although I’m not familiar with how that works. Edinburgh University uses Blackboard where Open Badges are an Achievement (find them in Course Tools -> Achievements area -> Create Achievement). I’d recommend the ‘milestone’ or ‘completion’ options for Open Badges.

Before setting them up, make sure you have:

• a good name for each badge that students and others outside your organisation (such as employers) can understand
• a description including the criteria needed to earn each Open Badge
• a specific grade centre column to link to each badge (badges will be triggered when grade is equal to or greater than 1 in my case)
• an image for your Open Badge

You can choose one of the existing images in Blackboard or using any technology you can upload your own design for your Open Badge, and make sure to publish the badge to Mozilla so that it can be included in the Mozilla Backpack which aggregates badges earnt from organisations around the world. From my experience, it’s important to have attractive-looking badges or students won’t want to earn them if they don’t look nice.

Don’t Forget the Marketing and Support
It is important to get the marketing right for your Open Badges so you promote them to students by selling the benefits to them, explain what your badges are, and clarify how students can earn them. I developed handouts that I made available at various events I ran, and I also included the handouts in our VLE for Reps so they were all aware of the opportunity to earn Open Badges.

Some students I work with have never written a blog post before and were nervous about that, so I worked with colleagues to develop some optional training sessions. We offered Blogging for Reps with tips about how to write effective online content, engage audiences, and be clear about what you want to say. We also offered a peer support session where Reps would have a go at writing a blog post and give feedback to peers on their drafts. This proved really helpful.

Clarify What Success Means for Your Open Badges
In your scheme, does success mean the quantity of badges students earn or the quality of their engagement? As you will see in the infographic, our Open Badges have had strong impact in the quantitative sense with over 1,300 Reps earning at least one badge (for the online training). However, we were just as interested in the quality of engagement of our Reps, and as you will have seen in the Benefits section above the Open Badges helped Reps reflect on their experiences and helped us learn about their work across the University. We learnt about how they developed communications, change management, and leadership skills as well as much more! See my case study in the Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership, and Change for a fuller look at what this qualitative impact meant for us.

Need More Support than I Can Offer?
I hope by sharing my experiences and tips this has helped you to think through how to create your own Open Badges. You can find lots of great resources to help you create them at http://openbadges.org/http://openbadges.org/ and http://www.digitalme.co.uk/.

Digital Day of Ideas

At the Digital Day of Ideas, it was fantastic to meet many colleagues working in digital humanities or information services. I attended a workshop on using Google Sheets and Google Analytics to analyse discussion data. While I expected that this would be discussion data from virtual learning environments, this ended up being a very techy session but I was able to use the code provided to extract the 253 tweets on #studentengagement in the last seven days and map the location of the tweets. While this was not particularly relevant to my work, it was interesting to think more broadly about how Twitter data and other digital data is used more widely. 

This theme was explored more deeply in Karen Gregory's keynote 'Conceptualising Digital Sociology as Critical, Interdisciplinary Practice'. For me, this keynote highlighted how individuals are becoming co-producers of their own digital data (via social media, FitBits, biometric data, data from wearable technology, etc). I took from this the need to engage students in discussions about  how their data is being used, how to evaluate trustworthy sources, and how to engage critically with the  digital world which is evolving around us. 

For much more on the Digital Day of Ideas, visit http://www.digital.hss.ed.ac.uk/.