Badges? Open Badges? What is this?

In the classic Western comedy Blazing Saddles, the Bandidos utter the famous line "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges."  So why then are we as a disaster response organization starting a badge program?

 

The answer lies in what modern open badges do.  Traditional verifications of skills have been based on formal education or on worker progress through apprenticeships in trades.  Skills learned through self-study, individual practice, and other learner based approaches were undocumented.  To some degree the explosion of certifications that started in the 1960s in the United States addressed this by creating credentials that documented competency in a wide variety of semi-professional forms of work.

 

However, these certifications mirrored the traditional academic verifications with formal structure and rigid requirements.  In our field, for example, more than one professional certification as an emergency manager specifies that the required documentation must be submitted in a three ring binder, no document protectors are allowed, and that the information must be in exactly the same order as the requirements are listed in the instructions.  That certainly demonstrates competency in preparing an application packet following highly detailed instructions in a highly bureaucratic environment, but its value in documenting the ability to save lives and protect property is open to question.

 

The wider problem is that professional certifications are heavily weighted toward activities that individuals in full time employment with a supervisor who values certification and adequate funding for travel can complete.  A requirement that a certification applicant must have attended certain professional conferences (attendance is a common "contribution to the profession") of a set number of days effectively rules out anyone who does not have employer support, and that means it rules out volunteers.

 

More dangerously, such certifications tend to substitute easily measured events for demonstrated performance of skills.  For example, attending an ungraded training course is assumed to demonstrate that you can perform to an acceptable level the skills it presents in a lecture or short activity setting.  At the same time there is a strong tendency toward traditionalism in learning - classroom courses are valued over online instruction.  And there is an inbuilt prohibition against giving credit for training received more than a certain number of years ago, in emergency management typically five years.  Finally, actually understanding what the certification represents may be difficult and represent a journey through multiple sources.

 

So we have looked carefully at the open badge movement.  First, we are a volunteer organization, so we need verification of capabilities that volunteers can do.  Second, we need portability and easy access, so that the credential and its requirements are readily available to the individual and to those who need to verify capabilities.  Third, we need to recognize the actual skills the individual can perform and the level of those skills.  We need immediacy, so that our credentials represent capabilities when they are demonstrated.  And finally, we need to understand the scope and trajectory of our volunteer's work in building skills, not just a delimited snapshot of a five year interval.  Open badges allow us to do all these things.

 

Our first step is to badge our four existing training levels because these are based on a mix of training, experience, testing, and skill demonstration and are easy to capture.  The next step will be to start to badge specific competencies needed for Internet based disaster work.

 

And if you are wondering what a badge is ...  Badges are simply electronic symbols with embedded metadata that document the achievement of competencies and provide information on who issued the badge, the requirements for its award, and the level of skill that shows.  We are using Achievery as our badging system, and recommend the use of Mozilla's Backpack as a framework for building an electronic badge resume. 

And a disclosure note - the author, Dr. Walter Green, taught for 13 years in an academic emergency management degree program, wrote his dissertation on emergency management certification, at one time held 6 national, state, and professional association emergency management certifications, and wrote the requirements package for Virginia's Professional Emergency Manager certification program when it was introduced.